Cube

[Smoke0]

I'd like to add a usb hard drive or some other hard drive  to the memory slot
of a nintendo gamecube.
I think it would be possible to take a memory card and open it to use its case as a
plug.So you would have a hard drive with no mods to the cube.
But maby the cards have a read-only program on them?

[Agentspikey95]

I'm in no position to answer this in this way, but why does everybody want to put a freaking hard drive on the gamecube? the sell 64 MB cards, get two of those, and that's all you'll ever need unless you use the cards to run software on your GC. i'l all for more storage, but seriously. i think it would be better to just even bould your own game system from the ground up that can play GC games and has a built  in hard drive.

[Smoke0]

For the same amount of money you can get a hard drive.Please help.

[NFG]

This is a foolish idea, too expensive, and for zero gain.  It won't work without extensive knowledge of microcontroller programming as well as the GCs communications protocol.  Forget about it.

[iamsomeguy]

ever think that maybe hes trying to hack linux onto the thing ?
(google cubehacker & linux on gamecube) its getting there and these machines would make a DAMN fine cluster being as there graphics processor and cpu are both 128 bit workhorses and that would make for a VERRRY nice rendering setup jus mty2 cents  

[KeepGood]

C'mon Lawrence its definitely not a foolish idea considering Nintendo may be releasing a 40GB hard drive addon shortly.  And if you think its expensive, you need a new job, hard drives are a dime a dozen nowadays.

Look at some of the products that are out there.  There are alot of small time companies in Hong Kong that release some funky addons.  The other day I was in an HMV store here in the UK and they had a GBA game adaptor for the GC (not the official Gameboy Player) and funny enough, it jacked directly into a memory card slot.

The main problem currently is....The system still boots from the disc drive by default, software would still be needed to to tell the system to use the hard drive.

Look at the ATAPI project for the GBA or the Floppy disk project for the Gameboy.  They will give you a good idea on how to use an IDE controller.

Anyway, I'll come back and dribble some more later :-)

[phreak97]

hmm.. this is not really my place.. but there is a way to boot gamecube software via the network adaptor.. you use some hack with phantasy star online through the broadband adaptor into your pc.. a program you run on your pc streams the gamecube software to the gamecube.. find a channel on irc where they serve out pirate games.. im sure someone in one of those could give you a proper explaination.

[CZroe]

C'mon Lawrence its definitely not a foolish idea considering Nintendo may be releasing a 40GB hard drive addon shortly. And if you think its expensive, you need a new job, hard drives are a dime a dozen nowadays.

Look at some of the products that are out there. There are alot of small time companies in Hong Kong that release some funky addons. The other day I was in an HMV store here in the UK and they had a GBA game adaptor for the GC (not the official Gameboy Player) and funny enough, it jacked directly into a memory card slot.

The main problem currently is....The system still boots from the disc drive by default, software would still be needed to to tell the system to use the hard drive.

Look at the ATAPI project for the GBA or the Floppy disk project for the Gameboy. They will give you a good idea on how to use an IDE controller.

Anyway, I'll come back and dribble some more later :-)

Yeah, that's the Advance Game Port from Datel. It sucks so much balls...

I bought one for $25 just to see how advanced their GBA emulation software was. The ability to sync the game's save from the emulated software to the actual cartridge intrigued me. I assumed that it would logically save to emulated SRAM/EEPROM/FlashRAM then tell their cartridge hardware to synchronize with this. The entire ROM is copied into memory before emulation begins and two out of three times it inexplicably locks up there. Sometimes it works, usually it doesn't.
Anyway, first I tried Mario Kart Super Circuit (EEPROM) and after being totally grossed-out with the choppy frame rate and horrible sound, I tried getting a time on a time trial course I had not played before. I removed the cartridge before completing the course and when complete it took me to a "now saving" menu. This is normal for this game and is NOT part of the emulator. Anyway, it would just wait there until I put the cartridge in. The emulator did not pause emulation. The game was simply very tolerant of delayed writes or something. I can't imagine how many aren't so tolerant Anyway, I checked the save on my GB Player and it was really saved to the cart. Then I tried an import copy of F-Zero for Gameboy Advance. This is a legit import SRAM game NOT a common pirated EEPROM cart with an SRAM hack (Yes, those are common). Those pirate carts always have save issues... This is the same game as F-Zero Maximum Velocity, not the new F-Zero Seiken Densetsu. Anyway, it locked up a few times on the loading screen as usual but when it finally worked my save was gone. I panicked. I've got a lot of hours in that game! I figured that perhaps it simply didn't support the more uncommon SRAM save type so I popped it into a real GBA only to confirm that it had indeed wiped my save memory I created a new file and put it back in the AGP and confirmed that it could read and write to SRAM. I fooled around with starting and restarting and it did wipe the game save again so WATCH OUT when dealing with SRAM (AKA "Battery Backed-up") games. Most games with built-in save chips use EEPROM and FlashRAM so this isn't so bad. I just have to remember not to insert Metroid Fusion either (Also SRAM).

