Preparations

This section of the guide will help you to prepare everything.

Step 0: What You Will Need

  • A SD Card (or Micro SD card + adapter)

    • We recommend a SD with at least 4GB+ even if not needed. A small SD card is enough to get CFW running, but larger ones are preferred for installing games and performing NAND backups efficiently.

    • If you want to backup your Wii U, you should use a SD at least twice the size of your console (16GB for the white console and 64GB for the black one)

  • A working internet connection on your Wii U

    • The browser exploit requires internet (Crazy, I know). If you decide to install Haxchi this is only needed once however.

  • One of the following games if you want Haxchi:

    • NOTE: This is not required if you just want to run the Browser exploit. We do recommend buying one of these games though

    • WARNING: Don’t use a pirated copy of these games. This will result in a brick.

      Compatible Haxchi Games

      Animal Crossing: Wild World

      Big Brain Academy

      Brain Age

      DK: Jungle Climber

      Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training

      Kirby: Canvas Curse

      Kirby: Mass Attack

      Kirby: Squeak Squad / Kirby: Mouse Attack

      Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

      Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

      Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time

      Mario Kart DS

      New Super Mario Bros.

      Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of the Sky

      Pokemon Ranger

      Pokemon Ranger: Guardian Signs

      Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia

      Starfox Command

      Super Mario 64 DS

      Wario: Master of Disguise

      WarioWare: Touched

      Yoshi’s Island DS

      Yoshi’s Touch & Go

    • We recommend buying Brain Age as it’s the cheapest at 6.99€ ($6.99 USD). However any of those games work fine!

    • If you had Brain Age or Brain Training installed for a very long time, please consider deleting and redownloading it as older versions are not compatible with Haxchi.

Step 1: Format your SD Card

The Wii U needs a FAT32 formatted SD card. However unlike the Switch, only FAT32 works!. If you need to format your SD on Windows and you can’t find FAT32 as a selectable option, use guiformat and set the Allocation Unit Size to 32K (32768).

Important

Don’t call your SD “wiiu”, this will cause problems later on

Step 2: Download Kosmos Wii U

  1. Grab the latest version of Kosmos-Wii-U from https://github.com/NicholeMattera/Kosmos-Wii-U/releases

  2. Insert your SD card into your PC

  3. Open `Kosmos-WiiU-vX.zip` with a ZIP Archiver of your choice

  4. Copy the content of the ZIP onto your SD

  5. You should now have a `wiiu`, `haxchi` and `install` folder on your SD

Congratulations, we’re done with preparations.

Continue to Exploits and You