As unique the Nintendo Wii U Gamepad may appear to be, at its core it’s pretty much just a tablet with game controls stuck on it. Now that the communication between the Wii U and the Gamepad have been fully reverse-engineered and poured into easy to use software, this opens the possibility of using other tablets with suitable controls on them for Wii U Gamepad purposes, like the Windows-capable Samsung tablet that [Bringus Studios] decided to experiment on.
Originally designed to run Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, the Samsung Q1 series of ultra-mobile PCs (UMPC) was first released in 2007, featuring a 900 MHz Celeron M CPU. Amusingly [Bingus] mixes up mAh and mWh when comparing battery capacities, as the Li-ion battery pack for this UMPC is an 11.1V one, whereas a smartphone battery is 3.7V nominal.
To turn this UMPC into a Wii U Gamepad, first 32-bit Debian 12 is installed along with the Vanilla Wii U Gamepad project. The main challenge then is to find a Wi-Fi adapter that works for this purpose, as the connection uses a slightly non-standard handshake. Naturally the TP-Link USB WiFi adapter that [Bingus] used changed from its previous and better supported Mediatek chipset to a Realtek one with typical poor Linux support, requiring manual driver compiling.
After more troubleshooting, it’s unfortunately found that the 900 MHz Celeron M in this UMPC just isn’t up to the task, with the decoding of the compressed HDMI stream correspondingly pegging the CPU at 100% with all the frame dropping. It’s likely that this is due to a lack of h.264 hardware decoding support, as this would push this burden onto the CPU. The system uses the Intel 915GMS chipset with the GMA 900 iGPU, which appears to just provide hardware acceleration for MPEG 2.
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