GameCube DD - possible method of making it SLIMMER...

Includes PS2, Xbox 1, GameCube (but not the Phantom Game Console)

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Re: GameCube DD - possible method of making it SLIMMER...

Post by eagle5953 » Thu Jun 24, 2010 8:13 am

Young Frankenstein. Watch it.

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Re: GameCube DD - possible method of making it SLIMMER...

Post by OzOnE » Thu Jun 24, 2010 9:33 am

Ohhh, that. It's been many years since I watched that.

I like Blazing Saddles, Spaceballs, and other Mel Brooks stuff, but The Producers (new version) was terrible IMHO.

Gene Wilder is a genius though. "What, are you serious?... Fuzzy Wuzzy was a woman?". LMAO...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD_xXvFpokU" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

("Now on video cassette").

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Re: GameCube DD - possible method of making it SLIMMER...

Post by Tchay » Thu Jun 24, 2010 11:39 am

Ozone!!!! If you get this working then YOU ARE A GOD!

Did you get those pinouts and data specs for the DD that I pm'd you a few weeks back??? It had some helpful info that might fill in some of those unknown pinouts.

If there is ANYWAY I can help you with this, I will. This is the single most important thread on this website to me right now.

:D

Quick offtopic moment:


- some of you might be thinking the Gamecube is outdated and time would be better spent on the Wii. Firstly, the Wii is expensive. Secondly, a slimmed wii mobo is going to be larger than a Gamecube mobo. I got a working gamecube mobo to be 4x4.125" exactly. Until Palmertech confirms a much smaller size on the wii mobo, the Gamecube is our best bet for making a small 6th gen portable.

Let me put it this way: if Ozone is successful, then Gamecube portables will be able to be smaller than Sifuf's sixtyfree Lite-R. Thats not an exaggeration.

/off topic, thread jacking
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Re: GameCube DD - possible method of making it SLIMMER...

Post by OzOnE » Thu Jun 24, 2010 1:53 pm

Hi, Tchay, and Sir Knight, ;) (sorry, just watched Solomon Kane. Not bad. A few more scary monster fights would have been nice though).

Yep, got the pinouts thanks (did I reply back then? I think I'm loosing some short-term memory, so you'll have to bear with me).

I can't seem to find the pinouts on the GC wiki, but this one looks good...

http://hitmen.c02.at/files/yagcd/yagcd/ ... tml#sec2.5" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It seems it will be best to try to get hold of older laptop drives because many of the new ones use the more modern type of pickup chip (multiple photodiode signals combined into fewer output pins). The GC DD requires a pickup with the four main outputs, and two extra outputs.

Traditionally, you'd often find four main focussing / RF photodiodes in the centre, and two extra tracking diodes - the new pickups seem to combine the signals in a different way so the naming is reversed (Four tracking TE1 to TE4, and two focus FE1 / FE2).

So getting it working mainly depends on finding a decent laptop drive. The rest depends on how fussy the DD controller is to changes in the sled motor gearing / speed and the focus / tracking coil resistances. I'd say the chances are around 65%, even with a good donor drive.

(I know I should really leave the emu board stuff for another thread, but oh well)...

As for the universal cart / disk emu board - AFAIK, the original GC DD code by Destop did actually work, but the "sound streaming" used by many games still wasn't working. This means that the music and often sound effects weren't working.

It was Destop who did the original Crazy Nation design I believe. The PCB you see in the pictures was apparently built by someone else and I'm not entirely sure if it ever worked properly??

So, assuming that the code does actually work, the chances of my PCB working come down to whether or not I screwed up the design (which is quite possible), and whether I can successfully solder the 240-pin FPGA without breaking the chip after trying to remove the hundreds of solder bridges. :(

I will likely need to buy a toaster oven and try the "solder paste reflow" method (which I've never tried before).

I made plenty of mistakes on the board design as I've never made my own layout using an FPGA before (so many pins!). I only spotted that I needed THREE separate voltage regulators (instead of two) after I'd already sent the files to the PCB manufacturer. Luckily, it was on the weekend, so on Monday they confirmed that they'd received the "fixed" files before they started production (only three PCBs to begin with).

If all of that works out, then hopefully the GC stuff won't be too difficult to hook up. I wouldn't bank on the sound working properly though, even if the prototype boards do work. The N64 cart emu stuff should be straightforward (again, assuming the SDRAM works etc.) Time will tell, as the boards are still being made and I can't afford to even buy the parts yet for a couple of weeks.

I might make a new thread and post some photos when the boards arrive. It will come with the disclaimer that it "might not work".

btw, I hope nobody is getting mixed up with the "custom / small" N64 PCB project? I had to abandon that for a while as I think the cart / disk emulator is more important. The "N64 board" project is technically more complex than the emu board too. I was kind of hoping that Kibble would make an appearance, but it doesn't look like it...

http://forums.benheck.com/viewtopic.php ... 89#p420389" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Obviously, if the emu works out then a board + laptop HDD will be thinner than the original GC DD anyway. Plus, it will hold a LOT of ISO's, and even more ROM images! :)

OzOnE.

