I Turned The Fake Portable GameCube Into A Real Thing

when i first saw this portable gamecube mockup years and years ago my immediate thought was i need this of course that was a difficult feeling to grapple with because this thing is very fake i think that's lame so today i'm going to figure out where this picture came from create a real design based on this render and then put that design together to finally turn this concept into a reality but first we need to get a bit existential why do you exist he's not particularly chatty so we'll have to ask someone else well the first place i ever saw this picture was in the film future gen consoles we too ps4 xbox 720 a timeless youtube exclusive produced by renowned filmmaker mr atomdude in 2008. i'll roll a quick taste of it for you here with the copywritten audio dubbed over by yours truly [Music] hey look it's you now this video is clearly just a compilation of other people's renders and not the original source so we'll have to continue our search elsewhere i've scoured internet forums flipped through old gaming magazines slogged through gaming journalism websites and have found almost nothing one interesting tidbit that i have found is that there's actually a second image to this mock-up that just doesn't get shared nearly as much behold evidently whoever made this mock-up was a big fan of mp3 players we've also got the name of nintendo gamecube advance which is a bit of a mouthful but it makes sense the one useful part of this image is a low res date in the corner of may 18 2005 which should be a clue as to when this image was created with this info fellow modern mp3 who's not related to this mp3 player was able to find a backup of a now defunct gaming website called joystick with an article on this mock-up from may 5th 2005. there are some funny comments to mock here including this one from draken4299 who said it is real there is a guy that takes apart consoles and makes them into handhelds so what you all have said about it being fake i'm sorry to say that you're wrong and you know what in 2005 draken here may not have been the brightest bulb but today i'm going to turn him into a prophet i will try some nefarious research tactics later on to get the full story on this guy but for now let's move into the design phase alright so the first thing we need to do is figure out how big this thing actually is which shouldn't be too difficult given that the artist put a gamecube disc in pretty clear view i took some paper and used the highly technical method of looks about right to decide that the rough dimensions of the build should be something like this conveniently the screen that i used in my portable ps2 is about the same size so we're going to just throw out the paper and use this screen as a base for the project i've got my own 3d printer so i'll be designing and printing each piece out to make sure that i haven't accidentally designed a loaf of bread instead i'll start by designing the holder for the screen as the size of this will decide the shape of the bottom section i don't really understand the design choice of the mickey mouse ears on the corners but i left them on there to stay true to the render however this picture is just a little bit too out there for my taste so we're just going to pretend that it doesn't exist i think that the top of a gamecube will suit this portable better in an age free from the tyrannies of mp3 players i've never built a device that folds before so i'm doing my best to understand how these bizarre contraptions called hinges work it's really not going well so i'm going to open up my little brother's ds and look for some answers oh look answers one side of a ds screen has a hinge piece that goes between the screen and this little piece and the other side just has a hollow ring to run wires through all i need to do is recreate these holes and let this funny hinge piece work its magic this works great but if you have eagle eyes then you might notice that this hinge design is different from what the mockups got so we needed to find some formal rules of this project which are legally binding with a federal prison sentence if violated the primary goal of this build is to create a real working portable gamecube that follows this mock-up exactly unless doing so is impossible or would ruin the build completely the first build ruiner happens to be this hinge design it can definitely open to that position and close from that position without any issues but here's the thing nobody plays a folding system like this you bend the screen back and play your 3ds like a proper member of society unfortunately the mock-up's hinge layout doesn't take proper society membering into account hence the changes two hinge pieces are enough to keep the screen solidly locked in one spot unless i really start shaking it but this shouldn't be an issue because we're building a portable gamecube but not a portable wii right um i've actually got a confession to make you might want to take a seat for this one the heart of this system is going to be a wee motherboard instead of a gamecube motherboard that's probably really hard to hear and you want to take some time to process that but i just want to tell you how stupid it is to build a gamecube portable the gamecube motherboard uses a lot more power than the wii motherboard it can't be cut down as much as a wii motherboard it can't be software modded as easily as we motherboard and it just has so many other flaws that all add up to this world where most nobody has built a true gamecube portable in years so why is it okay for me to use a wii instead well it's because nintendo made the wii backwards compatible with the gamecube which means that a wii doesn't pretend to be a gamecube a wii just is a gamecube wii's can read gamecube discs and play the games just as well as their blocky brothers so almost nothing is lost by using the wii's motherboard the only significant things we might miss out on are the gamecube's iconic boot screen and blocky purple menus which is a bit sad so i'll make you a deal i will add in some of that certified gamecube menu look and feel to the custom software of the system and in return you won't leave any angry comments about how i lied about using a gamecube can we shake on that hey i knew you'd come around with the hinge system all figured out i can start to design the main section of the portable starting with the controller slate the controls have a couple of changes that i need to make because well we'll avoid this by using 3ds sliders instead of joysticks with some custom capsid model