Bad news for fans of retrogaming! Many players who wanted to restart their Wii U after a period of inactivity had the unpleasant surprise of discovering a major critical failure. And no way to fix it…
Decidedly, the poor Wii U will have seen all the colors! After a major commercial failure and an official death in 2017 – only five years after its release – Nintendo’s console is dealt a fatal blow, even though it was carefully kept warm in the cupboards of nostalgic gamers. In recent days, many people have turned on their precious console to download a few games before the Wii U app store becomes inaccessible on March 27. Unfortunately, testimonials poured in on Twitter and Reddit, recounting that while trying to restart their console after a long period of inactivity, players encountered an error message 160-0103, which is attributed to a fault in console memory. And according to exputethis problem would be difficult to fix without specialized after-sales service, a service that Nintendo hasn’t provided for a while…
Wii U: a memory error after a period of inactivity
This is not the first time the issue has been raised. In December 2021 already, a player alerted on the GBAtemp Forums of a similar problem: “My Wii U Deluxe (32 GB) has been unused for more than 5 years. I decided to turn it back on and immediately got a black screen with error code 160-0103, suggesting a problem with the system memory. The console has never been modified and worked perfectly when last used.” All affected users reported that the console had not been used for several months or years.
Voultar, a youtuber who loves electronics, has decided to look into the problem and is trying to recover unusable consoles to examine them. Its goal is to analyze the memory of models to try to find a way to fix them. According to Exputer, this is a NAND corruption problem – a type of flash memory used in the Wii U – and the only way to fix it would be if a backup was made at a date before the memory corruption occurred, but this is a particularly technical process, if not impossible if one does not have any help from Nintendo. If your console still works miraculously, we can only advise you to turn it on regularly to keep it alive. But don’t delay too long, because some players concerned only left their Wii U for a few months before having this very bad overbfrise…