Hacking Misc New Wii U owner, have some questions

[kipuyanoo]

I'm soon going to be a proud  pumpkin Wii U owner, and I have a lot of questions. I didn't want to spam threads, so I'm posting ALL of those questions here:

• The Wii U is Japanese. My friend bought it by accident instead of a US region one and wants to give it to me for a really good price. But I have a NA 3DS and want to use the same NNID on both. NNIDs are region-soecific so is there a way to region-change a Wii U?
• What are the unsafe options in System Config Tool? From what I've heard, if you press the wrong button in there it leads to a brick. And supposedly restoring the NAND on a Wii U requires soldering on a hardmod?
• What's a good size for an SD card? Is 64 GiB excessive if I'm buying an external drive?
• Leading from that, are there any external drives that you Tempers recommend or don't recommend?
• Can I use both Tiramisu and Aroma together, or do I need different SD cards for each?
• Should I even bother installing Tiramisu now that we have Aroma?
• Going along with region changing, if it's possible, does it change vWii's region as well?
• Can I use the Japanese power cords here in the States? Will I be able to use a Japanese Wii U with American cords if not?

 

[jameshulk4]

I know practically nothing about the Wii U, but I do know that you can put Aroma and Tirimasu on the same SD card. However, Tirimasu is almost obsolete so you wouldn't be using Tirimasu apart from maybe for a few applications such as retroarch

 

[Deleted member 571007]

The Wii U is Japanese. My friend bought it by accident instead of a US region one and wants to give it to me for a really good price. But I have a NA 3DS and want to use the same NNID on both. NNIDs are region-soecific so is there a way to region-change a Wii U?

Not sure about the NNID part, but it wouldn't hurt to try connecting it as a process like that most likely won't cause any ill effects.

What are the unsafe options in System Config Tool? From what I've heard, if you press the wrong button in there it leads to a brick. And supposedly restoring the NAND on a Wii U requires soldering on a hardmod?

First off, don't bother with SystemConfig unless you know what you're doing, second, a lot of bricks are now recoverable via UDPIH, while it provides a soft-mod way to recover from some bricks, it is not by ANY means total brick protection, so please still exercise caution.

What's a good size for an SD card? Is 64 GiB excessive if I'm buying an external drive?

Mine was 512, but that was because I stored an absolutely stupid amount of ROMs on my SD Card. I would recommend 32 GiB or above just for general use. Just make sure to format anything above 32 GiB to FAT-32 because exFat doesn't work on the Wii U.

Leading from that, are there any external drives that you Tempers recommend or don't recommend?

That.. depends. I personally never used one, but if you do decide to get one I recommend picking up an HDD with an external power supply since the Wii U doesn't supply a lot of power through it's USB Ports. Another solution would be to use a Y-Cable, but the Wii U also occasionally randomly cuts power to the USB Drives even while under use, so an external unit could prevent needless data-loss. Also, this should already be implied but I do NOT recommend using a Pen-Drive (USB-Stick) as they are horribly unreliable on the Wii U.

Can I use both Tiramisu and Aroma together, or do I need different SD cards for each?

You can do both, and I actually recommend getting both since while Aroma is on it's way to replacing Tiramisu, there are still a lot of .ELF applications that are unusable on Aroma in it's current form as it only supports .RPX and .WUHB Homebrews. You can have both on your SD Card, and just choose which one to load from the environment loader on-boot. The guide for Tiramisu is here, which also explains how to set-up the environment loader. Once you do so you can just add the Aroma files to your SD-Card and choose which environment to load based on your needs at the time.

Should I even bother installing Tiramisu now that we have Aroma?

You don't have to, but I personally recommend doing both.

Going along with region changing, if it's possible, does it change vWii's region as well?

The vWii is a completely different environment than the regular Wii U, and as such it requires different processes entirely to modify it. Any changes made solely on the Wii U side will have no effect on the vWii side. Vice-Versa.

Can I use the Japanese power cords here in the States? Will I be able to use a Japanese Wii U with American cords if not?

Not actually sure about this. But I would recommend researching it further if no one else has an answer.

 

[AmandaRose]

Yep goota say stay away from sysconfg tool. For 99% of WiiU users it pretty much has nothing you will ever need to use. And if you do need something there are now safer alternatives out there.

 

[Deleted member 571007]

Yep goota say stay away from sysconfg tool. For 99% of WiiU users it pretty much has nothing you will ever need to use. And if you do need something there are now safer alternatives out there.

My memory is pretty rusty surrounding it, but for the longest time wasn't it also only available on Red-NAND? I know that there's a version you can use on stock that came out much later, but as far as I recall it generally serves no purpose to the average user.

Anyways, @kipuyanoo I might be wrong on this, so don't rely on my information 100%- but about the power cord, I think I remember something about them having different voltages. 120V for American and 100V for Japanese if I recall correctly, but once again I haven't dealt with that aspect in years. If someone else would like to verify or correct me, then please do so. But I think you should at the very least exercise caution.