YouTuber Voultar has shared a guide to using our favorite microcontroller, the Raspberry Pi Pico, as a tool to unblock the Nintendo Wii U.
This fix fixes apparent corruption in the flash memory used in Nintendo’s now 11-year-old consoles.According to Nintendo, errors (160-0101 and 160-0103) is either outdated or related to system memory corruption. Corruption is said to brick the machine and render it unusable. In Voultar’s video, they try to better understand the issue, and he buys five brick Wii U’s for testing.
To try and fix it, Voultar used a $4 Raspberry Pi Pico to repair a corrupted “Title ID” in the Wii U’s memory. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all memory is corrupted, it just means that the data that tells the Wii U where the data is stored is corrupted.
used by the software side of the project GaryOderNichts UDPIH (USB Descriptor Parsing Is Hard) ProjectThis software exploits a bug in the USB host stack descriptor to allow USB devices to inject payloads into Wi U. In this case, the payload would be the software that unbricks the memory.
Installing software on the Raspberry Pi Pico is easy. Gary Oder Nichts UF2 file This can be flashed to the Raspberry Pi Pico’s onboard flash memory. After that, you will need to copy the recovery menu file from GitHub to the root of your newly formatted FAT32 SD card. Set it on the Wii U and prepare to insert the Raspberry Pi Pico into the Wii U.
This is the important bit, and Voultar’s instructions are specific. Listen for the internal drive to boot. In this case, connect the Raspberry Pi Pico to one of the front USB ports. Note that the drive can boot before or after the Wii U logo appears.
Once the exploit is used, the recovery menu will be displayed. Use Eject to navigate the menu, select Power, and Voultar select ColdBoot files to recache the Wii U operating system for each country. Once complete, Voultar will hard power off the Wii U, revealing a working console.
This project is a great example of using exploits. can As a tool for restoring and repairing old consoles, it will never be used to malicious means forever.
The Wii U isn’t the only console given new life thanks to the Raspberry Pi Pico. Pico replaced the CD drive in the original PlayStation console to play ROM files. One of his predecessors to the Wii U, the GameCube, has also seen a Pico-based modchip that allows him to play homebrew games. Going back in video game history, there’s even a Pico-based emulator for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer in the early 1980s.
