gc-forever - Gamecube/Wii Forums

Dragoon wrote:

Abb_eliten wrote:

Dragoon wrote:That's the crazynation DI(N)Y GC HDD project

Edit: BTW is buyfromtaobao.com a ripoff? because 180 yen = €1,57 and they charge me €28,62...

Could it be Chinese yuan instead of yen?

180 yuan is around €20.

Got my Fusion today. Works perfectly

Don't know if you already know this,
but I noticed you actually don't need to feed pin 29 with 1.9 volts to get the Fusion to load the bootloader.

Just a switch between pin 29 and ground is enough

Only with Fusion, that is

Yeah, I noticed a very weird thing on that site, they say yuan with a yen symbol (¥).
Have you ordered anything from there? I want to know if it is yuan or yen, because that makes a great difference :p

They must have mistaken Japanese Yen and Chinese Yuan. In fact, they are different.

Aha, if it was in yen I was able to buy it now :p
guess I have to wait for some more pocketmoney :p
And I gotta find some work...

Glad to hear things are working for you now Bearteam. I will have the chance to test it all out soon myself. My wiikeys should be here Monday or Tuesday as Foundmy finally got off their asses when I e-mailed them directly instead of using their ticket system and started talking about fraudulent CC charges... My protoadvantage connectors also finally arrived today after almost a month. Not sure i'm going to recommend ordering from them again, being that its so expensive and they are slow as molasses.

Anyway I'm curious to see how the whole pin 29 thing is working with the wiikey and if the 1.9v is even needed at all. Emu and Abb, are you guys using a on/off switch to control this signal or just a regular momentary tact switch to activate the loader?

Edit: Got to looking at my protoadvantage connectors and they soldered those stupid pins on the back of them even after I specified for them not to. While attempting to remove said pins some of the traces on the board ripped up. While I think I will still be able to use the connectors its definitely not recommended to order from these guys.

Ashen wrote:Glad to hear things are working for you now Bearteam. I will have the chance to test it all out soon myself. My wiikeys should be here Monday or Tuesday as Foundmy finally got off their asses when I e-mailed them directly instead of using their ticket system and started talking about fraudulent CC charges... My protoadvantage connectors also finally arrived today after almost a month. Not sure i'm going to recommend ordering from them again, being that its so expensive and they are slow as molasses.

Anyway I'm curious to see how the whole pin 29 thing is working with the wiikey and if the 1.9v is even needed at all. Emu and Abb, are you guys using a on/off switch to control this signal or just a regular momentary tact switch to activate the loader?

Edit: Got to looking at my protoadvantage connectors and they soldered those stupid pins on the back of them even after I specified for them not to. While attempting to remove said pins some of the traces on the board ripped up. While I think I will still be able to use the connectors its definitely not recommended to order from these guys.

That kinda sucks :/, with the pins

I'm using a regular on/off switch right now, as pin 29 needs to be grounded in order to be able to read disc images.
I will probably get me one of those nc/no switches instead, or an inverted tact. Though I don't think they are very common.

When starting my cube, the switch is set to "on".
In order to load the Fusion boot image, I just flick the switch off and then on again while in the menu.

I don't even use 1.9v and it's all good. I start up with PIN 29 Not connected, then flip a switch to GND it and leave it like that for the entire time.

I made more testing this afternoon.
It seems that the compatibility is not good, many games hang when the GC logo shows. When the blue LED light on WIIKEY keep shining before GC logo, the game will hang. If the light flashes for sevral times, mmm, the game will pass the logo successfully and run perfectly.
Here the list of games I tested:

BATMAN:DARK TOMORROW (both NTSC-U and NTSC-J work)
RESIDENT EVIL 2 (both NTSC-U and NTSC-J work)
Generation of Chaos Exceed(NTSC-J,works well)
varanoir(NTSC-J,works well)

the games below all hang on the logo:

Chibi-Robo!
Resident Evil Disc1
IKARUGA

bearteam wrote:the games below all hang on the logo:

Chibi-Robo!
Resident Evil Disc1
IKARUGA

Both Resident Evil and Ikaruga has streaming audio,
could it have something to do with that?

No idea about Chibi-Robo! though...

Bearteam, just for the sake of trying. Wire up a regular on/off switch between pin 29 and ground. Ditch the 1.9v line altogether. See if you get any different results.

If that does not work try wiring pin 29 straight to ground and wire the on/off switch between pin23(wii) and pin12(gc) this is the GC lid open/closed signal.

Ashen wrote:Bearteam, just for the sake of trying. Wire up a regular on/off switch between pin 29 and ground. Ditch the 1.9v line altogether. See if you get any different results.

No, the results are the same as before:(
I am sure the ISOs I used are good becasuse they are Redumped. I downloaded them from here: NO ISO LINKS!
I made some testing last night.
Before those games hanged on the screen, I kept pressing A button, then I could enter the Game Selection. It showed "Reading Disc" .I think that's why those games hang. Maybe it's because Wiikey could not emulate those ISOs correctly on GC , or even on Wii. I don't own a Wii and I can't test those games on Wii.
I built an ISO with Swiss 0.1r33 and Disney Soccer, and the Swiss booted successfully. I could see the Disney Soccer.gcm in the DVD list, but when I tried to boot the game, I got nothing but black screen. Hoping Emu_kidid could fixed it.
Here's my ECID of my black GC.
IPL:NTSC Revision 1.0
DVD:20070213(of course, it's fake. Since I removed the DVD drive and this must be generated by Wiikey)
ECID:8D960080:00234B8B:8E4D30A0

Ashen wrote:If that does not work try wiring pin 29 straight to ground and wire the on/off switch between pin23(wii) and pin12(gc) this is the GC lid open/closed signal.

I will try it this weekend, but I don't think it may work.

try a region mod and see what your results are.

