Quick Guide: GameCube Boot Logo in Dolphin

[Music] hey everybody this is Russ Metro gamecore today we're going to talk about all things GameCube this is one of my favorite systems of all time I was in my early 20s when it first came out and my roommates had a PS2 and Xbox already but I decided to pick one of these up and I really enjoyed the catalog and I feel like we had some really excellent contributions to some of my favorite franchises including Metroid and Paper Mario and Star Fox and to be honest I even like Super Mario Sunshine and so I've always had a special place in my heart for the Nintendo GameCube catalog and it's been really great over this past year because we've been getting a lot of handhelds that can actually play this system in fact I think that 2024 is really the year where for $200 or cheaper you can play most GameCube games on a handheld and that's awesome now as I've started to play more and more of my GameCube favorites I found myself missing one little aspect of the whole experience and that is the old boot logo that came when you started up your GameCube let's do a quick nostalg take right now and yeah I love the look and sound of this boot logo now today what we're going to do is actually get that onto all of your different emulator systems and it's actually a lot easier than you might think it's just a matter of getting the right bios file and then renaming it and putting it in a certain folder from there it just takes one little settings tweak within the Dolphin Emulator and you'll be right as rain and so that's going to be the focus of this video and I'm hoping to keep it pretty short and sweet we're going to set this up on various different handhelds incling ining the steam deck as well as on your PC on top of that I will show you how to get it working for each of the three major regions that were supported by the GameCube and so without any further delay let's go ahead and Dive Right [Music] In okay to start in order to fully set this up you're going to need two different bios files the pal version as well as the ntsc version now like with game files these bios files are copyrighted so you're going to have to find them on your own now there are various different bioses you can use use it doesn't have to be these ones that are specifically named and so if you find any others they will likely work just make sure you grab a pal version as well as an ntsc one now for this initial setup we're going to do it on PC and then we'll move on to other devices here in a moment but for all these you're going to be using the Dolphin Emulator and so the process will be very similar to start go into the menu bar and select file and then open user folder within here you're going to see a folder that says GC for GameCube go ahead and open that up now within here you'll see three different regions Europe Japan and USA and we'll start by using the North American region now it's not as simple as just dragging and dropping you have to rename this bios file you have to name it IPL doben and of note the IPL needs to be in uppercase and the bin has to be in lowercase anyway once you've renamed that you can move that over into the GameCube USA folder and that's it we have now installed it but we first need to turn it on in the settings so we're going to go into the configuration menu and then the GameCube Tab and then within there you will see a section that says IPL settings below that you'll find an option that says skip main menu and this will be turned on by default we want to turn this off once that's done close out of these settings and then boot up a game that's from the US region so for my test case we're going to use the American version of Animal Crossing and sure enough when you boot it up you're going to see the GameCube logo how awesome is that now not only is the GameCube logo super cool nostalgic to look at but it actually has some functions to it as well let's close out of the game and then start it right back up and when you first see that GameCube logo if you press and hold onto the a button it's going to bring you into the BIOS menu and I don't know about you but this fills me with a lot of nostalgia just to see it now within dolphin there's not a lot of functionality within the BIOS menu because a lot of it's already been configured within the settings but you could go in here and change out like stereo and mono sound and you could also adjust the date and time but it's probably going to be correct anyway and you can also launch the game directly from here if you would like but the one function I think is actually pretty helpful is you can go through and navigate and adjust the memory card so if you'd like you can remove a save from your memory card or even move it over to the second memory card if you would like again this is something you can do within the dolphin user file system anyway but it is pretty neat to be able to do it directly on the device like this but really that's about it when it comes to the BIOS menu I think it's really just all about getting that boot logo in the first place now once you have this set up for the US region you're not quite done yet because if you want to try a game from outside of that region it's no longer going to work so for example if I try to open up the European version of Animal Crossing you can see that the game is going to immediately crash now there are two different things you could do one is just to go into the configuration settings again and then turn on that skip main menu under the IPL settings and yes sure enough when you do that the game is going to boot up just fine but you will not have a boot logo either in the US or european region so the trick here is to add the pal bios as well it's going to be the exact same process so we'll go into the GameCube folder then the Europe folder and then we have to rename our pal bios file to IPL doben same thing here we'll just move it over to the European region and we are good to go now you might be wondering about the Japan region say if you're going to be playing a Japanese game well Japan also used ntsc for GameCube so what we can do is just open up the USA folder and then we can copy this IPL bin and then then paste it into the Japanese folder as well and that's it we now have all three regions working correctly for the GameCube now we can go back into the dolphin configuration menu and then turn off that skip main menu option and now no matter what region your game is from when you start it up you will see that boot logo it's going to be the same across all three regions of note if you go into the bias menu with the European ROM you can go and change out the language and you've got six different options English German French Spanish Italian