The 6th generation of home consoles has to be my favorite era in gaming; from the mighty PlayStation 2, to the true arcade at home quality of the Sega Dreamcast, and Newcomer Microsoft with their Xbox and its built-in hard drive and online capabilities... And then there was Nintendo. [Shigeru Miyamoto:] Let me introduce you to our new baby! [SM:] Like all babies, it's small. (Pause for laughter) [MVG:] The Nintendo GameCube was released in North America and Japan in November of 2001, and six months later in Europe and Australia. As the name suggests, the GameCube is a cube-shaped console that packs a very small form-factor. While it's not a perfect cube by any means, it measures 150 by 160 by 112 millimeters all around. The GameCube was the first Nintendo console to utilize optical discs, which are the mini DVD format capable of storing up to 1.5 gigabytes in size. Nintendo was also first out of the gate to switch to the PowerPC architecture, something that Sony and Microsoft adopted with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 respectively. Nintendo wanted to simplify development and utilize a RISC architecture so developers could focus on making the best games they could, and the GameCube delivered. With an impressive launch lineup of games including Luigi's Mansion, Tony Haw Pro-Skater 3, Super Monkey Ball 2, Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader, and more, the GameCube's launch lineup is considered one of the best ever in video game history. Nintendo also wasn't afraid to experiment with the remakes of older titles, with the excellent Super Mario All-Stars, but the GameCube took that concept to the next level, with remakes of classic games including Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes and Resident Evil. [Jill:] Hey Wesker, where's Chris? [Wesker:] Jill, no! You don't want to go back out there... [Jill:] But we've got to find- [BANG] [Barry:] What was that?! [Wesker:] Chris? [Jill:] No! [Wesker:] Jill, go and investigate. However, if we look back at the sales numbers, it wasn't kind on the Gamecube selling, only 20 million units worldwide. It was easily beaten by Sony and Microsoft, and ultimately the Nintendo GameCube was discontinued in 2007. But the Nintendo Wii took much of the GameCube's architecture and innovation and added motion controls to it, and as we know, that was a smash hit. It's a great time to revisit the Nintendo GameCube, with so much power and performance in a small little form factor and of course, we're going to take a look at modding the device and really bringing out some new features that you may not be aware of. So let's go ahead and take a look and see what makes the GameCube still awesome in 2019. While it's controller technology had been around for many years before the GameCube, the Nintendo WaveBird, however, was the first mainstream wireless controller for a console system that set the standard for future generations. Requiring two AA batteries, the WaveBird used radio frequency transmission, or RF, for its communication. The receiver connects to a controller port and provides a channel selection dial to match its frequency with the controller. This meant that multiple WaveBirds can be used together without any crosstalk or interference. Although at the time it may have seemed like a pointless feature, the GameCube was the first system to have a digital AV Out port. It wasn't until the PlayStation 3 released in 2006, five years after the GameCube, that included an HDMI port for digital AV Out. This is just another example of Nintendo's innovation and forward-thinking. The digital AV output allowed the use for component cables, which are very expensive to purchase, thanks to the low production numbers. But in 2019, there are several HDMI solutions that can be utilized, such as the Carby for $75 or the more expensive EON GC HDMI 2, great for gaming on a modern display or even for live streaming. Nintendo was never afraid to experiment with emulation and backward compatibility ideas. The Super Game Boy on the Super Nintendo was a peripheral that allowed the use of Game Boy games on the Super Nintendo. That same idea was applied to the GameCube in the form of the Game Boy Player: a hardware add-on that fits underneath the GameCube and connects to the parallel port. It enables Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges to be played. It also requires a boot-up disc to use the device. The hardware itself is nearly identical to a Game Boy Advance and there is no emulation used. Like other sixth generation systems at the time, the Nintendo GameCube was region-locked. Now in general, most of us probably haven't dealt with this issue as it was a mild annoyance at best, but if you traveled overseas to Japan for example and wanted to play some exclusive early titles, or wanted to take advantage of better price of games, this was not possible to do on a stock GameCube. The GameCube will simply not play different region discs on your North American GameCube, for example. The good news, however, is that you can easily work around this without too much trouble, and use a boot disc called a FreeLoader. This simply allows you to play imported games on your GameCube. Boot up with the disc, and place the different region discs into the drive, and you're off and running. You can still pick up FreeLoader discs pretty cheap these days. They are made by Datel, the maker of the Action Replay. Another way to get region-free games to load on your GameCube is to install a mod chip. The most popular mod chip that you can get for your GameCube today is called the Xeno GC. Now this is a very cheap and easy to pick up mod chip that you can get on eBay for about $5, and it's a fairly rudimentary six wire mod that anyone with intermediate soldering skills can get installed into their GameCube. So let's go ahead and install the Xeno GC mod chip into our GameCube and show you what it's capable of. So this is the Xeno GC mod chip. It's a fairly simple-to-install device, but there's a few things to be aware of. First of all, you need to open up your GameCube. In order to do this, you need a tri-wing screw driver with a 4.5 millimeter bit. Just unscrew all four screws from underneath the GameCube, turn it upright and lift the case off. It should come away nice and clean. Now, the next thing you want to do is unclip the front controller port cover from the case. Then, with a Phillips head screwdriver, remove the two screws on the circuit board to separate the controller port cover. On the left side of the GameCube, there's two screws holding the power connector fan assembly. Unscrew those, then at the front of the GameCube with a small Phillips head screw driver, remove the two metal brackets. Now go around the metal shielding and remove each of the remaining screws with a Phillips head screwdriver. There should be 12 in total. Now simply lift the drive mechanism, but don't force it. It should give way and separate