I made my own GameCube Mini because Nintendo wont

[Music] okay so this is the gamecube that i want to use for this project and i picked this one specifically because it is a revision c motherboard or a dol uh 101 i believe that's what they're called yeah dol 101 so this model uh was the revision gamecube and they removed the digital port and they removed um moved a couple things they removed serial port two but i wanted to use this version because uh it has an integrated power supply into the motherboard the revision a and b motherboard game cubes have a separate power board um and it just takes up more space so for making a mini console this one's going to be perfect uh i'm not sure what i want to do with the controllers yet or this front panel here because i don't necessarily need the slot a and slot b sticking out the front here i don't really like care for having the memory cards in the front i would be totally cool with relocating the memory card to the back uh however the port the memory cards is is on the board the motherboard so i don't really have much of a choice other than putting it in the front unless i wanted to desolder those ports and then relocate them which may be too much work i'm not sure yet but that's the idea for memory cards at least and then this i'm just going to redesign the front panel for because i just don't need to i don't i don't want to really keep any of the outer shell to be honest with you i kind of want to do everything myself so i don't really want to reuse any plastics um and we're also going to say goodbye to the dvd drive and that's going to be the majority of our space saving you can just see it right here like we're going to be able to get rid of pretty much all of this and we're going to be able to get rid of pretty much all of this so we should be left with a fairly small unit i think the biggest um things that are going to be left to take care of is going to be the fan and the um the front ports but it should be quite a lot slimmer than the original unit that's the goal should be 100 3d printed so that's the general idea um yeah i'll figure out what to do with the fan i might just ditch this fan altogether and just use like a blower style one off a laptop or something um i'm not sure yet and then around the back there's just the single av out and this this is on its own little like plastic thing so this can get totally relocated but yeah so it's really a super simple console so it shouldn't be that hard to do all right so i've got the board out and the idea now is that i'm going to go ahead and remove both of these ports it's like the serial port and the broadband port for the um the what you call it the ethernet adapter and the game boy player i don't have or use any of those or either of those things so they're not really important to me and they add a lot of width um so i'm just going to go ahead and try and desolder them because they are not necessary for this all right we have successfully dremeled off that connector the one next to the video out i honestly don't know which one it is but uh yeah it actually came out kind of clean desoldering was definitely not going to happen there's way too many um pins there all right let's see oh oh i think it's running actually oh if it's on then it did not boot oh false alarm it booted just fine this error actually doesn't matter it's just throwing that error because we don't have a disk drive connected right now so yeah it's fine okay that one didn't come out quite as clean but you know what it got the job done so we'll go ahead and test it out one more time [Music] and look at that we are still good to go sweet all right so now that we've got the board significantly trimmed down um it's it's real short here let me measure this from the heatsink which is the tallest component right now close enough that's like 21 22 23 millimeters that's tiny i mean obviously the final version is going to be bigger than that because we still got to put uh the fan somewhere and we got to put the controller inputs somewhere so it is still going to be a little bigger but that's pretty damn small so good good start to work with here some things i'm going to have to think about are cooling obviously i'll just have an air intake i'm sure just like some holes on the side and then have like the fan right here um just so it can act like a duct and just pull air all the way through it um i definitely don't want to have the fan sitting here like it did before it's just going to add a lot of height which i don't want but i'll figure it out okay so i went digging through my parts bin and i've actually got this fan um off of god knows what that's a dell part number so off of a dell something probably just like a small form factor computer um and i think it's actually gonna work perfect now it looks like it's just huge like it's just way too big like we could totally go slimmer but i got to thinking about it and i'm like well we still have to incorporate this board no matter what and like yeah this could get trimmed down like there's a little excess pcb in the bottom but that's like a little more than i'm willing to do for this honestly because i don't really want to relocate all of these traces um and there's a good amount of them and