GameCube ISOs Released?

Mister.de writes "An online piracy group called "StarCube" has made ISO's of games like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker available for download on the net. They are not publicly available to everyone, but are said to be hosted on private warez FTP sites. As of yet (6/14/2003) there is no way to actually play the games after burning to a mini-disc, but reliable sources say that there will be a hack for the GameCube released soon so that these illegal copies can be played. Also rumors do have it that the copied games can be played on the Panasonic GameCube, but that is unconfirmed. " The story came from Console-Gods originally.

Comments

Re:Hard to do

[James_Duncan8181]

I am not entirely sure that the spins backwards thing is true (as that would mean that the normal GC discs wouldn't play on the Panasonic model) but assuming that it is, why not just make a program that modifies the ISO before burning?

Surely this is the simpler method...

Done before on Dreamcast

[Chris_Jefferson]

Opinion on IRC seems to be this was done in the same way as the Dreamcast, ie someone produces some method of getting code onto the gamecube which reads the disk and sends it out. Getting code onto the gamecube without Nintendo's permission has been previously shown to be possible by a number of cheat and "region avoiding" cheats. Therefore this part isn't too hard and to be honest it was only a matter of time. The much more serious problem is getting a disc of reasonable size that a gamecube can read to burn the games onto. Obviously it can be done but perhaps only on a large scale. I wouldn't hold my breath to the point where we are all burning gamecube games to be honest. Of course, in 4 or 5 years we'll all be playing gamecube emulators and then these rips will be in hard demand! Start hoarding now! :)

Re:Hard to do

[Chris_Jefferson]

There have already been multiple people who have made unoffical discs, like Datel's action replay and freeloader (disc for allowing the playing of games from a different region) so clearly it isn't too hard (or they don't really spin backwards)

Re:emulator?

[Chris_Jefferson]

There is no real N64 emulator (only high-level ones which don't really work on most games).

The Saturn has only just recently got emulators that work well enough to play the games and modern computers are (almost) fast enough to play them.

Screen shots of DC are getting quite far along but the emulator isn't released or anywhere near playable speed.

There is no PS2 or X-box emulator that does much beyond display a title screen or two (this is still a major accomplishment, but not really good enough to play games)

So to be honest the fact there is no GC emulator isn't that suprising :) Now that there are isos floating around and espically if people can put their own programs on the GC (which REALLY helps in emulating machines) then we may see them start. I'll be very suprised if you can play GC games on your PC within 3 year tho

What they probably did

[msgmonkey]

Was analyse the signals going to/from the GameCube and the read head/head motor control.

Once you have figured out how the raw bits are stored you can actually build your own controller to read off the information ready for transfer to CD/Hard disk/etc.

I suspect the problem they will have is getting a gamecube to read the data off some other medium. The GC is very integerated and you can't intercept the commands to the drive controller (eg read sector number xxxxx) because those signals are inside a chip and not tracks on the board.

You would have to build something that connected directly to the read head/head motor control pcb tracks and attempt to calculate where on the disc it wanted the bits to stream in from. It's not impossible but it is far from trival.

Re:Misconceptions

[b1t r0t]

5. One of the important (and well-known) copyright mechanisms is a barcode-like section of the far innermost track of GCN discs (look closely at a game and you can see it - no, not that one, further to the inside). It is probably just not possible to replicate this on any writable DVD format.

The patent for this was linked to in some article back in late March or so. I seem to recall that the barcode is an encrypted value related to the relative angular position of the start of the barcode and the start of the game data track. Sounds like some kind of Apple ][ copy protection, except using stuff that you can't record.

And of course the only way to get any of this (and Linux) to boot is probably going to be a hacked boot ROM with support for standard DVD-R discs. Time to bone up on your mad surface-mount s01d3r1ng sk177z!