easily from the main assembly. The mod chip will go on the underside of the CD mechanism, so we need to turn the drive upside down, and with a small Phillips head screwdriver remove each of the screws holding the metal shielding. So before we mod anything, the first thing we need to do is protect this laser. Because we're going to be turning this drive assembly upside down, we don't want the laser to be pushing on to the piece of wood here. I simply get a piece of paper and tape it down to protect the laser. As mentioned, we are going to be working on the underside of the board. Now to install the Xeno GC, you have two options: The first is the no wire method where you simply fit the mod chip in the correct position on the board, making sure you line up all six pins and simply solder into place. The problem with this method, however, is many if not most Xeno GCs you buy from eBay are clones, and very cheaply made, and there is no guarantee that all the points are even going to line up. So if this is the case, you can simply use a traditional six wire method, but I'm going to roll the dice and try the no wire method and see if it works. Not the cleanest job I've ever done, but I test each point with a multimeter and I'm pretty confident this will work. One of the coolest things about the Panasonic Q, which is the Japanese-only GameCube hardware and DVD combo that was developed exclusively by Panasonic in Japan, is that the controller ports are all illuminated. Now the cool part is you can perform the exact same mod onto your GameCube, and it's a fairly trivial and simple mod to do. Someone that has beginner to intermediate soldering skills can do this fairly easily. Let me show you how it's done. This mod involves installing four colored LEDs of your choice into the four controller ports. The simplest way to do this is to remove the security tabs of each of the four ports by using a pair of tweezers and pushing them up from inside the controller connector, then clip them away. Do this for each controller port. Now the reason why we want to do this is to allow for the LED lining to enter the controller port, otherwise it won't look very good. Now the next thing we need to do in order to attach LED lights to this board, we have to identify a +5 volt source and a ground. Now the good news is this mod has been done many many times before, and on each of the controller ports as you can see, we've got control port one, two, three, and four, this particular pin here is +5 and this is your ground for the first controller, this is +5 and this is ground for the second, this is +5 and this is ground for the third, this is +5 and this is ground for the fourth. Now simply connect up your LEDs to each of the +5 volts and ground source for each controller. In general you will need to use a 470 ohm resistor on the positive leg, but I cheated a little and I bought a packet of LEDs from ebay with the resistor already attached. Now once you've connected all four LEDs and you're confident that your connections are clean, wrap the led around to the front of the board and set them in the slots that we opened up from removing the security tabs in the first step. And finally, it's a good idea to hot glue each of the LEDs in place, but make sure when you hot glue, the LEDs are consistently set in the same spot on each controller. Now it's time to test everything out. Reattach the ribbon cable from the controller board to the main motherboard, then put everything back together and now we can have some fun with our mod chip and LED controller lights. [Heavy guitar and drums] With the LED mod in place, the next thing to do is test the Xeno GC mod chip and make sure that we installed it correctly. A simple test is to try a different region disk. I test a PAL region game, and it boots up just fine. We can't talk about mod chips without discussing homebrew. The Nintendo GameCube has some applications, emulators, and games available for it. The most well-known and widely used application is the all-in-one tool called Swiss. As the name suggests, it's the Swiss Army knife of applications with many features. You can boot any region GameCube game, and homebrew, from USB, SD cards, and more. You can set 16 by 9 widescreen for every single game, force games to run in NTSC or PAL screen modes, set games to load at 480p progressive scan even for those that don't support them, and there's so much more that Swiss can do that I couldn't possibly cover it all in this video. One area that I do want to touch on is the ability to use Swiss to boot homebrew from an SD card. With an SD flash memory card, we can install emulators and ROMs. You can also boot GameCube ISO images from SD card, too, but I just prefer to play originals. The GameCube lacked the memory and internal storage of the original Xbox, but that doesn't mean there wasn't some impressive stuff available for it. Here's a quick look at what's available: Of course, the Nintendo Wii took modding, homebrew, and emulators to the next level, and we're going to cover that in a future video, but the GameCube is such a great system to revisit and use in 2019. The system and games are still relatively cheap to buy, and there's a brilliant lineup of first and third party titles. We've seen some simple and easy to do mods to really open up the system, as well. The GameCube stands as one of the best systems that Nintendo has ever released, and one that I'm proud to own as part of my collection. And if you haven't got yours yet, maybe it's time that you did, too. Well guys, we're gonna leave it at that for this video. I want to hear your thoughts: What do you think about the Gamecube in 2019? Do you think it's still an awesome system, or do you think it's just me with my rose-tinted nostalgia glasses on? Now guys before I go, I do have an announcement: I will be giving away this Gameube that you saw me mod in this video to one lucky winner. I will be announcing a competition in the coming weeks. I was hoping that I'd have the competition ready for this video, but I still need a little bit more time. And before I go I want to wish everyone a safe and a happy 2019. We've got a big year of content coming up, so stick around for more videos. Thank you so much for watching, don't forget to Like and Subscribe, and I'll catch you guys in the next video. Bye for now!
I'm actually most of the way through this video as I came across this post.
I have a few GameCube kicking around, one with a chip but almost always play the GC games on a wii. I’ve been thinking about modding my Wii U and making it a central pre switch Nintendo console. Will I be loosing much if my main concerns are using original controls and the ability to use hdmi for video?
Man seeing that Gameboy Player hurts, I still have it attached but lost the disc after multiple moves.
Also definitely never gonna put a mod chip in a Gamecube, that looks hard after watching the vid, I'll just soft mod it hopefully.