There Wii U by Nintendo was one of the biggest commercial failures in the history of video game consoles, especially since its predecessor was the Wii, a video game console that marked a commercial turning point in the 2000s. system already gone does not win for scares and ten years after its launch a good part of the models of the said console could stop working. Which is a shame, because many of its titles have yet to be ported to its current console, the Nintendo Switch.
The Wii U is a cult console, whose particularity was to have a controller with a screen that many took for a laptop and locally allowed asymmetrical gameplay. However, having each player have their own screen is something that is already achieved with online gaming and that’s why the idea was stamped on in its attempt to do something different like the original Wii was. . However, the problem arises when we have games like Paper Mario Color Splash or Xenoblade Chronicles X, as well as the HD versions of the GameCube Zelda which have not yet had their conversion to the new console and a certain bug recently appeared could convert the console in a brick in perpetuity.
Wii U consoles will stop working due to hardware error
Specifically, the error is 160-0103 and it affects the internal flash memory of the Wii U gamepad and not the console itself, however, if we decide to return to factory settings we could find that the console stops working forever. . And it is that what has been discovered is that with each storage chip, both in the controller with the console screen and in the same Nintendo system, an Apple has been marked and each of them has a code that corresponds to a console model.
That is to say, if someone reballs the 8 or 32 GB eMMC chip and puts another one in, if it does not have the code, the corresponding code from the Nintendo factories, then the console will not work. However, it seems that said code is not in a ROM and over time it gets deconfigured. In the end the consequence is clear, the Wii U stops working and becomes a paperweight. And things get even worse if you take into account that the console hasn’t been in production for years and the way to create these signatures has completely disappeared.
And no, this is not a bug in consoles that have been modified to play unauthorized copies, but an intrinsic hardware problem. In any case, today’s PCs already have enough power to be able to play titles for the console with the CEMU emulator. So if you want to keep the games and still play with that ill-fated console, then that’s an option.