rob was here.

A week or two ago i decided that I would finally take the plunge and mod my gamecube. What will this mod do, you ask? Well, there are really two parts to my mod. First, I'm adding a qoob brand modchip. This involves soldering a little chip that I purchased to the gamecube's mainboard via 6 little wires. The purpose of adding a modchip is that it allows a sort of bypassing of the nintendo-brand bios and allowing the use of a 3rd party bios... Using a 3rd party bios allows you to do things that the nintendo bios doesn't let you do, like booting multi-region, back-up, and homebrew games or applications. Pretty much anything that one can rip, code or download is then playable by your gamecube. Since this blog is internet accessable, for legality reasons, let me state that i have no intention of running any unlegit programs...

;)..

anyways, where was I?.. Oh yes.. the second mod involves moving the entire internal hardware of the gamecube into a new case which is designed to use full sized dvd-r's instead of the mini sized disks that the gamecube normally takes. Let me point out that the eye (or laser) of the gamecube can still only mechanically move out as far as the maximum range on a mini-dvd, So you can still only fit around 1.5 gigs of relevant data on a disk. However, dvd-r's are more common and cheaper than using dvd-r-mini's, and thus are more expendable.

So let me begin.. I have an original DOL-001 gamecube from their first year.. This device has served me well since i picked it up 2nd hand in 2002. Here it is:



The very first step was, unexpectedly, the most difficult: Removing four screws out of the bottom of the original gamecube. Good gravy, was this amazingly difficult. Nintendo use their own custom screws ( a sort of funny octagon shape head) to prevent people from opening these things. I had the proper tool (or so i thought) ordered in with my replacement case. It took a good 2-3 hours to get the four screws out.. I ended up using a combination of using a hand screwdriver, a power screwdriver, swearing at it, prying with my fingers, prying with a flathead screwdriver, etc, etc.

Lets just say that, eventually, I got the four screws out and the top came off:



After this dreadful experience, i needed a beer.



and a nap.



Okay.. back to work i guess. The next step was to remove all the screws and latches keeping the optical drive mounted on top of the computer board. Not too bad; it came off easily enough.



with the optical drive removed from the assembly and put asside, the computer board was revealed. This is like reaching the tasty innards of a boston cream donut. Notice that big heat sink on the middle of the board. I had to remove that at one point when i did the soldering.. it was pretty difficult to remove, but a little muscle and twisting dislodged it.



I removed the computer board and put it aside. The next step was taking out everything from the base of the original case (blue) and installing it into my new case (green). This included metal plates, rubber feet, the power supply board, etc.



once i got the basic base-components over into the new base, I re-installed the computer board on top of it. This is where things got interesting.. I began scoping out the computer board for the best positioning of the modchip so the wiring I would have to add would be the least intrusive. I didn't have to worry too much though, the qoob sx is a tiny modchip and had lots of room to fit inside the case. Here is the modchip before the install:



Oddly enough, I am much more comfortable soldering and playing with the digital system of the machine that I am unscrewing screws and what not.. I soldered the modchip's wires onto the mainboard as per the instructions and verified i had no shorts with a multi-meter. Here's what it looks like after the install, 6 wires later..



After the modchip was installed, I re-sat the optical drive on top of the assembly and bolted it down. I also added all the junk i took off during the disassembly such as the cooling system (fan), and the front plate where the controllers plug in. The mod is pretty much done now.



I placed the top of the case on and screwed it in. The screws didn't go in very good (i swore a lot here as well).. I didnt screw them in all the way, as I plan on getting some similar sized phillips screws to replace these painful ones. Anyways, once it was all together, i decided to first test out an original game to make sure my gamecube still worked. I tried my favourite gamecube game: the legend of zelda: the wind waker:



And here it is, my gamecube still plays all my original games!! huzzah!!



I then tried a backup version of a game. No dice. After much confusion, i realized that the qoob chip's default bios doesn't support backup's out-of-the-box.. I had to download an updated bios of the qoob chip and reflash it. I burned the updated bios file to a dvd and put it in the gamecube. A message came up indicating it was updating the bios. After the update, i retried the backup:



Success! It worked. My cube is now 100% bonafide modified. Gravy!