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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."
Long live this spirit of investigation. It is what true hacking (as opposed to cracking) is all about.
Whenever I buy a PC, the first thing I do, before I even plug it in, is take the case apart and have a look inside. Am I the only one who does this ? I doubt it :-)
i was more interested in the "dreamcast controller hacks" aspect of the post.
what exactly is available and what where you looking for?
dreamcast is now only 80 dollars, a keyboard is 20, plus 20 more for a mouse. add 60 for a broadband adapter and you have a pretty well rounded game console. also, in the coming months, dreamcast stuff will start appearing in funcoland`s and the like and stuff will be cheaper.
also, there are tons of cool stuff like nester dc or a vcd player, a divx player, and tons of other stuff including linuxdc
i`m looking for a hack for adding other controllers such as an old nintendo controller to play on dreamcast.
xavii aka bobbefore moding me down, read the post...
The CPU is that smaller IBM chip, everithing else is done by the ATI chip.
Well, we know the CPU is a PowerPC derivative, and we know linux kernel have some support for ATI video cards.
I just want to know what kind of proprietary stuff or changes ATI and IBM introduced to make things harder for linux hackers...
Sony already have an official version of our beloved system for PS2, there's a version of linux for the Dreamcast too...
I hope someone (Nintendo, maybe???) puts togheter a distro for the GameCube too. It's a shame wasting all this hardware just for games.
BTW, the guy who gutted his Cube just lost the warranty...
What ? Me, worry ?
Remember these 'wee' discs are not the same as the 8mm mini CD's you find now and then, they are truly weird custom 5mm DVD's which I doubt you'll ever find on the market unless some factory in China does a major haul. They are also double-layered, none of the DVD-R/DVD-RW/DVD+RW drives handle double-layered discs of any kind.
I doubt the GC could play games from CDR, given the fact it doesn't read Redbook audio discs this probably indicates it doesn't read CD's at all.
Also... did you see the custom authentication strips on the innerside of the disc, try and get your DVD-R to burn those!
Hong Kong game store Lik-Sang had pics of a dissasembled gamecube quite a while ago, Sep 12 to be exact.
They have a bunch of other interesting news, such as the portable screen making the gamecube if not exactly portable, at least luggable.
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.
... the world shortage of aluminum has finally been explained!
Seriously speaking, it's one big heatsink for a processor known for its low power usage! Gotta be for the flipper chip i guess.
Thomas S. Iversen
Wow, I've finally made the big time after all these years. Just thought I'd say thanks to CamelTrader (whoever you are!) and welcome everyone else to my life's work - GameSX.com.
It's originally named after a retail store I opened some five years ago - Game Station X - but the store is no more.
It is, I believe, the single largest collection of game hardware pinouts and hacks and so on. It wouldn't be there without the help of all the fantastic people who've sent in their mods and info, so thanks to everyone!!
The ISP hosting the site might freak out if it's hit by the normal slashdot traffic. Please try again later if it buckles.
Lawrence.
If you've ever seen the GameCube in person the first thing you probably thought was "Wow it's small!" Well I noticed a few things that contributed to how they made it that size. One was the power source. It's external so it resides in the AC adapter. This thing is fairly large for a console adapter. Here is a picture:Cube IGN.
The second is the processor. IBM has developed a VERY tiny 485Mhz processor for the Cube. It's called the Gekko and is based on PowerPC technology (uses copper wire tech as well). Have a look at it: GameSpot Dossier.
The GameCube hardware is unique. The chip is produced by ATI although it was designed by another company (hence, it is not a Radeon). It also features 1T-SRAM developed by MoSys. It's more efficient although not necessarily all that much better than the RAM used in the Xbox. Unfortunately only 24mb out of 40mb of the RAM in the Cube is 1T-SRAM.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
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.
They don't. They spin clockwise, same as every other console I have handy to check with. Strangely I don't actually own a CD player...
I dunno who started that little rumor. Or maybe it's only south of the equator they spin the wrong way?
Lawrence.
A month ago a number of sites indicated that when they gutted their GameCubes they found two switches near the position of the region switch that was seen on demonstration machines at shows like SpaceWorld and E3. It was hypothesised that by pushing different switches (I think they were pushed by lugs on the disc door?) you could choose which region of software the machine would accept. It was proved that Japanese software only worked in one of the four possible switch combinations.
A week or so ago it was reported that some of the mainstream game review sites now had final US region discs. Ever since I have been waiting to see if anyone is able to prove or disprove the hypothesis. If it is right, I (and many others) would cancel our orders for an import US machine, and get a Japanese one right now. Ultimately I will be buying US region software, and possibly the odd European title - how I long for the machine to have an easy multi-region hack!
Has anyone heard any further news on this stuff?
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.