I've wanted to hardmod my GameCube for over 10 years... Today was the day!

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I got my Swiss disc, SD2SP2 adapter, and my Xeno 2 chip from eBay for just a little over $12 USD, and they arrived today in my mailbox. And since my cube is one of the late DOL-001 units without the SP2 port, I wired that bitch directly into the header holes on the motherboard, and stealthed it into the SP2 port compartment. Then I soldered in the Xeno chip, and did the laser pot tweak. My laser is sitting at a comfy 208K. Boots directly into the Swiss disc from cold boot. All games load fine from the 64GB micro SD card. Formatted as FAT32 with 64K cluster size. Loving that all my favorite games are now just a few button presses away without resorting to emulation. Even my Gameboy games play fine via GBI at 240p using the GB Player. Was fun to finally buckle down and mod one of my GameCubes, as it was long overdue. I changed the clock battery too while I was in there, since it had just over 1 volt left in it. I'll change out the LED for a white one later.

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KleinesSinchen
jeffyTheHomebrewer said:
Nice! Any benefits to hardmodding aside from less wear and tear on the disc drive though?
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How about the possibility to load your games from SD as such? No burning DVD-R, no searching for discs – burned or legit. No switching discs. The fun of expanding functionality.

Arguably GC-Loader ODE is even better, but expensive and hard to get. I've soldered in a XenoGC as well. Fortunately my consoles have the serial port 2 – didn't need soldering SD2SP2.
 
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jeffyTheHomebrewer
KleinesSinchen said:
How about the possibility to load your games from SD as such? No burning DVD-R, no searching for discs – burned or legit. No switching discs. The fun of expanding functionality.

Arguably GC-Loader ODE is even better, but expensive and hard to get. I've soldered in a XenoGC as well. Fortunately my consoles have the serial port 2 – didn't need soldering SD2SP2.
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I know that you can load games from SD, that's what I meant by "less wear and tear on the disc drive". Is there anything else you can get through a regular hardmod, or..?
 
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N10A
jeffyTheHomebrewer said:
I know that you can load games from SD, that's what I meant by "less wear and tear on the disc drive". Is there anything else you can get through a regular hardmod, or..?
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homebrew, mods, and piracy I suppose. Although I'm not too familliar on if there's much of a gamecube game modding scene.
 
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jeffyTheHomebrewer
N10A said:
homebrew, mods, and piracy I suppose. Although I'm not too familliar on if there's much of a gamecube game modding scene.
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I know there seems to have been a homebrew scene back in the day, but now it seems like it's moreso about the Wii now.
As for the newer consoles it feels more like homebrew is just tools more than it is cool original games or at least ports of other games. Feels like the only perk to homebrewing aside from maybe customization is just piracy and maybe modding the games you have
 

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