EDIT: Oh, thanks very much for the offer of funding. I wouldn't want to take anyone's money as I don't trust my design skills enough for that. I'll keep on the quest though, and I'll hopefully have more info soon.

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Re: GameCube DD - possible method of making it SLIMMER...

Post by Tchay » Thu Jun 24, 2010 2:13 pm

Great! So I understand you.....you would be going with the "hard drive emulation" method? But are you also trying to find a replacement DD that is smaller than the original? Are these two separate methods you are trying? Sorry if I'm a lil slow....most of this stuff is going over my head :lol:
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Re: GameCube DD - possible method of making it SLIMMER...

Post by OzOnE » Thu Jun 24, 2010 2:48 pm

Yep, it's two separate projects (closely related though). You could actually use CF card, optical drive, or an SD card if need be, but hard drives are a nicer solution in most cases (especially for the GC).

tbh, when reading my posts back, I realize that it's very much a case of "infomation overload". I can't understand how I end up typing so much? lol

OK, this might add to the confusion, but this the PCB layout for the Uni Emu which is currently being manufactured...

http://img17.imageshack.us/i/nemesisuni ... tozon.jpg/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Note the name "Nemesis"... Marshall wasn't too keen on it, but hey, it's a name. :lol: I know it's cheesy, but it's mainly a way to identify the board in some way.

It's fairly simple in principle. It's just the FPGA, SDRAM chip, USB chip (FX2), three voltage regs, and a few caps.
The port on the right is the 44-pin IDE connector and the board is the same size as a 2.5" laptop HDD. (The board should bolt onto the HDD.)

The signals on the other connectors are defined purely by the FPGA "firmware" and almost all pins are re-definable. For example, an N64 cart slot could be connected to either the top or bottom-left connector. The menu for choosing the ROM could be done by a bootloader (like Marshall is doing), or by an on-screen display generated by the FPGA itself.

OzOnE.

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Re: GameCube DD - possible method of making it SLIMMER...

Post by OzOnE » Mon Jun 28, 2010 6:54 am

Hi,

Just an update - I bought two more laptop drives. At least one of them should be here tomorrow.

I never looked into the Wii DD until last night though - the Wii laser looks almost identical to the one in this Quanta laptop drive, so that confirms that the Wii drive is also made by Panasonic. It's possible that a Wii laser might have a pickup chip which is more compatible with the GC (since it only uses a Red laser I think).

The Wii laser has a 30-pin ribbon cable though, so it won't connect directly to the GC DD controller unfortunately. If a Wii laser could be made to work for the GC then at least we know that it "should" fit into a Panasonic type laptop mech (to make everything slimmer than the Wii drive).

A few days ago I removed the GC pickup chip and tried using it on the "shell" of the laptop drive's pickup. It fit the laptop pickup very nicely, but you could see that the focal lengths were completely wrong. There's just not enough distance between the pickup chip and the lens, so I couldn't even see the proper tracking beams (through the disk.)

(btw, I had to remove the dichroic mirror from the laptop pickup so the beams would pass through.)

When attached to the laptop pickup, the ribbon cable on the GC laser sticks out too far and it stops the disk from spinning. So, even if it did work, this small part of the ribbon would need to be trimmed and re-wired. (ironically, this part of the ribbon contains the power tracks for the laser diode itself). The tracking / focus coils also need to be soldered to the GC ribbon cable.

btw, the spindle motor wouldn't start at all during this test, so the GC pickup wasn't detecting the disk properly at all.

I'm guessing the GC laser is so big because of cost-cutting - the long focal length might have helped them to reduce any extra lenses etc. I did notice that the GC pickup has a second lens below the main one - this made me wonder if this "lens" is actually a diffraction grating for generating the tracking beams (I'll have to test this theory).

The fact that the GC DD and a lot of laptop drive mechs are made by Panasonic is in our favour, but I think we might need to look for laptop drives which were made around the same time as the GC (2001 - 2002) to find a pickup chip with the correct number of signal outputs.

Note that the HUL6273 datasheet (which appears most compatible with the original GC pickup chip) says that it is recommended for use in "Car DVD players" - maybe this is another source of compatible pickups?

That's not to say that I think we'll find a laser which plugs directly into the GC DD controller since it's probably a custom pinout. It would still require a lot of soldering by the sound of it.

Anywho, I'm still messing around with this and we'll see what these next two laptop drives reveal. (I'm not too hopeful though.)

No news on the Nemesis boards yet. It could take another week for the PCBs to be manufactured.

OzOnE.
P.S. Sorry there are no photos of the laptop pickup + GC ribbon, but my camera is charging and the experiment didn't work anyway.

EDIT: stupid forum bot thought Matsush*ta is a swear word, and it changed it to say "crap" instead. lol

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Re: GameCube DD - possible method of making it SLIMMER...

Post by Basement_Modder » Mon Jun 28, 2010 9:29 pm

Raizer04 wrote:BEHOLD MY ENTRY!!
Why must you put this at the top of every post you make?

Also, kynar wire is quite easy to solder to ribbon cable if flux is used. If you don't want to do it, I'd be happy to solder it for you if provided pinouts.
Cheers,
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Re: GameCube DD - possible method of making it SLIMMER...

