Exploit for Recovering Software-Bricked Wii U Discovered from Repaired SD Cards — Team Shares ‘Paid the Beak’ on GitHub

Alright, let me spin you a yarn about this wild adventure these console hacker folks went on. Picture this: our buddy WinCurious stumbles upon a pile of old, beat-up SD cards chucked out by Nintendo. Kinda like finding hidden treasure in the trash, right? Anyway, these cards were used in setting up Wii and Wii U systems back in the day.

Now, here’s where things get juicy. The cards were busted up pretty bad — like, one in four were total goners, but the rest just had a little scratch here, a little crack there. Not the end of the world if you’ve got the right tools and a bit of patience.

DeadlyFoez (cool name, I know) and their crew had to play doctor with these cards, doing a bit of electronics surgery. I mean, not to brag, but that’s some hardcore tinkering. They had to resolder some, replace PCBs on others. It’s this whole process that sounds simple but isn’t — trust me, it’s as tricky as it sounds.

Oh, and forget about sticking these cards into a regular SD card reader. Nope. DeadlyFoez tried using this fancy external programmer for the NAND flash but had no luck. The stuff on the card just wouldn’t show up right.

Then, WinCurious gets a brainwave (maybe from some random burst of inspiration while munching on cereal, who knows). They’re like, “Why not just swap the brains out, you know?” So, they grab a working SD card, rip out its NAND, and plop in the chip from a damaged card. It’s like SD card Frankenstein.

Gotta love the drama of it. DeadlyFoez complains about soldering these tiny TSOP 48 clips. Apparently, they melt if you look at them wrong. Then everything’s too tiny to see without squinting real hard — sounds like a nightmare.

Anyway, they manage to bring 14 cards back to life. Rairii, another member of the team, pokes around in the dumped data and finds this golden nugget called SDBoot1. It’s basically a cheat code for bringing back Wii Us from the dead (well, unless the thing’s hardware is toast).

The gang puts their heads together and writes an exploit called “paid the beak” — don’t ask me why it’s named that. They throw it up on GitHub like it’s no big deal.

So, there you go. With a Nintendo jig, a Raspberry Pi Pico, or some other gadget, you can wake your stricken Wii U. Even thought of using another mod chip called de_Fuse? More complicated, but hey, if you’re up for the challenge, it’s there.

And that’s the scoop. A messy, chaotic journey filled with hacked-together gadgets and some serious ingenuity. And the moral of the story? Never underestimate what you can find and do with a bit of broken tech and a lot of imagination.