One of the bright spots for the Wii U is its crazy, touchscreen-equipped GamePad. While it’s pretty cool to use on some Wii U games, just imagine how much cooler  it would be if you could actually stream content to it from your own PC.

You might not have to imagine much longer: a pair of presenters at the 2013 Chaos Communications Congress have demonstrated Nvidia Shield-like streaming on a Wii U GamePad. Now you can see the fruits of their labor — that’s Wind Waker running on the GamePad and it’s being transmitted to the controller from a PC that’s running a ROM in the Dolphin emulator.

This isn’t the same thing Chris Manning accomplished earlier this year. Manning figured out how to get the GamePad working as a PC controller with the help of some clever server software running on a desktop and the Wii U’s Internet Channel. (Skip to the 47 minute mark to see Wind Waker in action)

The new hack involved completely reverse engineering the GamePad so that it could be “liberated” from the Wii U itself. [booto], [delroth], and [shuffle2] began by dumping the firmware from the chips in the GamePad.

Doing that allowed them to figure out that the Wii U communicated using slightly obfuscated WPA2 encryption. Once they had established a connection, they then had to determine how content was being delivered.

Unfortunately, Nintendo wasn’t using Miracast — something many assumed based on information from Nintendo’s launch event. Fortunately the protocols for audio, video, and input turned out to be relatively simple to crack.

No, the GamePad isn’t the glorious high-resolution streaming handheld that the Nvidia Shield is… but if you already own a Wii U you may as well squeeze every drop of functionality out of it that you can, right? If you’re just looking for a way to play some of your favorite classics without being stuck in front of your desktop monitors, the GamePad’s 854 x 480 resolution will probably do just fine anyway.

The trio’s now offering up an alpha version of libdrc, which they’ve released under a BSD license so that any developers who want to can quickly and easily integrated GamePad support in their applications.

now we just have to wait for Nintendo to release standalone gamepads for sale

I wonder how the Latency is since its a big issue... Nintendo did partner up with Broadcom to make some sort of fairy powered magical nearly 0 latency proprietary wifi connection from the wiiU to the gamepad... With that being said... Can't wait till I can use this tablet for photoshop

If you check the demo the latency was pretty bad, but it was an alpha build. With a lot of optimization the latency should be fairly low.

I believe the latency could become very good and besting even devices made on purpose for that like the shield.

The gamepad has got crazy low latency working with wii u, if they can achieve something close to that is another question.

I want to play a Portal mod where you can instantly swith the view on the gamepad ot one of the portals !