Post by Tchay » Mon Jun 28, 2010 9:50 pm

I've done a lot of tedious soldering and rigging for the DD. So I would also be happy to do any tedious modding or soldering for your experiments. Anything that would help, I would be happy to do.
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Re: GameCube DD - possible method of making it SLIMMER...

Post by OzOnE » Tue Jun 29, 2010 5:44 am

Hi,

Yeah, soldering to the ribbon cable is a proper pain. I use flux quite a lot (which helps), but usually one of those Kester flux pens. The flux is a quite thin, so I need to get hold of some flux paste really.

I managed to solder the ribbon connections for the tracking / focus coils and I just soldered the rest of the signals directly to the laser chip itself.

That was the first drive though (didn't work). I literally just received another two drives but I haven't opened them yet. It's very likely that they have similar pickups to the Quanta drive, so won't have the correct signal outputs for the GC.

I'll just rip them apart and let you know...

OzOnE.

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Re: GameCube DD - possible method of making it SLIMMER...

Post by OzOnE » Wed Jun 30, 2010 5:02 am

Hi,

I had a look at the two new drives last night. They're both Dual Layer writers, so they look too complex to bother figuring out the pinouts etc. There's an HP drive and a HL (Hitachi / LG) drive, and both appear to have a Panasonic pickup / mech.

So instead of attempting to use those, I grabbed the combo drive from my ancient laptop. The drive is another Quanta (SBW-242, circa 2003) and the pickup is a Sharp HPD-240. This looks like a much better candidate for modding - from what I can tell, these older Sharp pickups have the six output signals (four main and two tracking).

It's almost impossible to find any pinouts for these pickups though. The main board also uses a Mediatek MT1616E chip, so I don't think we'll find any datasheets for that either (would have been fairly easy to work out the correct pinouts for the pickup otherwise).

The only way to try to identify the pickup signals is to use an o'scope while a disk is reading. There are quite a few pins on this pickup 'cos it's a CD-RW / DVD combo.

If the soldering of the test wires was easier then it wouldn't be too bad at all. I'll have to shelve this idea for a while though because I'm spending money on drives which could have been better spent on the first Nemesis prototype.

If anyone wants to try this, you basically want to find some older laptop drives from around the time the GC itself was made (2000 - 2004 ish), preferably a DVD-ROM drive. You want to find a pickup with the same number of output signals that the GC DD controller expects...

I don't know what configuration of photodiodes the GC Hologram pickup uses though (appears to have FOUR tracking and TWO focus outputs, which is opposite to most older pickups).

It was worth a try though. If a suitable drive can be found, a nice adapter board could be made which allows the pickup to be plugged directly into the GC DD controller board.

The spindle motor will probably still need to be wired directly because a lot of laptop drives have a motor control chip on the spindle board itself - this will need to be bypassed 'cos the GC DD controller already has this chip onboard. Luckily, there aren't that many signals, and the GC spindle motor ribbon is easier to solder to (still a pain though).

Does anyone know of any ribbon cables which convert from the flat ribbon into small wires (like Kynar)?? It would be SO much easier if I could get hold of some of those. I'll have a Google around for some.

Sorry folks, but that's it for now. Please await the update on the cart emu board - the PCBs haven't arrived yet and it will take me a while to buy the parts.

btw, the FPGA chip alone for Nemesis costs around £29 ($43 USD), the little config chip costs a whopping £14 ($21 USD), and the 64MB SDRAM chip costs around £22 ($33 USD). So, once you add around $4 per connector, the voltage regs / caps, then the PCB itself, it's going to be at least £100 ($150 USD)!

I did go a overkill on the FPGA though - cart emulation for many consoles probably only requires around a fifth of the logic available in the current Cyclone III chip. Even the on-screen menu code needs a small amount of logic, so I might have to get a much cheaper version made if this first prototype works.

The thing is, the FPGA can be used for SO much more than just a cart / disk emu. (I realize that you can only really use the board for one task at a time though.)


OzOnE.

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Re: GameCube DD - possible method of making it SLIMMER...

Post by OzOnE » Wed Jun 30, 2010 5:14 am

Oooooh, that's the beasty!...

http://www.proto-advantage.com/store/pr ... id=3400005" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Loads of nice stuff on this site.
Might look at this experiment again soon. :)

OzOnE.

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Re: GameCube DD - possible method of making it SLIMMER...

Post by The Smooth » Wed Jun 30, 2010 3:32 pm

Your right, it does look very nice... me wants it!
Let's just say my portable has got loads of win!!! *hint *hint
Transformice is so addictive!

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Re: GameCube DD - possible method of making it SLIMMER...

Post by dragonhead » Sun Oct 17, 2010 5:11 pm

Thread bump. any progress? News?

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Re: GameCube DD - possible method of making it SLIMMER...

Post by Tchay » Sun Oct 17, 2010 9:04 pm

dragonhead wrote:Thread bump. any progress? News?
Ozone is busy, but I talked to him and he has been brainstorming a lot.

BUT

I also told not to kill himself with this project.

The DD has an expiration date.
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