Ultimate Gamecube (Picoboot, GBI, and more!)

(Posted: Monday, July 10, 2023)

Project Log

Diasassembly/PicoBoot

Honestly this wasn’t too bad. I mostly followed this guide, but honestly once I skipped through it enough, I could probably do this by memory now. The GameCube is a bit of an engineering marvel in its simplicity. After the security screws are out from the outside the rest is pretty easy peasy. We also found a tiny spider exoskeleton living underneat the drive assembly! I honestly left it all in there because that’s just a fun little story with it, and it wasn’t harming anything/was clearly stuck to the heat shield.

We got the PicoBoot soldered in fairly easily, only needing about ~5 solder points. What was a little jank was the wire lengths. We had no idea what the lengths should be, and therefore just had to stuff the Pico somewhere in the case.

So we got it all situated and turned it on, still booted to BIOS/Stock firmware. Cool. We closed it back up and turned it on and… nothing. Black screen/no output. I tried for about an hour or so checking the solder points and everything until I just decided to redo the whole mod to make sure all points were good and cool. What also clued me in to a possible solution was there troubleshooting tips. Mostly around a short happening on or around the heatsink, since two of the solder points lived under there. I ended up using some kapton tape on top of the area just to make sure there couldn’t be any shorts in between.

Somehow magically, the GC seemed to boot just fine! I ended up stuffing the Pico in and closing it up. After plugging in the SD2SP2 in the serial port on the bottom, it could load ISOs through Swiss just fine!

All in all, I might redo the wiring with longer wires, but even if I don’t I’m very happy with the results!

Game Boy Player

I found a Game Boy Player for super cheap because it did not include the boot up disc, which we do not need because we can get into Picoboot/Swiss to load up Game Boy Interface. After we put it on the SD card it can load GB/GBC/GBA cartridges and they look AMAZING on the Commodore 1702 monitor.

TODO

Custom Case