and Dutch however this also is not really necessary because you can also change that within the dolphin menu in fact it's right there under the IPL settings menu and you do not need the BIOS to change out the system language you can do this anytime you want and to test we can open up Japanese games as well so here's the Japanese version of Animal Crossing and sure enough yeah same boot logo and everything and each of these regions will have their own memory card as well as save games and so you can go into these and manage these yourself as well and really that's about it when it comes to setting up dolphin on a PC if you're using a windows-based handheld it' be the exact same process as well but but let's say you have an Android based device let me show you how to set that one up next the first thing we want to do is get those bios files onto our Android based device for this I've just put in my SD card for the Odin 2 and then I put my IPL files here on the SD card on the left now both of these files are named the exact same thing IPL dobin and so as a result I wanted to give them some sort of characteristics so I knew the difference between the two so I've gone ahead and named one of them pal IPL dobin and the other one ntsc now when I put it into my Odin I'll be able to identify which one is which next I'm going to put the SD card back into my device and then I'm going to open up the regular files app not the fancy like Google files or anything else like that just the standard regular one and now I'll press the menu button on the top left to bring up the sidebar and there I can see my SD card if I scroll down a bit I can find my two IPL files and now it's just a matter of drag and drop so I'm going to select this one and then select copy two and then I'll open up the side menu again now if you've already been using dolphin on your device when you open up that files app in the sidebar you will see the dolphin user files so we're going to click on this and this it's going to take us to the exact same setup we had on PC so here we want to go into the GC folder and then pick your region in this case we're going to pick the USA one from there we'll copy over that file and then once it's done let's do the same thing but with the pal version so we're going to select it then do copy two then go into the dolphin user file system then GC and then EUR and same thing here we will then copy that file over next we'll go into those dolphin system files so we'll go back to the menu then pick the Dolphin Emulator and then GC we'll start with the European one first and the only thing we have to do here is just rename this file to the plain IPL dobin so on the top right there's an option to rename and then we'll remove the pal in the space there we go we're good to go let's do the same thing with us but then obviously we're going to take off the ntsc and once we've renamed it let's go ahead and copy this and move it over to the Japanese folder as well and some of these steps may not be necessary for you if you're not going to be playing with any other region other than your own but it's always better to be safe than sorry anyway once we moved over all of our files we're now ready to go into the dolphin app itself self now we'll go into settings and then config and then GameCube and sure enough within here we have the IPL settings so we just want to toggle off the thing that says skip main menu and that's it from now on anytime we open up a GameCube game it's going to show that boot logo but one thing you may notice is depending on your software settings you may see a bunch of text when you first start it up and that can kind of get away of the whole boot logo experience so let me show you how to get rid of that we're going to exit out of the game and then go back into the main dolphin menu and then within settings we're going to go into config and then interface if we scroll down a bit there are two options I would recommend turning off and it's going to be these two right here use Panic handlers and then show onscreen display messages now bear in mind that when turning these off it is going to limit the messages you will see so for example it won't tell you that it's saved a game when it saves it and then also if there's a compatibility error with the game it's not going to give you that indication so it is a bit of a trade-off to be able to get a nice clean look when it comes to that boot logo anyway let's try it again and yeah sure enough here we have minimal text on the front as we boot up the game and of note even when you're using the Android version if you press and hold the a button button it will bring you into the BIOS menu so if you want to adjust your game saves you can do that here within the menu that's pretty handy and once you have this set up it's going to work well with any front end that you can think of emulation station dig show all these are going to work the same you'll boot up your game you'll see the boot logo and then the game will start one of my favorite things about the GameCube boot logo is that it's fairly short and so because of that I don't really mind having it on there it just gives me a little bit of a nostalgic kick by contrast I don't really like using the boot logo for either PS1 or PS2 just because they are so darn long and of course course that's all going to be personal preference Now setting this up for steam deck is going to be very similar as well but let's run through it really quickly to start you need to be in desktop mode from there go into the bottom left and under the menu bar go to the game section and then find the Dolphin Emulator and this is going to be very similar to how it is on PC so we're going to go to file open user folder and then here under GC you will find your three different regions and then within there you will put your bios files just make sure that you name each of them IPL doben after that go into the configuration settings go into the GameCube Tab and then and then turn off the skip main menu option and that's it from now on anytime you start up a game you will get the boot logo as well anyway that's about it for this video I think that the GameCube boot logo is one of the Lesser known features of the Dolphin Emulator and so I do hope that you enjoy this I think this is one of those little touches that really makes emulation special so let me know what you think in the comments Down Below have you already been using this or do you plan on using it in the future as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music] oh

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 18,153

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Id: jmBAuq1aPPM

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2024