Cross post from gc-forever : http://www.gc-forever.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=2547
I wanted to run homebrew with whatever hardware I had lying around so I grabbed my unused Raspberry Pi and a bare metal tutorial, and set out to make a XenoGC clone. That modchip allows to play burned discs and imports on the Cube. Since it doesn't have code signature you can also burn homebrew and play it on hardware.
Have some pics.
CN302 debug connector under the DVD controller board with wires attached :
I tapped into the 5V line on the motherboard to power the Pi :
The wire harness comes outside the back through holes I'd made for a previous audio jack mod. I used a connector from a floppy drive ribbon cable to attach it to the Pi :
And here's the finished product. I have a 2043 block memory card in slot A and a 32GB SD in slot B to load games and homebrew from :
I should try to write some software for the Cube now. :D
Source and schematics attached on GC forever cause it doesn't fit in the limit here. I hope you like it.
Awesome mod! I should get a pi some day. Perhaps when I run out of projects :p
Awesome mod!
/me wishes he had a GC now.
Welp the RPi is a bit overkill for this as the original chip uses an Atmega8L but it works. :P
And thanks. :)
Quote from: Streetwalrus on November 30, 2014, 03:07:45 PM
Welp the RPi is a bit overkill for this as the original chip uses an Atmega8L but it works. :P
And thanks. :)
That was actually what I wanted to say : isn't it a bit overkill?
(Atmega8L... Aren't these the Arduino chips?)
Arduino uses ATmega328/168. Not sure if ATmega8L have been used.
Wow this looks interesting. I am glad you cross-posted this on calc forums for us to see. :) I wonder if GC homebrew is popular? You could write some games or emulators for it. :).
Also I don't know if it's due to the shopping mall wifi but your pictures took 2 minutes to load. O.O
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on November 30, 2014, 05:24:04 PM
I wonder if GC homebrew is popular?
There is the Wii for that, it's more powerful, retrocompatible with GameCube and has a
bighomebrew[/i] scene, big enough to have RetroArch (http://www.libretro.com/) ported on these. (Yeah, realtime rewinding is rad!).
True but what about Gamecube-only owners? :P
Well the Wii homebrew scene started with the GC. A lot of homebrew is actually cross compatible as long as you modify some things. :)
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on November 30, 2014, 05:24:04 PM
Also I don't know if it's due to the shopping mall wifi but your pictures took 2 minutes to load. O.O
Yeah lol public wifis are slow, the pics are like 8 Mpx. :P
Ah ok lol. I thought you meant that because the Wii exists we shouldn't do any GC homebrew, which would be a bit ironic considering you hack the console yourself :P
Also yeah sometimes public wifi can be 10 mbps over here but it depends where and it's often unstable.
Yeah I dabbled a bit with Wii homebrew back in the days, I heard it's pratically the same as GC homebrew (and probably WiiU homebrew too), but since the GC only have a mini-DVD drive and no SD card or Internet, it's kind of harder to get your homebrew on, I mean, it's not as easy as loading a defective savestate on your SD card since there's no SD card.
Yeah I guess. Also lol I was always wondering if the GC had any disk space before (even though I knew if it did it would be very limited). And yeah I had forgotten that the GC used mini-DVDs. I wonder why Nintendo took so long before finally using a common format... <_< (although maybe it was to fight piracy)
They still aren't using common format : for Wii U it seems they use a slightly different blu-ray format. :p
Quote from: Juju on December 01, 2014, 02:57:14 AM
Yeah I dabbled a bit with Wii homebrew back in the days, I heard it's pratically the same as GC homebrew (and probably WiiU homebrew too), but since the GC only have a mini-DVD drive and no SD card or Internet, it's kind of harder to get your homebrew on, I mean, it's not as easy as loading a defective savestate on your SD card since there's no SD card.
You can actually use SD cards on the GC but you need an adapter like I use. Also it has that ethernet module (and you can even GDB over the network with it) though it's kinda pricey on ebay.