i don't really feel like doing that so i'm just gonna keep this board as it is uh and it's gonna basically just go right there i don't really have a better place for it so when you look at it that way it's kind of perfect okay change of plans i think i'm going to take this controller pcb and i think i'm going to make a cut like right through here and i'll have to relocate the led the battery and the reset switch i was putting together the cad model for it and it was going to be about 60 millimeters which is still quite a bit off the top of the original gamecube but i kind of want it to be smaller than that and um that also means i'm not gonna be able to use the fan i wanted to use um this blower one right here i know i got all excited about it but i don't know i'd rather the whole thing be slimmer um so i think i'll be able to get away with using the original fan and kind of doing the same thing i was doing with this where it just it's going to sit on top of the heatsink and pull air through the heatsink i think it should still work using the stock fan and it'll let me be a lot thinner with it all right so i'm in the middle of mocking up everything in cad and i've got some stuff done here you can see the heat sink on the uh circuit board for the motherboard for gamecube and then i just blocked out some basic shapes for the ports the memory card slots right there and then that's gonna be the av port right there and then just a basic uh shell for now uh this yellow piece right here is going to be to hold the controller port pcb that i trimmed onto the memory card slots and i actually printed it out already so you can see right here there it is attached there's the 3d printed part it just screws uh directly into the memory card slots there's already two holes there that were used to mount these little um just like little metal bracket thingies but we don't need them no more and so i actually just mounted them backwards i just put the screw heads through the bottom and then it just the threads just bite right into the plastic of the 3d print so yeah that seems to work out really nice really really nice and slim and we can actually compare some of the size here and we have saved quite a bit of room already which is cool yeah we've saved a little room we shaved off maybe three millimeters but anyway it's a good start all right my raspberry pi pico has shown up in the mail so i'm gonna go ahead and get that all wired up to the gamecube board here so we can uh run without the dvd drive all right just finished installing the pico boot i've got this plastic lid here just to um keep it from shorting out with the board um but this is a rev c board which means oops we get no sp2 port so we have to use an sd gecko here all right let's try it out first boot let's hope it works hey that's what we like to see nice first try okay change of plans number three i know i said i was going to use this stock fan but then i had an even better idea [Music] hell yeah noctua cooler all right i've got the case mostly printed out here the shell of it i mean um and it's looking really really nice honestly and it's going to be a quick jump cut for you guys to go from what we've been doing to here but trust me this has been hours and hours of work and cad and here's the back side and i'm the well the bottom situation is a kind of a thing because the screws just kind of stick out there um but i'll probably end up making some feet out of tpu at some point i might just make uh just little tiny strips of tpu that just run along the sides here to keep those from scratching up the surface that you put it on it's coming together really nice you can see the uh fan intakes there and then the noxio fan is going to sit a little bit crooked right in there and the reason it's going to be crooked is because it barely does not want to be centered if i put it head on it's kind of hard to tell in the video but you might be able to see that this space right here from here to here is shorter than here to here and it's not by much it's by like two millimeters but i'd rather the fan be centered so when i do the lid uh i'm gonna have the mounting points this is gonna be mounted to the lid and i'm gonna have it slightly skewed like that because that way i can actually get the circular part of the fan completely centered so that'll be like that but uh and like the ports they work really good and i printed the face plate um with a different piece so this uh the face plate was printed from top to bottom like that just like the shell was but now you take this and you orient it differently so that the surface finish is that of the top of a 3d print rather than the side so it kind of gives off a more distinct look for the front panel just like how the gamecube had a different front panel finish and memory cards going just like that they go in fantastic they don't feel uh bad at all feels perfect so yeah any controllers obviously or obviously sorry jesus christ gonna go right there uh pico boot is installed i don't know if i covered that already but that is just mounted right there and its own little uh adapter housing thing that i have 3d printed it originally was just the piece that holds the controller pcb to the motherboard but i added a little mounting