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The day I bought 8 "broken" Wii Us (2020)
Sometimes, when I get bored, I scroll through ebay looking for newly listed “buy it now” consoles to see if there is something interesting/cheap. Once I came across a box with three untested PS1 consoles and ten controllers for 30€. A few years ago my PS1 broke a few years ago, so I gave it a try. Even if only one of the three consoles and one controller worked, it would have been worth it. When the box full of PS1 consoles and controllers arrived a few days later, I tested them all. It turned out that one console couldn’t read any discs and two controllers were broken. But I still had two consoles (+ cables) and more controllers than I would ever need for 30€. It even included a multitap, so a few days later I played Micro Machines for the first time with 4 players on a Playstation! Update 2024-04-09: For quite some time there a now tools that can be used to bypass parental controls via raspberry pi pico or fix consoles with the 160-0103 system errors.
Unfortunately, the Wii U doesn’t seem to have such a feature, but I came across a random Youtube video that showed how to fix a “no picture on TV” problem. The first monitor I tried showed an “invalid hdmi signal” error, but on my slightly more expensive one I finally saw the Wii U menu! I even found another “no video ouput” console on ebay for <20€ that sounded very promising, but I decided not to buy it even though it probably works fine.
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