to keep that signature gamecube look i'll also be recessing where the controls go rather than popping them out just to be 100 sure that the screen can close properly speakers will go in the corners just like in the mock-up although i'm going to be dropping the massive wi-fi logo because i don't like it and what are you gonna do make me put it on there the buttons for the build obviously need to be gamecube shaped but unfortunately gamecube buttons are a little bit too big for this project to fix that i've gone ahead and designed slightly smaller buttons that fit the size of the case perfectly the mock-up also doesn't have any sort of start button or triggers and so i've designed those along the screen control buttons to make sure nothing's missing and that's pretty much it for this piece the other half of the bottom is going to have a little bit more going on and a little bit more stuff to fit in i need to somehow cram a trimmed wii some batteries a cooling system triggers the wii pms and usb-c charging boards from four layer tech a headphone jack all this junk here on the side and a disk drive into this little rectangle i think you can tell that one of these things has no chance of fitting in this project that's right mr headphone jack we're gonna have to ask you to leave no but seriously there is no way i'm fitting a disk drive in this thing the disk drive system for a gamecube is this big and the disk drive from a wii is this big the case is this big erasing the disk lock completely though would be an unforgivable sin when it's one of the central features of the mock-up and so i will at least be keeping a slot that discs can't slide into even if there's nothing there to read them with this in mind i need to figure out what batteries i'm going to use and where they're going gonna fit which is tricky i've gone through dozens of different orientations and placements for all the parts with all sorts of batteries and i think i finally have one that works i can put these batteries in the bottom half which gives me just enough space to place the wii in the top right and the power boards in the top left these batteries are enough to get a whopping hour of battery life it's a lot less than i would have liked but it's as much as i can fit in without making the bottom half super thick the upside is that these batteries line up perfectly with the disc slot which is excellent cooling vents are somewhat critical so i modeled this gamecube vent shrunk it a bit and lined my heatsink up with it so that it looks invisible from the outside it's a nice touch that some of my other portables could really benefit from and that should be it for case design all i've got left is a bit of circuit board design for the controller stuff on the front once that's finished i'll go ahead and order the circuit boards and final case from pcbway who just so happens to be the sponsor of today's video pcbway is a manufacturing company that provides all sorts of services that make my projects a lot easier they offer high quality circuit boards price as low as five bucks for five boards and almost any color i could ever want they also have a variety of 3d printing services that i like using for detailed prints that my printer struggles with like this controller slate piece they also offer the option to have your prints painted or dyed in virtually any color you give them which is very convenient for me because it's snowing outside which makes doing a paint job myself somewhat troublesome so i've given pcb away the part files and color ids that should match the mock-up and all that's left to do is wait for the package to arrive wow what incredibly well-scripted timing let's open up the package and see what we've got we've got our circuit boards and all the parts to the case and this case looks fantastic the colors are pretty much dead onto the render and i'm really excited to finally put this guy together the circuit boards look to be precisely what i need as well the glossy black pcbs were a great choice it's pretty much time to put this thing together but before i get too deep into the assembly i need to cut up a wii it's going to be the smallest trim i've ever used due to how little space there is for it in the case relocating the wii's nand storage inside the trim lines is the trickiest part but it's a lot easier with this flexible circuit board after that i just need to move around a couple of minor things and then very carefully cut out this bizarre shape after some sanding and cleanup i wired it up to power and it still boots i'm going to set the wii off to the side for now and begin assembling the screen half of the build this should be pretty straightforward all i need to do is slim down the screen and its control board as much as possible so that the two screen pieces can fit together nicely shaving off the plastic screen housing indoors ended up being a really dumb idea because this white dust has now coated my entire workbench to make this seem intentional the first person to give an accurate count of every single white plastic bit seen in the rest of the video will receive this slightly used bass pro shop gift card so be sure to post your guesses in the comments below after cleaning up some of the dust miss fortune struck again when i tried to trim off a piece of the case and accidentally snapped off a piece of the lid in doing so i really don't want to have to wait for an entirely new lid piece so i've carefully super glued the broken bit back into place it's an unfortunate flaw but these things happen next up is to assemble and test the big circuit board the soldering here is pretty straightforward i just need to attach a few connectors a gc plus board which acts as the controller for the build and the audio amp which operates the speakers and headphones this is all looking good so now i need to get my hands on all the buttons for the build obviously we're going to need a bunch of different colors so i'll make molds of these 3d printed buttons and then pour various colored resins into my molds it'll take a day or two for the buttons to fully cure so we'll move on to assembling the bottom half in the meantime while i had designed the bottom half to be printed in just two pieces i ended up breaking it into three to get the proper silver and black paint job the scary part is that i need to very carefully super glue two of these pieces together without misaligning anything that went okay so once i was sure my glue job wouldn't fall apart i was able to drop in the batteries power boards side stuff and cooling setup right in and connect them all