Dragoon wrote:try a region mod and see what your results are.

I have tried it already, but no luck.

bearteam how did you build the image with swiss + a game, the bootable disc creator?

emu_kidid wrote:bearteam how did you build the image with swiss + a game, the bootable disc creator?

GC Bootable disc (creator) GUI 0.1.2 RC3

Oh what was I thinking, yes this won't work because it would be trying to use the Gamecube set offset command when it should be using the Wii one. I can add this support and test it.

emu_kidid wrote:Oh what was I thinking, yes this won't work because it would be trying to use the Gamecube set offset command when it should be using the Wii one. I can add this support and test it.

That would be great!

I have done some serious testing and have made the following discoveries:

The gamecube 3.4v line can accept a much higher voltage. I have put 3.4v to 5.0v through it and everything works fine. Amp draw is about the same on every voltage I've put through. 0.8A to be exact.

As explained before the 5v line is not needed. The memorycards only use the 3.4v line. I have however not tested a memorycard with a higher voltage. That will be tested soon.

The controller will also work with voltages from 3.4v to 5.0v. You can connect the 5v rumble line to the same controller voltage input. That way when you have a small 3v rumble motor you can have a decent rumble in game.

The wiikey which also uses the 3.4v line can also accept higher voltages. I have also put through 3.4v to 5.0v and it still works properly. This also means you can rewire the 5v line from the disc connector to the 3.3v line on the wiikey. Making it connect without extra wires to the discdrive port. If anybody could make a little pcb they could make things allot easier for people who can't solder that well.

Now the whole idea of all these tests are that you can run the gamecube with one 3.7v battery and one regulator. As the gamecubes 3.4v line can have higher voltages the battery can be connected directly. All that's needed is a regulator to output 1.9v which can handle a 6-7 amp draw. This one for example (PTH04T240F)


I also did some game testing and have found out the that you CAN play region games not of your region. I have connected a PAL gamecube to the wiikey switch in PAL mode with the dipswitches and was able to play allot of USA games. Some games just show up with a black screen after the gamecube logo boot but many games I've tried work. The video output isn't always that good because of the way the PAL gamecube video chip handels the resolution. Some games won't fill the whole screen but hey it's better than not beeing able to play out of region games at all. This will also work on USA games with PAL games as far as I know. That has not been tested though so let's keep it open for now.

Great findings!
Very interesting.

Wow... That is really awesome Zen. Thx for doing all the testing. I may just change my plans now. 2 3.7v @ 10,000mah will give a better battery life than 1 7.4v 5000mah for sure. I'll have to run the numbers to be sure though.

Only 1 thing though zen. Can you post pics of where you connect video and audio to now. Bypassing all the audio amps and stuff?

Edit: guess i need to test those screens @ 3.7v now >:)

zenloc,

Those USA games that you say are working are simply working because they don't mind the PAL mode - the ones that black screen do care. Should be able to get around this in Swiss once I add support or if the wiikey dudes fix up their GC "full region free" patches to work on a GC.

Yeah that's what I thought. Hope Swiss isn't too difficult to port to the wiikey.

Ashen I'll post pics of the video/audio pinout tomorrow.

this thread is full of awesome!

Got my Wiikeys yesterday I'm having some odd issues though. It seems to be along the same lines as the trouble that bearteam is/was having. Only worse.

1. The eject switch acts oddly. Before I updated to 1.5 it worked fine. I'd switch on the system and it would autoload the bootloader in the "disc Channel" and I could launch it but since it wasn't updated it couldn't read the SD card properly. Updated to 1.5 on the GC fine and now it does not autoload the loader on boot and every time I press the eject switch it freezes the GC. ONLY if I press it RIGHT after boot before the cube spins up does it work correctly and not freeze the GC.

2. Every single iso i've tried to load hangs at the same point bearteam described. I cant even get 1 game to load properly

Here's the av pinout: (green is ground)


Here's a little teaser of my gamecubepocket.

Pics here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2 ... af59f910d8
Vid here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hCgen5N5j8

As seen in the pics the cut board fits into a psp 1000 case. It also fits inside a psp 2000 case but that's too thin. The psp 1000 case might need to be a little thicker too due to the heatsink and batteries.

Note that if you cut the mobo this much you will have to rewire some small components for the controllers and memorycards. Once I get it done I will try to make a little guide. Also there are allot of components on the gamecube board which are not used I will also add that to the guide once done.


@Ashen: You are sure you have the region set to the correct console region. PAL wiikey - PAL gamecube - PAL backup?? same for NTSC. My wiikey sometimes autoloads in the disc channel and sometimes it doesn't. Not exactly sure why though but I wouldn't worry about it. Also check the wiikey settings and make sure it is set to play gc backups and region free.

My iso's are wiped gcm files renamed to iso. Then when added to the sd card with wbfs manager it will convert them to 1.36gb. I have not yet encountered a game it will not play so there must be something wrong with your setup. Try to shorted the wires. The wiikey is picky if the wires are too long.

Ashen wrote:Got my Wiikeys yesterday I'm having some odd issues though. It seems to be along the same lines as the trouble that bearteam is/was having. Only worse.

1. The eject switch acts oddly. Before I updated to 1.5 it worked fine. I'd switch on the system and it would autoload the bootloader in the "disc Channel" and I could launch it but since it wasn't updated it couldn't read the SD card properly. Updated to 1.5 on the GC fine and now it does not autoload the loader on boot and every time I press the eject switch it freezes the GC. ONLY if I press it RIGHT after boot before the cube spins up does it work correctly and not freeze the GC.

2. Every single iso i've tried to load hangs at the same point bearteam described. I cant even get 1 game to load properly

2.Try Resident Evil 2(NTSC-U). It works for me.