It’s not hard these days to find a portable game console, between Nintendo’s own Switch, the SteamDeck (among many others like it), and Sony’s abandoned PS Vita (RIP), gaming on the go has never been easier, but that hasn’t stopped dedicated individuals from exploring other ways to game while out and about. Twitter and BitBuilt forum user YveltalGriffin has done what I certainly would have considered impossible before today, and has managed to trim down the Wii U motherboard by more than 70% in order to fit it inside the GamePad, allowing it to run as a fully portable console.
This is the LOLWUT Wii U trim. A fully functional Wii U in the palm of your hand (81x111mm). It's the culmination of ~3 months of off-and-on portablizing R&D by yours truly! https://t.co/WIx5KnVkTl pic.twitter.com/MnDQnVU06d
— YveltalGriffin (@YveltalGriffin) September 18, 2023
The project, appropriately titled LOLWUT (the WUT stands for Wii U Trim), took YveltalGriffin 3 months of off-and-on work to complete, and is far more complicated than just cutting down the board of the Wii U. In YveltalGriffin’s own words, the trim “requires obscene amounts of magnet wire and microsoldering.” It also isn’t greatly power efficient, with an estimated two and a half hours of runtime, but the fact that it runs at all seems like a monumental feat. If you’re interested in all of the specifics of the build, the BitBuily forum post linked above goes into great detail.
The build isn’t fully complete inside of a GamePad just yet, but it appears YveltalGriffin is working with another BitBuilt user to supply a GamePad shell that can feasibly house the whole unit. If you’d like to see the LOLWUT in action as it is now, however, you can check out the video below, showing the project booting up and loading into The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, featuring some very long load times and an extremely loud fan.
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Written by Jaxson Tapp
As a lover of gaming and the written word, Jaxson currently fills his time not only with playing games, but also writing about them. Ready for anything, Jaxson’s passion for puzzle games, JRPGs, tough platformers, and whimsical indies helps him bring a well-rounded opinion to Nintendo Wire’s reporting.
