Finally cracked the Gamecube
About a year ago, I learned of a no-modchip Gamecube mod.
So naturally, I looked into it. I’d rather do a softmod (a modification that doesn’t require a physical modification) than install a chip, risking ruining the gamecube.
The process is quite ingenius, but I feel the need to tell some history. The known first softmod was an exploit within an internet capable GC game called Phantasy Star Online (later releases were fixed). As with any online game, it included settings to be changed to access the internet. When it connects to the online server, information is downloaded. So the first modders had the game access their own computers. Once connected, they found out there were ways to send small programs to the console, which were executed.
A little later on, a program was devised to stream the loaded gamecube cd BACK to the pc, thus allowing game backups onto the internet. The reason one could not just put a gamecube disk in a computer and copy was because the disk is read from outter to inner, and spun in the opposite direction of a regular DVD. Now that we have ISOs, they tweaked the program senders to send them BACK to play.
So at this point, a computer is needed to send games to the console which takes some time, after a five minute bootup of the Phantasy Star Online game, which is a long time. Now a guy, whom is known as Costis heard about someone who wrote an Action Replay (cheats games) Cheat code that would make it patch itself, no matter what version it was. He had a SD memory card on his desk..and came up with a great idea….is it possible to put a small program on it and have the Action Replay boot it?
Once he made an adapter and modified his SD memory card, was able with the help of a 29 lines of cheat code, was able to make his program boot. This lowered the time to sending programs to the Gamecube from minutes to less than a minute.
I tried this last year with no success. Someone was asking me about this the other day, and I had the enthusiasm to try it again, but I’ve learned things since then…especially Linux. Apparently my SD memory card was sort of corrupted. I was able to fix it and was able to boot the software.
Now with the key in the door, it was time to open the door. Since then there has been the release of a collection of gamecube programs, for the method I am using, and for hardmods. This program is called GcOS (GameCube Operating System). With this, I have successfully done the following:
- Backed up Gamecube games
- Sent mini custom games to the gamecube
- Burned a GameCube to a mini DVD-R and launched (StarFox Assault).
And I’ve yet to try the other utilities