Wii U and 3DS jailbreak

Didn't want to keep crowding up the switch thread so made a new one. If you didn't know, both the Wii U and 3DS have been jail broken - completely opened up - for a while now. On current, live firmware. That means you can copy any code you want to them after you jailbreak them, including all kinds of homebrew, running your own code, running hundreds of emulators, and of course pirated games.

edit 3/11/17: the latest 3DS firmware, 11.3, does NOT allow the system to be jail broken, Nintendo patched it. Nintendo has not patched the wii u firmware in over a year. If you are running 11.2 or lower on 3DS, you can jailbreak it and THEN update it to 11.3 no problem (I am running 11.3), but if you accidently update to 11.3 before you jailbreak, you are shit out of luck.

The crazy thing for Wii U is that with the "brazilian title download" method you can just download copies of every game ever released on any e-Shop. No need to torrent or go through shady sites, you are directly downloading games from Nintendo servers.

Oh yeah, your 3DS/Wii U become region free as well so you can play games only ever released in japan or europe, plus install mods and stuff that change existing releases - for example putting back in all the skimpy outfits or whatever that got yanked from some games like Xenoblade or Tokyo Mirage.

I'll make two seperate posts for Wii U and 3DS on the places to go to do it, its a bit time consuming but its fairly simple at this point.

edit 3/6/17:
The official guide changed section 6, removing the brazilian title install method because its a bit too pirate-y. When you get to step 6, look at this (now deleted) part of the guide since its way, way, way easier downloading and installing games straight from Nintendo servers instead of ripping discs you probably don't own.
Delete ABrazilianWaysToDoThings.md · FlimFlam69/WiiUTutorial@b17a115 · GitHub


edit 3/13/17:
Wii U Guide is apparently a newer version of the entire Wii U guide and a bit simpler to follow



Everything you need to know for Wii U:

First you can buy a refurb wii u from ebay for $200 direct from nintendo.
Black Wii U 32GB Deluxe + Nintendo Land - FACTORY REFURBISHED BY NINTENDO | eBay

I bought this one, it came in about 5 days with free shipping and zero problems.

Second you need a SD card, 64-128gb is ideal. They go on sale for $15-30 all the time on amazon, best buy, etc. I used a microSD card in a SD card adapter.
Third you need a USB hard drive plus a USB y-cable - the Wii U won't give enough "juice" off one USB port. Lots of places to get these things, here's the drive and Y adapter on amazon. I'd recommend 500gb-1TB, you can't use more than 2TB but really 500gb is more than enough for most people. I've installed EVERY game I want and it takes up 400gb of 1TB.
Amazon.com: 2.5" 500GB/500G Portable External Hard Drive Black USB 3.0 Black: Computers & Accessories
Amazon.com: USB 3.0 Y-Cable, LineYDI SuperSpeed Dual Micro-B USB to USB3.0 Y Data Cable with USB Power Extension Hard Drive Cable (0.5 m/ 1.64 ft): Home Improvement

Fourth obviously you'll need a PC with a SD card reader, you can buy a small adapter on amazon/etc, this is the one I used
Amazon.com: Sabrent SuperSpeed 2-Slot USB 3.0 Flash Memory Card Reader for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Certain Android Systems - Supports SD , SDHC , SDXC , MMC / MicroSD , T-Flash [Black] (CR-UMSS): Computers & Accessories

This is the reddit that has all the latest info and FAQs and stuff on the Wii U jailbreak:
WiiUHacks • /r/WiiUHacks

This is the step by step guide:
Home · FlimFlam69/WiiUTutorial Wiki · GitHub

Just follow through every single step from 0 to 6. It WILL take hours at step 4 when you dump your NAND onto the SD card (which will shrink by 32gb) and copying wii u games is laborious - you have to download the titles you want on your PC (hours), then copy them to the SD card (hours), then transfer them on the wii U from the SD card to the USB drive (hours). But once you start it, it just runs by itself.

Oh, for step 6 when you actually start downloading games, the website they won't mention is wiiu dot titlekeys dot com, just type that into the tiki tool bar (or Wii U USB tool, etc) and you are good to go.


It took me about 15 hours total but I have nearly 100 games installed now on my Wii U, pretty much every 50+ metacritic game ever made. I'm going to play around with modding some of my games too, to restore the original japanese stuff for games like Xenoblade. I also installed the retroarch emulator but haven't played with it much yet.

I haven't touched the vWii stuff yet, but that'll also open up a library of thousands of wii games I can install and play. Some have Wii U up-ports I installed and can play like Xenoblade or Mario Galaxy 1 & 2.

I did do the "full" thing, including Mocha CFW, RedNAND, and Coldboot so my wii u boots into already jailbroken mode. The instructions are a bit scary but its pretty easy if you follow them step by step, don't skip anything (including constantly editing the config.txt in /haxchi).

Everything you need to know for 3DS:

I haven't done this yet, gonna do it today or this weekend but obviously you need a 3DS on the latest firmware, a microSD card for the new 3DS, SD card reader on PC, and thats about it.

Sub reddit:
3DS Hacking and Homebrew • /r/3dshacks

Actual step by step guide:
Guide

The Wii U firmware hasn't been updated in 9 months by the way and there is only one single game left to be released, Zelda Breath of the Wild. Zero games are scheduled after that. They may do a firmware update, but if you follow the instructions and disable auto DNS and redirect it to the DNS sites they list, you won't automatically get any firmware updates and I'm sure if they do release one the authors will update it to adapt.

BOTW should be runnable on release date with the brazilian title method if no firmware updates are released.

meStevo said:

Is there a CEMU discussion anywhere too or could that fall under this?

Can you also load emulators and whatnot onto it too, or only VC games?

Probably seriously consider getting a Wii U because of all of this.

Click to expand...

you could talk about cemu on this thread or Cemu, the Wii U emulator • /r/cemu

You can load emulators on the Wii u with the jailbreak, there are dozens that run off the retroarch platform. That gets you access to thousands of ROMs from pretty much every system - nes, snes, nintendo 64, turbographix, MAME arcade ROMS, sega genesis, etc, etc.

I played around with CEMU a while and its good but its still clearly in dev mode, performance is all over the place even on highest end PCs, and biggest of all multiplayer will never work. I love mario kart 8 online so that was a big problem, plus mario maker is pretty much useless without online.

Probably in 3-9 months CEMU will be better, especially on a i7-6700 with a 1070 or better. Being able to upscale games to 4k rendering is amazing but dropping to 3 fps all the time as the engine caches renders makes games not that fun to actually play.