Welcome to Gulag
they’re both broken. one’s showing my personal favourite wii u error (160-0103), the other they have absolutely no clue what’s going on with it. i will be making a full blog post about them. also you ever seen how many of those boxed white 32gb japanese splatoon wii u systems there are online? i want one.
you’re the one with the wii u problem. not me.
so i finally bought the ps3 i said i’d buy in the gamecube post. but not really. as much as i wanted a slim i still couldn’t find one. but u wanna know what i did find? a used CECHK03 fat ps3 for £45 with a controller that i would soon realise was fake and no power cable. some would call that dodgy as fuck, i would call that fun as fuck. so i buy it without first realising that it would be shipped by a courier that i “jokingly” call the worst in the UK with my mates. once it turns up (took forever but surprisingly turned up on the day they said it would turn up!), i get it out of its packaging that consisted of a bunch of paper and what i vaguely remember to be an Aldi shopping bag, plug it in and power it on. to my surprise it actually booted and it was absolutely filled with shit. what i believe was pirated tv shows, music, a couple games, decent lot of save data (the most notable being GTA V and IV) and they still had ps home installed with some cache data! one issue though: the disc drive didn’t seem to enjoy ejecting any disk very well. later on that issue fixed itself though once i gave the drive some more use.
once i knew that it actually worked, i took it upstairs and began my fuckery. i first installed HFW and HEN to grab their game licenses just in case i ever wanted them and then webMAN MOD to check the temps and usage stats. the temps are surprisingly good for it being a fat ps3 with a still intact warranty seal, not overheating at all. they had used the system for around 3400 hours and it had a startup and shutdown count of around 1800. fairly decent for a probably 15 year old console. once i had checked all that, i installed multiMAN to extract the ps home cache data. that went well and it’s sitting on my desktop. i’ll be donating it soon.
now that i’ve got all the data i needed i put in a 500GB hard drive i had lying around and loaded into safe mode to reinstall 4.91 OFW in preparation for an Evilnat 4.91 CFW installation. now that i can see the XMB again i log into PSN and activate my account on the system, and of course disable auto log in. next i made a new local user, opened the browser, wiped all the cookies, search history, etc. and loaded the ps3 toolset. the flash got backed up, i checked it with PyPS3checker, it says my flash backup is good so i patch it and that succeeds. i reboot and install Evilnat 4.91 Beta 8, then webMAN MOD, multiMAN, the PS2 Classics Launcher and the PS2 CONFIG Database. multiMAN gets started, i put in a PS2 disc, try dumping it, multiMAN starts acting up and crashing my system. i spend about 20 minutes trying to fix the issue and turns out i had to take it out of mmCM mode or else for some reason it would just cause my system to crash. now though, i have a really nice way to play PS2 games since setting my actual PS2 up is a pain in the arse and the video quality is similarly arse since i have to use AV.
fast forward to today (2024-08-20) and i have a small collection of PS3 games that i’ve dumped and put on the hard drive for easy access. i’ve also got both the Sonic Adventure games for the third time, making me closer to completing my goal of owning every single different version of both the Sonic Adventure games (thank you very much Sony for keeping the PS3/Vita store alive, even if it is a bit of a pain to add funds). i’ve been playing through them both, cleared SA2 again and for the first time in literally years i now have the hero and dark gardens unlocked. and for the first time ever, i have all A ranks in a couple stages too.
so i got paid a bit early may. after putting some of that money into savings i went onto ebay and had a look for ps3 systems as i had been wanting to buy one for months prior. after a while of searching, i started to realise that the exact model of ps3 slim i wanted to buy was kinda hard to find, at least on that day. because of that, i started thinking about other systems i had been wanting to put in my collection. soon after, the gamecube popped up in my mind and off i went looking for a DOL-001. not long after, i found a black one in fairly good condition with all the cables (the AV cable was fake but that wasn’t gonna matter cause GCVideo), one controller, one third-party memory card and a game for ~£60. i started thinking about whether or not i *really* wanted it, as i always do for some reason before buying something, and not long after i had a confirmation email from ebay for the purchase of a gamecube.
a couple days later, i had just finished one of my exams and i get my phone out of my bag and turn it back on. i look at the shipping status and see that it had arrived. the driver attached a proof of delivery image too. it was incredibly low-resolution and it seemed to be a random picture of the ground. thankfully when i got home, the parcel was actually there and when i opened it i did indeed see the gamecube i paid for. i powered it on and made sure that it worked. it worked fine, controller inputs are recognised, the memory card is too and the optical drive seems to be working fine (thank god). the video however, was really really bright. the black background of the gamecube startup screen was light grey haha. i obviously blamed that one on the AV cable they provided, which i ended up being correct about. i am absolutely keeping that cable though because paired with my cheap AV to HDMI adapter, the output i get from it looks like it was recorded in the early 2000s with the cheapest capture card anybody could get at the time. and i like that.
along with the gamecube, i bought an sd2sp2 and a 32GB SD card. upon loading a memory card with a save exploit and a copy of NiHuSu’s dolauncher, i tried using the sd2sp2 to boot Swiss. it failed. i tried everything i could and it still failed to load. so off i went looking for an sdgecko. one amazon search and around a day later, i now had an sdgecko. this time, booting Swiss actually worked and i could get to setting it up. after that, i beat Sonic Adventure 2 for what feels like the 30th time in my life, and completed a couple of the stories in SADX too. safe to say i’m happy with my purchase. soon i’ll probably have to open it up cause i see some rust on the shielding, but that’s no issue really.
so a few months ago i was wanting to set my Wii U up again. i put my SSD into my SATA to USB drive enclosure and plug it into the system. formatting goes well, and soon enough i’m installing some smaller games. then i decide to add Xenoblade X to the queue. it starts downloading really slowly, i think nothing of it cause in general the Wii U’s internet is pretty shit. a while later, i get a black screen with an error.
There is a problem with the USB storage device.
i reboot, the drive and the games on it no longer show up on my Wii U menu.
attempting to format from System Settings makes the system tell me it’s convinced there’s no drive connected.
i try putting the drive into my laptop, the laptop can no longer complete its POST.
as soon as i disconnect the drive and reboot, it POSTs normally and tries looking for a way to boot an OS.
oh well, the drive was only 128GB anyway. i should have listened to the people warning others not to use solid state media on a Wii U to store games.
so i leave the Wii U alone for a while cause i have no money and don’t want to install games onto the MLC (i have a 2012 system with a Hynix MLC). a while later, i get some money back that i let someone close to me borrow. i use it to (amongst other things) buy a 500GB WD Black mechanical laptop hard drive with a USB Y cable to properly power it from the system. said Y cable turns up really quickly, the hard drive however took a bit longer to arrive. when it did finally arrive though, i was impressed with the packaging. it was packed really well (which really it should have been because it was a mechanical drive but for the £8 i paid for it i honestly expected worse).
first things first, i put the drive into my laptop and boot from a USB that had on it a copy of ShredOS. that took about 6 hours but now i can rest easy knowing that whatever was previously on that thing was very likely gone now. next, it came out of my laptop and into the drive enclosure. that got connected to my Wii U and i started the format. i installed all my game backups on it, that went well. i go onto the eShop to try and redownload my copy of Xenoblade X. it’s not there. i suppose that’s what i get for buying a grey market key on eBay. time to buy a physical copy!