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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."
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.
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.