spot on it right here to mount the pico boot chip and yeah so we're almost done honestly i really gotta do the top uh cover and then get the fan method in there and then obviously i'm gonna have to wire up a custom solution for this fan if i ran this at 12 volts it would be really freaking loud uh and it would be running really fast so i don't really want to do that the point of using a fan like this is for it to be quiet so i'm gonna have to find a voltage that it's happy with um i imagine i'll probably end up going with 5 volts but i'm going to see if it'll run on 3.3 because then it would be really quiet and i highly doubt the gamecube needs more than 3.3 volts on that fan worth of cooling because the original fan as you can see right here was not much to uh write home about so i think i think this fan will do really well even at a low rpm so it should be fine i'm gonna get the power button all mounted up right here on its own custom little uh bracket there that mounts to the shell and yeah everything is going really good but yeah it's been hours of freaking cad work here the like designing the shell was not that hard to begin with but making it super accurate was the really hard part taking measurements and comparing it to um i'll actually show you here comparing it to photos that i took um to make sure it's accurate you can kind of see i'll turn these on and off you can see like these are actual photos that i lined up um just to make sure i got everything accurate the holes and all that and then printing it out and then making tiny little adjustments because 3d printers aren't perfect and hours and hours and hours later we finally have something usable all right and here it is all put together it looks fantastic sorry the lighting is a little funky because of the way this uh light is set up but i think it looks great it's so slim there's the top of it got the fan mounted got the uh nintendo gamecube logo going on right here came out a little funny but that's fine um and then here's the reset button it's um a little odd i was gonna try and mount an actual button here but um decided it was gonna be way simpler to just use the lever of the switch itself as the button and there's this little recessed area here just so it's easier to press and you just slide it forward that is the reset button so that actually actually works really well like it actually feels really good to use so there's that here's the power button right here which has actually been a ginormous pain in the ass to get just right because it won't pop up all the way uh sometimes and there's the fan got the vents and then i'm i actually straightened out these lines in the model uh so if i ever make another shell for a different color or whatever then these will be straight but for now they're still slanted there's the back there's that side and then i've 3d printed some feet out of tpu so there's those just glued them on because uh the screws kind of stick through unfortunately and i couldn't make them any shorter without losing um you know grip on them and i didn't want to make the whole console any thicker so feet were a good solution but uh there is now let's go ahead and uh power it on all right i've got the power cable and the video cable plugged in here is the sd gecko to load the games off of and then here's a controller and here we go so the power led is actually right in there it's kind of hard to see you don't really turn it off again you don't even really notice it it just looks like a little bit of 3d printed defect but that's just a one layer thick hole is all that is so yeah shines pretty well all right so now let's see there we are we're in swiss you got to hold down b obviously because there's no dvd drive i'm like super happy that this is just kind of working anyway there it is it's running and i wanted to compare it to a real gamecube hold on all right there it is right next to an actual gamecube so as you can see it is pretty slim compared to the original and in this dimension it's about the same maybe a tiny bit shorter so it's a good bit less wide as well which is nice but yeah it seems to run really good um i don't think it's overheating which is good because in swiss it gives you a temperature readout but i've heard that that temperature readout is kind of not very accurate but i don't know i left it on for a while and it's still going just been uh sitting there playing mario kart double dash intro so yeah seems like it's running really well i'm really happy with it i think it turned out great if you liked the video go ahead and give it a like if you want to see more weird gamecube stuff or gaming stuff in general go ahead and subscribe i don't post very often i used to stream a little more often but not really doing that much nowadays but yeah if you want to see some weird i guess go ahead and subscribe i don't know up to you if you hate the video dislike it no one else is going to get to see it anyway thanks youtube anyway i'm out you

Channel: Bringus Studios

Views: 353,460

Keywords: gamecube, gamecube mini, wii, modding, picoboot, gamecube hacks, gamecube mods, gamecube portable, wii portable, wii mini, snes mini, nes mini

Id: AqgEKN8vAY4

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 21 2022