Discovering a Boot Exploit for Bricked Wii U Consoles from Recovered SD Cards: Team Shares ‘Paid the Beak’ on GitHub

Alright, let’s dive in—because this story is a bit bonkers but stick with me, promise it’s worth it. So, there’s this console hacker or tech magician really, named WinCurious. Dude finds some chucked SD cards from a Nintendo factory. These weren’t just any old cards, mind you, they were used for setting up Wii and Wii U systems. And hey, turns out they’re not all trash!

Enter DeadlyFoez. Another hacker type who somehow pulled data off these beaten-up cards. Imagine the scene—an SD card hospital (if that was a thing). Cards were damaged, like 25% totally busted, destroyed IC and whatnot. The rest? Well, just somewhat dysfunctional. Think of them like bent paperclips needing a gentle nudge back into shape. After some nerd-level TLC, these cards were readable again. Almost like Frankenstein’s monster but, you know, memory card edition.

But hold up, it’s not just “plug and play.” Nope. They needed a magic trick to crack these open. So, DeadlyFoez didn’t have a compatible programmer for the TSOP 48 chips involved. Honestly, my brain sort of fizzled out hearing that. Anyway, the workaround? Pure brilliance—WinCurious had this crazy idea to use a donor SD card. Basically, a card transplant. Pull out NAND chips from the old cards and shove them onto a working card. Easy, right? Hah. Wrong.

DeadlyFoez described the soldering process as a massive pain. Ever tried making a soufflé and not having it collapse? Yeah, me neither, but probably similar frustration. They were using this infrared preheater thing—because why would you have a proper reflow oven handy, right?

Amazingly, they managed to salvage 14 cards. Then, this other hacker, Rairii, hopped in, poking around the data and BAM! Discovered SDBoot1, which was legit the wizard key to running code on bricked consoles. Now, they crafted this exploit, charmingly called “paid the beak” (birds, Nintendo? Why not). They uploaded it to GitHub and made it public for anyone stuck with a bricked console. Almost sounds like a Robin Hood tale.

But, fair warning! You need these rare bits—like a Nintendo jig, Raspberry Pi Pico, or PICAXE microcontroller. Little tech toys to get your console resurrected. Unless your console’s got hardware glitches or Seeprom issues—then, sorry pal, you’re out of luck.

Once you have the gizmos, just slap that card into your Wii U, and poof! System boots. It’s like a phoenix rising, except with circuits and screens. Also, there’s this de_Fuse mod chip—a bit more complex to tame, but it’s out there in the console tech jungle.

So yeah, thanks to these tech wizards, folks digging the old Wii U still have some tricks up their sleeves. Play on! 🤷‍♂️