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Gamecube Guts
CamelTrader writes: "I was runnin around the net looking for info on dreamcast controller hacks and I found this sweet site that exposes the guts of a gamecube. The pics are here. Take a gander at the rest of the GamesX site if you are into hardware hacking, its very cool."
1. If taking the top off will help people put full CDs or DVDs in there, then A LOT of them will do it. Who thought anyone would solder a chip to their console, or send it off to be soldered on by a "piracy professional"? Yet lots of people did with the PlayStation.
2. Someone will find a way to replicate the safety strip, probably with regular PC hardware. If not, someone will make something themselves that can do it, and they will sell the pirated discs directly for a cheap price. Cartridges are difficult to pirate, but CDs and DVDs are still widely-used, easily burnable things. I have confidence that someone will find a way.
3. DVD burners aren't ubiquitous in PCs yet. But then again, CD burners weren't ubiquitous when the PlayStation came out. But they WERE ubiquitous in the last three years of the PlayStation's life, and especially in the last two. Unless the GameCube bombs faster than the Virtual Boy, piracy for it will eventually be widespread.
I don't condone piracy of new games. I am saying all of this just because I think the technical side of piracy is interesting, so please, waste your "privacy is wrong" flames on someone that doesn't agree with you.
They are not hardware compatible with standard DVD's, first of all none of the DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW or DVD-RAM drives are able to write two layer discs, then you have the added problem with the protection strips, and as somebody else has indicated the discs spin in an inverse spiral, that's even if you can get hold of the discs since they're a custom size and spec. This isn't like PSX games, it would be very difficult to burn these things with a off the shelf DVD burner.
As you indicated if a relatively simply operation allows people to play dodgy games then a lot of people will go down that path, Nintendo know this too well, hence all the engineering to make the drive as non-standard as possible, even if this means they have to fab and press non-standard discs at added cost it's still worth it in their eyes.
I doubt taking the top off the box will let you use standard CDR's as stated before, if it doesn't play RedBook audio disc's then I doubt it plays any ISO9660 discs. They might have gone as far as using a different laser wavelength than standard DVD's.
i think this is one of the best 'gutting of the $product' i've ever seen. it denotes at least a small amount of research, and the color coding legends were a very cool idea. i'd love to see this kinda well thought out gutting done more often.
good job!
They are not hardware compatible with standard DVD's, first of all none of the DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW or DVD-RAM drives are able to write two layer discs, then you have the added problem with the protection strips, and as somebody else has indicated the discs spin in an inverse spiral, that's even if you can get hold of the discs since they're a custom size and spec. This isn't like PSX games, it would be very difficult to burn these things with a off the shelf DVD burner.
This is where the "CD burners weren't ubiquitous when the PlayStation was released" part comes in. CD burners have come a long way since the PlayStation came out. In fact, I think they may have been in the $600-$700+ Dark Ages when the PlayStation came out. In the last year and a half of the PlayStation's life (and the PS1 games can still be pirated to your new PS2), CD burners came standard with your new Dell/Compaq/Gateway/Whatever machine, and were at $100-$150 alone. The point? Sure, you can't pirate GameCube games easily NOW, but technology will catch up fast. If DVD burners don't start coming out with dual layer capability, then packages of blank, specially made DVDs, complete with the GameCube security strip already on them, will start appearing on Lik-Sang. The point is, if someone doesn't figure out how to do it immediately, then technology in general will find a way soon, because writable DVD technology is bound to be a quickly growing market, much like writable (and rewritable) CD technology was a quickly growing market until it became completely ubiquitous in new PCs.
As for the whole "inverse spinning" thing, the page makes no mention of that, and someone here has already said it's a rumor. Personally, I'm inclined to think that it IS a rumor, because I've been to that site many times before, and I seriously doubt that they would've noticed that the laser range is larger than the disc, but not notice that the disc is spinning backwards at the same time.
I doubt taking the top off the box will let you use standard CDR's as stated before, if it doesn't play RedBook audio disc's then I doubt it plays any ISO9660 discs. They might have gone as far as using a different laser wavelength than standard DVD's.
I completely agree. Using CDRs is a long shot, but I think someone should still try it out as a test. It would be dumb NOT to try it out.
That said, I got a chance to play both the GameCube and XBox kiosks, and attend the XBox Unleashed event in New York. The GameCube has a ridiculously functional controller and some really fun games-- it was just plain old entertaining to see Luigi yell "Mario!" in full 3D. The XBox games vary wildly. NFL Fever looked absolutely awful-- almost like a Dreamcast game. Project Gotham Racing and Dead or Alive 3 looked absolutely beautiful. The controller also gave me a mixed opinion of the system. It's large for "real-sized" hands but bulky as well.
What seals the deal for me, I think, is the hackability. If it turns out that XBox releases some crap games (which is possible) I still have a nice NVidia motherboard, chipset, and PIII to play with. Plus I can always use the hard drive and I'm sure I can tweak the USB ports to fit "regular" USB. GameCube, I don't think, would ever be that tweakable. Heck, I can probably make the XBox into a Linux server if I felt like it.
I'm going to get an XBox for hackability, and you should, too.
The old Sega Saturn had a security track similar to these "protection strips" as well. It needed this, as Saturn games were all simple Mode1 CD-ROMs. As the game booted up, the Saturn would check the security track (burned on the very edge of the CD, and impossible to replicate on normal burners).
The hacker's solution to this was to muck with the Saturn BIOS so that it "forgot" to check the security track.
My point is, if the Gamecube's DVD-drive mechanism is a standard component (and doubtless it is, probably the same Matushita mechanism in Panasonic DVD players), HACKERS WILL FIND A WAY, whether it's to sell 1337 Gamecube games for $10 on their website or to backup that import game they paid $75 for.
It doesn't matter if the discs themselves use proprietary format, how they spin, or anything lik e that. Sega's Dreamcast used proprietary GD-ROMs that were uncopyable by normal CD-R drives, but since the drive mechanisms were standard Yamaha 12x CD-ROMs, CD-ROM booting was made possible.
The same thing will happen with the "closed" Gamecube, although undoubtedly the Xbox will be easier to hack.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)