Quote from: Eiyeron on December 01, 2014, 07:14:40 AM
They still aren't using common format : for Wii U it seems they use a slightly different blu-ray format. :p
Yeah lol that's part of the copy protection (at least on the GC and Wii). Here's an interesting article on how it works on there : http://debugmo.de/2008/11/anatomy-of-an-optical-medium-authentication/
What my mod does is that it detects if you have a regular DVD in there and makes the firmware switch to that format instead. Provided you can write to the burst cut area somehow, you could actually make discs that the console accepts if you modify a DVD burner. And that's exactly what Datel did for the ActionReplay, Freeloader etc.
Hey guys, I know this thread is a tad old, but I was wondering if you could help me out. I really like this idea, but I haven't had much success. Is there any way I can get some more detailed instructions for the RPi SD card setup? Any help is very much appreciated!
Heya and welcome here. :) I myself cannot help but hopefully
@Streetwalrus might pass by and offer some, since he modded his Gamecube. In any case, good luck!
Setting up the SD card is pretty simple. You need to set up raspbian like usual then you can replace the kernel.img on the sd card with the one I attached (the compiled code).
If you succeed you should be able to boot burnt game backups or homebrew like Swiss (http://www.gc-forever.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=1375) and then boot games off of an SD card provided you have an adapter. GC-forever forums are full of gurus and that's where I learnt to do all this so I owe them this success and if you need more advanced help that's also where you should ask. ;)
Thanks for your replies! :)
I'm going to try reinstalling Raspian, then replacing the kernel img. I'm also going to try some different media for my backups.
Cool. Be sure to give feedback, I'd like to know how well it works for you.
Ok, so I've spent the past couple of days tinkering and still no dice. I've tried the mod on a couple different game cubes and tried different releases of Raspbian. By booting into Raspbian normally, I was able to confirm that I am getting feedback from the GameCube, because the data values of the connected pins would change when I turned the GameCube on or off.
I've attached a pic of my sd card setup. Any ideas on what might be going on?
I have no idea. The Pi-side pinout should be independent on the revision. What are you trying to boot ? Fyi the chip should behave just like a xenogc (http://www.gc-forever.com/wiki/index.php?title=XenoGC) so try holding start on powerup with a disc inside the console (try an original first). Also you should hear the disc spin up, stop then start again during boot. The act/ok led on the pi itself should turn on to indicate it's working then back off. One last thing, the lid detector switch should be in the closed position or the drive will not initialize.
Btw the raspbian version doesn't matter as my "kernel" completely overrides it.
Hey sorry I never got back to giving you feedback. I eventually determined that it was my soldering job that was to blame. The hack works quite well now. Thanks for the post!
Awesome to hear :D
Also I think Street :walrii: started doing Gamecube modding again a week ago.
He has, he wants to make another thing with a FPGA or something.
How do I rig this up for the DOL-CPU-10? the one supplied is for the revision models I have the earliest one.
So it's not possible then?
@Streetwalrus might know how. It can take a while before he replies, though.
Alright, thanks.
The motherboard shouldn't matter. You'll need to find different 5v and GND point for yours though. These should actually be on the DVD board as well. Probe around with a multimeter to find them (yes with power on).
And cool to hear Enaz. ^.^
Streetwalrus but when I look at the board from the back it doesn't look like yours so I don't know where to pin the raspberry.
Or at the very least I don't see it.
Please don't double post, it's against the rules. There's an edit button for a reason.
That said, did you remove the metal cover below the DVD drive ? The board you have to solder most wires to is in there.
Oh! My bad I was looking at the wrong board!
That's what I was thinking. :P Have fun.
Question: Are there different hardware revisions for the GameCube? For example, I think I recall some NES consoles that lacked the RCA jacks on the side and some SNES boards were a bit different. Was it the case on the Gamecube and could it prevent Streetwalrus mod from working on older or newer models or NTSC consoles (since his is PAL)?
Yeah there are quite a few different motherboards and DVD controllers. They're mostly compatible tho.
The only big differences are on video output tho, the rest is the same.
Ok thanks. I was a bit worried since some console mods tend to only work in one region or hardware revision.
Nah all modchip work on all boards (or almost, some Wii modchip that works in the GC doesn't like very early BIOSes).
Is there anywhere else I can pin gpio9? I pulled on the wire when my dog jumped on the table. The gold piece was stripped from the gamecube board
Yeah there are extra pads right next to the connector, just use a multimeter to find it.
