gamecube advance

[The Smooth]

No n64p that I know of used a GBA screen, but you'll need to find a video in thing to use it. (Damn impossible to find)

It was one of the early ones made in 2004

[Zeflis]

Thanks. And yea, I saw that in a thread soon after. Actually I do have batteries in the mail now

[kaito]

ah. that makes no sense to me, but I guess I can understand it a little. I guess this means I'm going to have to make some sacrifice in my budget and/or convince my friend to let me be in debt to him for eternity and have him order me a 14.8 v liPo battery pack and charger. speaking of which, on one of the sites that some post in the reference forum about batteries links to, I found even cheaper batteries with the same voltage and mah rating, just a different charger (it was smaller).
if I can't pull together enough money to order lipo batteries, I'm going to mutilate some old cellphones and steal their batteries, circuits and chargers. yes, I WOULD have to charge each of them seperately. no, I DON'T think that's too much of a hassle when compared to coughing up the money to order a 14.8 volt lipo battery pack/ordering 4 3.2v lipo batteries, a protection circuit, and a charger. yes, I WOULD rig together some frankencased contraption to charge them all together, but, yes, I would STILL have to take all of them out of the case to charge them. such is the sacrifice of a penny pinching portablizer.

may God (or some generous forumers *wink**wink*) have pity on my wallet.

[Zeflis]

It is not impossible to run the gamecube off of lower voltages, you just need to build a custom regulator. there are 2 sticky threads dealing with this or similar topic at the the top of this forum.

[kaito]

I know I can run it off of lower voltages, and I saw the custom regulator stuff. I'm just not confident enough in my soldering ability nor do I have the patience to wait on the stuff to get here. though, with all the crap that I have just laying around, I might be able to find everything I need to build a custom regulator all in one box... (I took the casing off of all my old, useless/broken electronics and put all the circuitry and wiring into a shoebox and labeled it "materials". the casing all sits in another box for me to steal battery holders and/or cut and melt down to make other casing.) I've got an old toy walkie talky, some radio parts, speakers (small ones), a wifi detector box(the one that goes to the wifi shirt from thinkgeek), an sd card reading sound thing from the thinkgeek speaker shirt(also has an audio in standard 3/4" jack), all the motors and circuitry from a motorized iguana thing that could move on its own or accept commands from an infrared remote, the internal circuitry and 1 bit black/white/greyscale screens from three different little toy things-- one was one of those neopet egg things, the other two were those "POG" things that were around for 6 months or so and could battle each other wirelessly (seems to use radio signals. will have to find out what frequency it uses), and parts from an infrared controller for some lego car thing. as for case building material, I have three underbed storage boxes (about a foot high, two and a half feet across, and four feet long) full of ABS plastic building blocks, A.K.A. "Legos," a shoebox full of various types of plastic, a gamecube's worth of GCN case to melt down (minus the disk cover portion. I'm going to use the whole top of the gamecube for the disk cover.) and the casing of the gameboy player, whether I decide to put that in or not.
'nother 9-16 "business days" until my psone screen arrives. found a better one for a (at the moment) cheaper price than the other-- this one has games with it!!! anyways, the friend who's ordering it for me can do whatever with the stuff besides the screen. he may end up selling it to recompensate himself for the money I'm making him spend. I've advised him against selling at gamestop(they give you $10 or less for used systems, and about $5 for used games. unless it's brand f%^*ing new, of course. then they give you 20 and 10, respectively.) and flea markets (we live in southern US, where people know how to haggle the pants off the man while still being sweet and courteous, unlike our northern brethren, who will haggle everything the man owns off him, and then slap him in the face before getting money from the reality tv show host for showing up on the news.), and suggested selling it at a pawn shop-- one with electronics. yes, this friend is knowledgeable about the values of electronics, and he's smart enough to at least get more money for it than what he paid for it. he's even cheaper than I am.
anyways...
I have the proper bits now, so I don't have to melt down pens anymore!!! nor do I have to rip the casing to pieces... that was a pain in the you know what. I've decided I'm going to (most likely) sacrifice the quality of the sound and bridge the 5v and 12v lines so I can run it off of 6-7ish volts. that way, I only need to steal two or three batteries from old phones, and it won't be such a pain to charge all of them. I have decided 100% that I'm going to use rechargeable batteries, because paying for disposable batteries can get pretty expensive. if I can get the regulator and ac->dc converter boards out of the chargers, I may figure out some way to charge all the batteries at once off of a generic ac line. that would be nice...
on a similar note, I opened up the gcn end of my gcn composite cable, and I saw that there were just five lines. no circuit board or anything. am I missing something? all the stuff on it says that there's a small circuit board and you have to desolder the resistor and solder on a pot/variable resistor and they all show it connected to the analog out pins. I have checked both the rev A and the rev C cable. neither had it, both were exactly the same-- composite video cable, left audio cable, right audio cable, and two black ground cables.
this diagram is what I'm seeing on the site:

