Friday, March 10th 2023
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Long Term Nintendo Wii U Owners Experiencing Bricked Systems
It has been reported by multiple users across several online communities that their Wii U consoles are no longer functioning properly. The error codes 160-0103 and 160-2155 are the dreaded indicators of memory corruption. It has been discovered that the NAND Flash within the Wii U's internal eMMC is prone to failure. According to details gleaned from teardowns of the console's hardware, Nintendo has implemented either Toshiba or Samsung flash storage boards for the various revisions of the console. There has been an uptick in the rate of bricked Wii U consoles across recent months, but the problems seem to have occurred as far back as 2015, according to archived posts on the GBA Temp forum. It is speculated that leaving the Wii U inactive for long periods of time can lead to the memory corruption issues.It will be interesting to observe whether any official solution will be outlined and implemented in the near future. Nintendo ended technical support and repairs for the system many years ago, and the Wii U Nintendo eShop is set to shutdown on March 27, 2023.
It is notable that the console remains the sole legal platform to play HD remasters of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and Twilight Princess on. A personal favorite of mine, Xenoblade Chronicles X, is yet to get the Switch port treatment. It seems that it will be eternally tied to the Wii U ecosystem, outside of emulation - for example via Cemu on PC.
I am tempted to dust off and power up my 2012 vintage Wii U Deluxe Edition 32 GB model this weekend, to discover whether I have not won the NAND lottery.
Sources:
My Nintendo News, GBA Temp, Wii U Subreddit
It is notable that the console remains the sole legal platform to play HD remasters of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and Twilight Princess on. A personal favorite of mine, Xenoblade Chronicles X, is yet to get the Switch port treatment. It seems that it will be eternally tied to the Wii U ecosystem, outside of emulation - for example via Cemu on PC.
I am tempted to dust off and power up my 2012 vintage Wii U Deluxe Edition 32 GB model this weekend, to discover whether I have not won the NAND lottery.
38 Comments on Long Term Nintendo Wii U Owners Experiencing Bricked Systems
Fortunately with the Wii U, Cemu can run nearly all of it's games better than the Wii U can.
Though this is still no excuse for poor repairability. Interesting how regular Wiis don't appear to be failing in this way.
The equivelent would be PS4 and Xbox One consoles getting shutdown which would probably be big news if it happened.
I own a WII-U but pretty much didnt use it, the treatment of the console by Nintendo prevented me from buying a switch. But given it seems certain games are exclusive to the platform, I wonder if I should purchase them before the cutoff point and indeed see even if the console still works.
Every NAND dies at some point especially mobile oriented. It rans out of overprovisioned area and that is it. It has been like that for around 3 decades and applies to every NAND based device.
There is a reason routers use NOR and or SPI flash. Early mobiles had a hybrid combo memory having multiple memory types in a single chip, very conventional, just defined by specific address regions. Just keeping the filthy user data in non important NAND areas, but even then around 2000 the overprovisioning area was present and people knew NAND is really not meant for long term stability.
i'm unsure if they had to be actively used with new writes, or just powered on to prevent the corruption
There was a big deal with samsung phones and custom ROM's back then, being able to use SD cards as replacements for the inevitable failure of the eMMC flash - over the years almost none of the phones still worked with the stock NAND, the xda forums on the phones are almost exclusively about people trying to get them working with external storage now