Wii U Consoles Are Literally Rotting

If you happened to own a Wii U, you probably had some really good times with it. The console was released in 2012, which means it's just coming up to 12 years old. If your console has been stored in your closet for the last few years, there is a chance that it might be dead by now, but there's stuff you can do to prevent it.

It appears that prolonged periods of inactivity can lead to memory corruption on the now-retro Nintendo console, potentially rendering these 12-year-old devices unusable. Patrick Brickhouse, a podcast host, took to his podcast's X account (formerly Twitter) and shared what happened with his console, as a word of warning to other Wii U owners. Brickhouse reported that his own console had fallen victim to this issue after sitting idle for an extended period. Upon attempting to power it up, he was greeted with an error message indicating a "problem with the system memory," with error code 160-0103.

Throughout the past few months, many Wii U owners have reported similar experiences, with their consoles displaying black error code screens after extended periods of inactivity. The culprit appears to be the console's eMMC chips, which are susceptible to corruption if not powered up regularly. Different consoles feature different chips from a handful of manufacturers, and this is a cost-cutting practice that's pretty common in a lot of the hardware you use. It appears consoles with Hynix chips are more susceptible to rotting, however.

Wii U owners have reported that the issue is popping up for them after attempting to use the console after keeping it in a drawer for the last 5+ years. It's been seven years since it was succeeded by the Nintendo Switch, and if you immediately got one and shoved your Wii U in a shoe box in your drawer, there's a non-zero chance that the console is currently not working.

Since the console is currently end-of-life, there's also not a lot Nintendo can do about irreversible damage. Looking up the error code only turns up a generic troubleshooting procedure and no actual fix, as well as a warning that if there is a hardware problem, Nintendo won't repair it since the console is currently not being sold by the company.

There are some workarounds you can use if your console is already bricked. One of them involves using a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller to exploit the Wii U's USB host stack, but this one doesn't seem to work for absolutely everyone. There's also a NAND recovery kit for the Wii U that will help you to try and repair it or, if that fails, completely replace and bypass the damaged eMMC with an SD card. A similar fix with ISFShax and redNAND involves replacing the failing chip with a partition on the SD card, and doesn't require soldering. But likewise, your mileage may vary.

If none of these work for you, then the console might be dead for good. The 160-0103 error might not represent one specific issue, but might rather be sort of a catch-all generic memory error that encompasses a wide variety of issues. Those issues could be fixed by these workarounds, but not all of them.

The best way to keep this issue at bay is to avoid it from happening in the first place. Pull the Wii U out of your drawer, plug it in, and see whether it will turn on. If it works, you can keep it plugged in every so often, or perhaps even play with it, to avoid it sitting unused for too long at a time.

The Wii U was released in 2012 as an eighth-generation video game console, alongside the PlayStation 4 from Sony and Xbox One from Microsoft. The console was more powerful than the original Wii, with a second screen on the wireless gamepad, and backwards compatibility with Wii games and accessories. It struggled to achieve success, and Nintendo released the Switch in 2017 as a direct replacement. Many Wii U games have since been ported to the Switch, but not all of them—maybe one day we'll get that Wind Waker HD port.

Source: Patrick Brickhouse (Twitter), Reddit (1, 2, 3)