Booting homebrew

There are several methods available to successfully boot homebrew on unmodified and modified Gamecubes. These methods include using a special bootdisc and memory card device, a loophole within an official Gamecube game title, a traditional modchip or a drive replacement modchip.

Unmodified Gamecube

Game Save Exploits

These require a memory card to place the hacked save game and a boot.dol converted to .gci format. Swiss is distributed as a bootable GCI. Need the help of an already homebrew able Gamecube, or a Wii (while RVL-001 is the easiest, RVL-101 and RVL-201 can have their GameCube ports soldered back in), modded or unmodded to first put such files on memcard.

• Animal Crossing
• BMX XXX
• FIFA 06
• FIFA 07
• FIFA 2002
• FIFA 2004
• FIFA 2005
• FIFA Street
• FIFA Street 2
• FIFA World Cup Germany 2006
• F-Zero GX
• Frogger Beyond
• James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
• NBA 2K3
• NBA Courtside 2002
• NBA Live 06
• NBA Live 2003
• NBA Live 2004
• NBA Live 2005
• NBA Street
• NBA Street V3
• NBA Street Vol. 2
• Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
• Pokémon Colosseum
• Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness
• Robotech: Battlecry
• Super Mario Sunshine (PAL only)
• Super Smash Bros. Melee
• Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2
• Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell
• Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 (NTSC-U only)
• Tony Hawk's Underground (NTSC-U only)
• True Crime: New York City
• True Crime: Streets of LA

End-of-Life Products

• SD load

Requires Action Replay 1.14b or below and an SD-Card adapter.

• Samson's bootloader

Tedious to set up and can get oftentimes annoying when loading homebrew, requires to be transferred onto the memory card (preferably using the PSOload method) alongside an injection of GCOS after putting in a cheat through an older revision of the Action Replay disc. Since then, it’s better advised to use the custom loader that comes with the latest package of Swiss which utilizes the same SD-Card adapter combo as the SD load method.

• MaxDrive Pro

Uses a region free bootdisc to load hombrew from included memory card device.

• SD Media Launcher

Offers out of the box homebrew support - always need the disc to boot it up. Comes with a flimsy SDGecko!

• PSOload

Requires an original copy of Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II and a Broadband Adapter.

Modified Gamecube

Active Products

• FlippyDrive solderless drive replacement

• GCLoader or CUBEODE solderless drive replacement

Very quick to boot backups and homebrew with Swiss as initial ISO.

• KunaiGC soldered IPL replacement

Very quick to boot backups and homebrew with Swiss on flash.

• PicoBoot soldered IPL replacement

• PicoLoader soldered / solderless drive replacement

• XenoGC or DuoQ soldered drivechip

Quick for booting backups and homebrew with a bootable disk of SDLoad or Swiss.

End-of-Life Products

• Viper GC soldered IPL replacement

Quick to boot backups and homebrew with SDLoad installed as plugin.

• Viper GC Extreme soldered IPL replacement

Very quick to boot backups and homebrew with Swiss on flash.

• Qoob SX / Qoob Pro soldered IPL replacement

Very quick to boot backups and homebrew with SDLoad / Swiss on flash.

• Wiikey Fusion / WASP Fusion / WODE soldered drive replacement

Quick to boot backups and homebrew with Swiss.iso and SDGecko.

Very quick to boot backups and homebrew with Swiss as initial ISO for WiiKey Fusion / WASP Fusion or initial ISO for WODE.