Thanks, I found them but It's not loading up Xenogc. The pi lights up and "tries" to patch through when I use a burned copy but I get nothing. ACT lights up on boot and when I insert a copy of too.
Does the disc spin up ? It's supposed to start spinning, accelerate, stop and start again. If the ACT led doesn't turn off it means it could prepare the drive but not upload the patch.
Also did you put the top cover back on ? There's a switch on the drive to check whether the lid is closed. If it's not pushed down it won't work. :P
It starts (ACT lights up), stops (ACT lights down), restarts spinning(ACT lights up again), spins for awhile and either gives me an "insert a gamecube disc". Yeah, I noticed the switch to the right, I just put my e-tape on it to hold it down.
If I press start from boot, it doesn't show me the version or anything. I have 2 different SD card, one with raspbian and the other with arch linux. Both have the kernel.img and both do the same thing.
That's odd. Seems like it can't read the disc and the drive gets reset. Did you try an original to see if that still boots ? The drive should show the same behavior regardless.
The original runs just fine on it. I tried resident evil the original and it runs.
Then there's a problem with your disc that's causing the drive to reset. Trying something else to make sure it's not the modchip : hold start while the gamecube boots, it should show a special menu.
How long do I hold it? I tried holding it from the start and nothing appears.
Could it be a bad copy even though the version is not loading up?
Before the gc logo fades out and the game starts, you can release it after it faded.
I should mention that this will cause the chip to upload more stuff to the gamecube so the led should turn on another time to indicate that it's doing that.
Nada, the version won't load up or any of the backups but everything else works fine. Idk where to look now, I've checked the soldering and the power, I've swapped out the card x3 already.
If you get to the menu then it's definitely not your soldering nor the code. Either your dvd drive is failing or your discs are crap. See this : http://www.gc-forever.com/wiki/index.php?title=Laser_Tuning
Noooooooo I feel like it's going to be the dvd drive or it would load the version up.
I'll clean it and report back if it changes anything.
Get on the chat, I'll try to see what I can do.
Edit : actually, not tonight. Going to bed now.
Err my earlier message didn't go though apparently. Well, thanks for the help, I got the games to load up by messing with the pot. None of them really worked, RE Remake and Metroid Prime got in to the game but always crashed. :P
Could it be due to being the wrong region? I forgot if playing different region games is possible on the GameCube due to different TV signal.
All the games I downloaded were American I'm still messing with the pot setting and we'll see if it goes though eventually.
It's exactly the problem I'm having, the GameCube is struggling with reading the discs. I gave up after a while since swiss + SD adapter is so much more convenient.
How large can the SD card be for the Gamecube? I remember that with the 84+ USB8x app, they couldn't be larger than a certain amout of megabytes.
There's no limit to the size. The largest cards currently sold are 128GB, so you can use that.
You can actually buy 512Gb sd cards... for only €729.00 O.O (about $797 usd)
such moneys O.o Theres a 1 terabyte usb stickfor less tho.
Surprises me actually. Most usb sticks consist of a micro sd inside a housing with a small onverter
The smaller the storage medium, the higher the price I guess. (unless it's from TI)
I guess they sell air? :P
No but they are so greedy that they attempted to sell TI-Nspire CX slidecases separately when the calc came out IIRC. There were even jokes about how they would eventually start selling the calc buttons separately as well.
I'm sorry for the necrobump, but I'm interested in this but imgrush doesn't seem to be up anymore, and therefor the pics in your post don't work. Would you be able to reupload them elsewhere if possible? I would have PM'd you but I'm not allowed to. Thanks.
Heya and welcone here. Hopefuy
@Streetwalrus can help you :)
You don't need those pics, everything's in the zip over at gc forever.
For the record, I don't have those pics anymore unfortunately. This mod is a dirty hack that I put together out of boredom. You really should consider getting a proper xenogc instead, they're a few dollars on ebay or aliexpress or whatever else.
Ah got it, thank you. I am planning on getting a XenoGC but until then I'm going to try this, as I have like 3 extra RasPi's just laying around doing nothing. I know they're basically free for what you get out of them, but they generally all come from China and take a while to ship.
Thanks again, didn't notice that zip at GC Forever