Load Games for Gamecube with SD card?

Klaymator14 · Post by **Klaymator14** » Sat May 03, 2008 11:48 pm

Ok, well, I am thinking of making a Gamecube Portable, and Im new to this site, Hi People! And My question was...well, say If I completely remove the optical drive from the GCp and I was able to load the games through SD instead, it would save up a lot of room and power. Would this be possible? Maybe thorugh the SD Gecko or USB Gecko?

EDIT: On Second thought, If I install the Qoob Modchip and purchase an SD Card Launcher, and download the SD Loader .dol file, patch my SD Card with SDload then put my game on the card, and load it through Qoob, and done! Will that work? I got the idea from this forum, http://www.tehskeen.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3644

WhatULive4 · Post by **WhatULive4** » Sun May 04, 2008 1:02 pm

If you could get rid of the optical drive it would save A LOT of space. It is about 2" thick. If this was possible, it would definitely take less power. I don't think anyone here is very experienced in this field. If you find anything more, be sure to keep us updated!

Joes2Silly · Post by **Joes2Silly** » Sun May 04, 2008 1:17 pm

Sounds like a plan. Only problem is the size of gamecube roms....

GoldenfrankO · Post by **GoldenfrankO** » Sun May 04, 2008 1:18 pm

Klaymator14 wrote:Ok, well, I am thinking of making a Gamecube Portable, and Im new to this site, Hi People! And My question was...well, say If I completely remove the optical drive from the GCp and I was able to load the games through SD instead, it would save up a lot of room and power. Would this be possible? Maybe thorugh the SD Gecko or USB Gecko?

EDIT: On Second thought, If I install the Qoob Modchip and purchase an SD Card Launcher, and download the SD Loader .dol file, patch my SD Card with SDload then put my game on the card, and load it through Qoob, and done! Will that work? I got the idea from this forum, http://www.tehskeen.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3644

Your correct. With a Mod chip you can use SD loader. You have to have that certain .dol file along with the.iso game files.

Joes2Silly · Post by **Joes2Silly** » Sun May 04, 2008 1:52 pm

Could this be of some use?

WhatULive4 · Post by **WhatULive4** » Sun May 04, 2008 2:01 pm

No, that would be using an SD cart as a IDE drive. Untill an IDE adapter is made for the gamecube, it would be no use.

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Sun May 04, 2008 2:26 pm

I believe that the SD Loader will only work with 1GB and smaller SD cards, due to it using the MMC SPI protocol interface. You might check around and see if it can address larger than 1GB MMC cards.

There was a project linked on these forums dealing with making a CF to Gamecube adapter that would connect where the drive was. I believe that they got it working, but I never followed up and seen if they released the adapter or schematics and programming to the public. With one of those you could easily grab a 16GB CF card and store your games on it.

Edit:
Found the page I mentioned: http://www.tehskeen.com/forums/showthre ... 040&page=5
Unfortunately, it seems it wasn't released (at least according to the last post of the thread of the 12th of last month)

Klaymator14 · Post by **Klaymator14** » Sun May 04, 2008 6:28 pm

Hold on, You say the SD Card Launcher cant use more than 1 GB cards? Well, what about the SD Gecko? Would that work with larger cards?
-Blayke

soundwave · Post by **soundwave** » Sun May 04, 2008 8:24 pm

I'm not seeing anything about loading .iso's from an SD card, just .dol's or .elf's. Googling "GCN SD ISO Loader" did nothing for me. You sure you can do this? And are you sure you aren't mixing up .iso with .dol? The latter has nothing to do with actual GCN games.

Klaymator14 · Post by **Klaymator14** » Sun May 04, 2008 9:00 pm

Well...ok, but what if you use this? http://forums.maxconsole.net/showthread ... =4&t=40387

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Mon May 05, 2008 12:21 pm

Klaymator14 wrote:Hold on, You say the SD Card Launcher cant use more than 1 GB cards? Well, what about the SD Gecko? Would that work with larger cards?
-Blayke

The SD Gecko just connects the pins for the MMC/SD card to the GC memory card port. SDLoad is what does the magic. I'm still not sure what the maximum capacity of SDLoad is, but the Datel SD Media Launcher can address up to 4GB SD (not SDHC) cards, but some applications can't use 4GB cards according to this thread: http://www.tehskeen.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6377

Klaymator14 · Post by **Klaymator14** » Mon May 05, 2008 6:02 pm

So it can work with some Gamecube games, but not all? Well...if it can work with the games I like, then I would probably be ok with it.

-Blayke

WhatULive4 · Post by **WhatULive4** » Mon May 05, 2008 6:28 pm

Would it still work if it couldn't detect the disk drive? Has anyone tried it without the disk drive attached. If you could make copies of all your games and put them on sd cards, then it would cut down the size of a portable quite a bit.

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Mon May 05, 2008 9:13 pm

Klaymator14 wrote:So it can work with some Gamecube games, but not all? Well...if it can work with the games I like, then I would probably be ok with it.
-Blayke

I think the thread was talking about homebrew, not sure how well comercial games via that loader work. I haven't played with the SDLoader much, since Nintendo made it stop working on un-modded Wii.

I suppose you could keep around a 1GB card or two for things that don't work on a 4GB card. You could probably fit 2 or 3 games of small size on a 1GB card. Most games are probably small. However, I'd want to play Sky of Arcadia Legends, which is at least 2GB (Dreamcast version spans 2 1GB discs, and the GC version has slightly more stuff in it). Well... I forgot these cards have dropped in price, a little over $20 shipped is certainly riskable; $16.99 + 5.99 on Newegg(linking isn't working right). Then, keep a couple of $12 1GB SD cards on hand for the homebrew that doesn't work with the larger cards.

Klaymator14 · Post by **Klaymator14** » Mon May 05, 2008 10:06 pm

Well If i take a .gcm file, which is the raw game file for Gamecube, convert it to .dol, load it on the SD card, and use this tool which compresses the dol file a lot, which the Gamecube decrypts and runs without taking up more space on the card, and thats when i will probably be able to put huge file games like the one you mentioned, and it probably will work. Now all we need to see is if this works without the optical drive plugged in. This would be a big improvement, as the drive is huge!
-Blayke

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Load Games for Gamecube with SD card?

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