Anyway, the sound is totally unacceptable no matter what game you are playing. It is not simply because the emulation is throttled because it does not play correctly no matter what type of game you are running. I don't believe it's simply inaaccurate emulation for certain titles either because it sounds the same with every title (And I have 30+). It's almost as if they purposely throttled the bit-rate to free up CPU cycles but locked it that way regardless. Everything sounds stuttered and static-like rather than off-key or missing channels. This sounds like their coding method because they clearly locked a frame-skip rate too. They had to lock it at something odd-numbered so that transparancy flicker effects would work (Though the effect is lost, at least the object doesn't dissapear). However, when there's something very simple with no audio, the frame-rate doesn't improve so it's clear that this is a very sloppy way to do it. I mean, the frame rate is so bad I couldn't bear to operate the menues in an RPG because my cursor was simply too choppy to operate and move quickly through selections. That alone makes this an un-releaseable product. I mean, if the emulator were capable of full-speed without frame-skip in certain areas, it should do so. All PC GBA emulators have auto-frame-skip options to keep emulation speed at 100%.

At least it demonstrated the GC's ability to read and write to something other than a memory card from the slot. Of course, the SD adapter is a more interesting device for this Perhaps someday someone will port a nice homebrew emulator to the GC and this could become a great way to transfer saves from the emulated titles to the real cart as well as an alternate method for loading ROMs. I'm taking mine back to Best Buy / Futureshop (Used the $5 Gamer's Gift Card coupon to get it for $25, see vgtalk.com for info on that over-used promotion ). Yes, it's that bad and I figure that it may get even cheaper by the time the homebrew community decides to interface with it.

Also of note, 16:9 wide-screen TVs work well in zoom mode with the GB Player (Chops off some of the border without distorting or modifying the GBA screen area). Not so with the AGP. The top of the screen is cut-off unless your TV has the ability to move the zoom area up. I was hoping that it could solve the problem many TVs have with progressive scan: Being forced to play with interlaced mode because their TVs stretch all progressive or HD signals and disable zoom or standard aspect ratio options. All it would take is a mode with vertical letterboxes / pillarboxes. My old Samsung was like that as were any other sub-$1.5K tube set but luckily my XBR910 HiScan Trinitron WEGA is fine. Very glad to finally be able to play Metroid Prime in progressive-scan without stretching the 4:3 screen to 16:9.

hmm.. this is not really my place.. but there is a way to boot gamecube software via the network adaptor.. you use some hack with phantasy star online through the broadband adaptor into your pc.. a program you run on your pc streams the gamecube software to the gamecube.. find a channel on irc where they serve out pirate games.. im sure someone in one of those could give you a proper explaination.

I've been doing this for a while Soon it will not require PSO. Basically, if you own an Action Replay rent or borrow PSO once (Get or borrow a Broadband Adapter too!) then use it to write a very special "very long cheat code" on the AR memory card. Because these "codes" are actually RAM addresses and values, this code can be used to insert a small program into memory which can access and load more code from a large memory card (1GB SD card anyone?). Even a small MC251 would work great because it can hold a network loader program to utilize the Broadband Adapter just like PSO. All of this has been demonstrated in concept.

I can't wait