is it the one from the older system? which was it, the snes? or the 64? I don't know... I don't have either of those... *cries softly*
moving on. for the rgb mod for the component cable, it says I'll need a 10k ohm resistor. what kind of electronics would have those in them? I realize that no small piece of electronics would have one, and that it'd be simpler just to order one, but as I've said before, I want to do this project with what I already own as much as is physically possible. ah, i've had an idea!! when I was taking apart my sony "CD RADIO CASETTE-CORDER", I saw a large number of blue resistors in there-- the color of the one in the picture for the how-to. I'm going to open it up again once I finish this post and see if it has one that matches the color pattern. say, is there such a thing as a polarized resistor?
now, in terms of the controller stuff, is it possible for me to cut off part of the controller board and reconnect all the connections with wires and have it still work? I have other circuit boards with the number of things for buttons that I would need just in case I can't do that-- I don't want to have to use up two controllers to make one, if at all possible.
I'm speculating over whether or not to make/get a new fan and/or heatsink or use the original ones. I may end up using two fans (I have three gamecubes, so triple everything except the digital a/v out, the seperate regulator board, and serial port 2.) I'll probably just use the original stuff. coz I'm like that.
anything else? hmm... can't think of anything. If I think of anything, I'll write it down and throw it in the next post.

[kaito]

ok, I've got my gameboy player disassembled, so I'm going to use it. especially seeing how slim it is. when I get ahold of a multimeter, I'll test for which lines are what, and then test for necessary voltages and see if I can discern what they do. once I get that out of the way, I'll post a diagram for posterity. took apart my broken ac adapter (yes, stupid and dangerous, I know) and I realized what was wrong-- the DC end of it had a shorted circuit. and of course, given Murphy's law, all the things that I couldn't fix had broken. none of the soldering is messed up- a few of the lines are burnt up, one of the various pieces of shmorgisborg that makes up the circuitry was messed up, among other things. ac side is perfectly fine. my hand can tell you that. (again, murphy's law)
screen will be here... eventually. component cable... might get here. one day. BUT FEAR NOT! the screen works with composite video too. I think I've finally given in in terms of batteries. I will soon convince my friend to let me be in about 50 dollars more of debt to him to order a charger and a pcb (I'm getting old phone batteries. yes, they're LiPoly. 3.7v. I think one might be 3.74v.) I'm going to bridge the 12v and 5v lines and run the whole thing off 7.4 volts, screen included (runs off 7.5v, will wire from the 5v line to the 5v in on the screen and ground the whole thing together. I'm definitely going to make an analog AV out port and hardwire a controller to port 1, the other 3 will be on the top along with the memory cards and gameboy player ports (cartridge and ext. port). yes, the system is going to be thick enough in the middle for all that. I've given up extending the OD cables because it would be somewhat counter productive with how I'm designing it. regulator and batteries will be on the side with the power switch and left half of the controller while the speaker(s) and all excess wiring will rest on the right side with the volume and headphone jack and right half of the controller, meanwhile the OD, board, mb, gameboy player, and screen will be in the middle (yes, I'm getting rid of the humongous connection port on the gameboy player- I'm going to wire it directly to the board.

so, I'm saving the rev A od for a later project where I will need to move the OD for spacing reasons because you cant relocate the OD on the rev C gcns- one of the optical cables is soldered directly to the board. I will be using rev A MB and regulator and a rev C controller board (it's cleaner, and the light bulb still works, so I will relocate the bulb for gameboy-esque appearance. plus, I still have things I want to find out about the rev a CP board. I noticed some markings that seemed to be denotating ports, the corners labeled 1, 6, 7, 12, the box divided into 4 1x3 matrices with dots in them. the rev c CP board has less dots.

yes, I'm still documenting everything I find about the systems and their differences. maybe if I'm lucky, I can make an amazing (or maybe not so amazing) discovery on my first portable. I do seem to have that kind of luck in relations to things I'm motivated to do by the internet... (the things I do when in the presence of non-netizens are never as successful. mostly because they don't get my jokes.) remember to check back regularly, I tend to respond to all posts before the day is over, so if you have a question, comment, or suggestion, fire away. I'm open to criticism (unlike many...)

[kaito]

well. this is falling apart. gamecube refuses to run on batteries even at the proper voltage, can't get ahold of lipo batteries, can't get a screen that works with composite, can't get a component cable to use for the screens that I can get. grr. it's always those few things that I don't have on hand that screw me over. even the tiniest things, and it's DONE. sigh.

plus, evil overlords are refusing to allow me to do this even though I'm already halfway there. they refuse to let me do it unless I have a "kit" and "instructions." I've got "instructions" here, and a large repertoire of people who can PROVE to them that it can and has been done with ease, but they deny it no matter how much I show them. well, at least I only owe people twenty dollars. and I have 3 gamecubes. no functional casing, though, which is what the evil overlords are complaining about. circuitry, dust, exposed to the elements of my room, etc. I can see where they're coming from, but I can easily disprove a good number of my complaints, they just refuse to let me to do so.
I'm probably going to keep going anyways. I'll be back when I'm done. post ANYTHING that could help me out on here. I need all of it, and I can't reply to most of it.
masked DIYer, over and out.

[Tchay]

FYI, wordy worklogs make for an eyesore. Also, people will be more likely to help you out if you are to the point with any issues you're having.


.................Oh, and pictures, we like those.