together the heatsink was a little bit too long at first so i bought the finest hacksaw walmart had to offer and spent 20 minutes sawing through it but uh it fits now with this all set up it's time to drop in our trimmed wii and pray that it all works this is by far the most nerve-wracking part of the project because if nothing happens here then i am in for a world of troubleshooting pain but that's a relief at this point the project is in full go mode the rest of the buttons have come out cleanly and everything else is ready to go so it's time to actually put the thing together the controls slide into place and feel great to press the controller board lines up with everything all my wires go between the halves the screen slots into place the hinges work flawlessly all the tests check out oh wait the controller isn't working oh let me just spend 12 hours taking it apart again and troubleshooting that okay it works now the last screws are buried and finally [Music] [Music] well was it worth the effort [Music] this thing is so cool this is easily the cleanest portable i've ever made going off of looks alone in terms of how it feels to play it is a bit of a mixed bag this design isn't super ergonomic and while i wouldn't say that the weird grips ruined the feel of the portable i would certainly say that it would be better off without them the screen is 480p which might not sound great but it looks quite good as that's the resolution these games were meant to run at audio sounds flawless through the headphones and speakers and the volume slider works as intended the power boards from four layer tech also add some convenient features like the ability to tune the charging speeds see the exact battery percentage and know the exact temperature inside the portable and thanks to the wii inside all gamecube games run flawlessly at full speed exactly the way you'd want them to there's a lot of good stuff packed into this little guy but i have two substantial issues with the build the first is that the battery life is less than an hour and a half long which is laughably low by any standards i can work around this by using a portable charging bank but it's a pretty lame solution the other problem is that the case is glossy black which looks phenomenal from a distance but this thing is just an insane fingerprint magnet i'm willing to live with these laws though because the goal of this project wasn't to make a perfect product that i could sell the goal was to make this gamecube portable and i feel like i accomplished that there is one thing that i did fail to accomplish though and is that i never found out where the 2005 render for this guy actually came from so after attempting to extort answers from the render through torture i had finally exhausted all ethical ways of trying to find an answer to a question and so at a heavy cost to my conscience i asked for help on twitter and thanks to a boost from my friend shank a user named emergency pants took all the links in history i had found to make one final discovery an archive of an artist webpage from 2006 with this very exciting preview image this backup didn't have any other pictures but it did have the full name and email address of someone i hoped was the artist a guy named damond the email address was long dead but thanks to the incredibly scary power of the internet to find out anything about anyone i was able to track down his instagram and in a wonderful turn of fate i discovered that he already follows me one dm later i had confirmation that he was the guy who made the render and he was happy to tell the story of the image so here it is the first thing i asked was why he made the render it turns out he made the mock-up just for fun demond was studying traditional and digital art in college and came up with this concept while practicing product rendering in 3d studio max he posted the image online to see if people would think it was legit and it got picked up and swirled around in 2005 internet fashion a couple of people did manage to tie the project back to him and he ended up getting paid to create mock-ups and renders for some phones and emulation devices since then demond has worked at a variety of video game companies like ubisoft epic games and squanch games after the gamecube render he did a few more for fun renders that have also gained some notoriety such as this psp mock-up and lastly i asked if he still had the project files or any high-res photos of this render he does have those files on a hard drive but unfortunately that hard drive is dead so the files are unreachable for now and that's the full story of this image i'm really grateful to demand for providing the original inspiration for this project and being willing to share the story of it it was awesome to finally have this all come together after building so many portables the magic of seeing wind waker on something i can hold in my hands has definitely worn off quite a bit but this project felt really special because it had a set goal that i could see from the very start and it's got that same feeling of wow this is real that my first portable wii had it may get terrible battery life it may have a crack and it may get horribly smudged every single time my greasy fingers touch it but it's real and in my hands and that's super cool there are plenty of other fake renders out there that i could use for future projects but none of them hit home as hard as this one so i'll be sticking to my own original projects for now if you want to make sure you see those then subscribe you know how this works and if you want to funnel me money directly then i've got a patreon where i post details and plans about upcoming projects so that you can see the stuff i'm working on before anyone else anyways that's all i've got thanks so much for watching i'll see you again soon with whatever i come up with next forgot it was a wii

Channel: GingerOfOz

Views: 2,498,169

Keywords:

Id: ENEpJJPQomg

Length: 19min 57sec (1197 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 11 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/commander_nice]

I think it's amazing that such a small piece of the Wii motherboard is all that's needed for a functioning Wii.

[u/Pikmeir]

This guy's voice reminds me so much of Dave from the G4TV show Portal. Is it just me?

[u/a6mzero]

holy crap, you can cut PCB like that?!?

[u/DevilRenegade]

Post here.

[u/RedSquaree]

Not really. The entire top of the device was left out. The video maker just didn't want to make it like the image so he made up a different version and brought that to life.