gc-forever - Gamecube/Wii Forums

Ok I've looked around and it seems the only device ever used on this port was the official GBA device for playing GBA games on the GameCube. The pinout of this port was also available via an easy Google search and is documented to some degree.

So I'm curious if anyone has ever attempted or will attempt to use this port for a custom device like a hard-drive/SD adapter? This port has the most bandwidth available to it and might support DMA (though I am no coder/hardware expert to say for sure).

Is this port accessible at all from homebrew software? If not then I suppose booting/accessing anything from this port would be impossible. Though it would be interesting if someone attempted to build an "expansion pack" like device to extend the GC's memory in a manner similar to the N64's expansion pack. The port is on the same bus as the A-Ram so it would run at the same speed as the A-Ram which is what I think most homebrew uses for memory space correct?

I assume the other two serial ports have a much slower access speed and might not be much better then using the memory card slot. This is just judging by how horridly slow the BBA is on Serial Port 1. A ISO dump from Swiss is super slow through the BBA. It's a wonder people ever had to put up with this thing back in the days of the PSO Exploit.

Someone fill me in on this. It would be interesting if someone could use this port for something.

Yes that would be interesting to give the cube a bit of a kick with more power. It could be potential useful for some of the CPU intensive media players and cubeSX and cube64 for example

Apache Thunder wrote: Is this port accessible at all from homebrew software? If not then I suppose booting/accessing anything from this port would be impossible.

Actually, yes there has been some homebrew alternatives to the Gameboy player software called GBI. Other homebrew should be able to access it.

CathodeRayBlues wrote:

Apache Thunder wrote: Is this port accessible at all from homebrew software? If not then I suppose booting/accessing anything from this port would be impossible.

Actually, yes there has been some homebrew alternatives to the Gameboy player software called GBI. Other homebrew should be able to access it.

Closed source

The GBI source code is completely unnecessary to access the high speed port though. It's literally the same as ARAM.

novenary wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 16, 2018 11:53 am

The GBI source code is completely unnecessary to access the high speed port though. It's literally the same as ARAM.

Sorry to resurrect an old thread… for my own curiosity, I’m trying to understand more about how the parallel port and the Game Boy Player work, and I’m having trouble finding much in the way of documentation on it besides connector pinouts. The sources I find say that the Game Boy player uses Audio RAM. Help me to understand—does the Game Boy Player send GBA video and audio data to ARAM that’s already on board the GameCube? Or does the Game Boy Player have its own set of ARAM which the Cube pulls the GBA video and audio data from?

Are there any more in-depth documents detailing the communication between the Cube and the Player?