Nintendo ends Wii U repairs

The hacking community has already taken DIY Wii U repair to a level beyond even what Nintendo was likely providing.

For example, someone wrote a recovery menu that leverages an exploit in the USB stack and executes before the OS loads [1]. Many Wii Us also have SK Hynix NAND chips with high failure rates, which under normal circumstances would eventually result in a bricked console, but hackers found out how to replace it with an SD card and rebuild the internal storage from scratch onto it [2].

Hackers also revived the console's online service [3]. This was up and running even before the official service shut down.

All very impressive achievements from the hacking community around a somewhat niche and commercially failed console.

[1] https://github.com/GaryOderNichts/recovery_menu

[2] https://gbatemp.net/threads/how-to-upgrading-rebuilding-wii-...

[3] https://pretendo.network/