I'm making a GC laptop with fully planerised inteernals ect

[gabman]

Yep, I know it might sound dubious that a complete nube to the forum is embarking on such an ambitious project but I'm gonna try.
I planned to this with a DC however due to a twist of fate I have suddenly found my self the owner of allot of GC parts...
The basic concept is that I
A: build a custom case (I have intermittent access to a vac form),

B:planarize the internals in the simplest way possible (I plan to use the jacks on the mainboard from a second GC to make Gamecube "IDE" leads. That way there is no chance of screwing up the mainboard I want to use)

C:build a front loading disc drive (already in progress as I'm currently building a prototype)

D:use a salvaged low energy laptop screen and thus get full VGA quality.

E:3 hours play on NiMH or (more expensivly) Li Poly (so around 10000mAh)

F: Broardband Adaptor for LAN to LAN play

I have managed to find, much to the annoyance of every second hand video game dealer in manchester, a DOL-001 (EUR) gamecube. My first question is am I right in thinking this is one of the early Gamecubes that supported VGA out on the Digital AV port (before it was disabled)?
Next question, what modchip should I use if I want
A:Region free play

B:Backup creation via USB

C: and forced VGA mode for all games (very important)

I plan to call it the Gameslab or GS for short.

Thanks from Gabe and Dowd (we still haven't got a modding team name, any recommendations?)

[Helpplease]

D:use a salvaged low energy laptop screen and thus get full VGA quality.

To bad you can't use a laptop screen because they need a special converter to work with other video sources, but if you can find a converter you can use one, but they are expensive and hard to get.

But anyway this sounds kinda awesome if you could pull it off, good luck with your project.

[64M320N3]

Front loading disc drive?
You mean like slide in, like on the wii or imac, or disc holder like on a pc or xbox 360? You can not do this without the original gc disc drive hardware.
Also, replacing the disc drive with a different one will NOT work at all. Not without ER's mod.
Most of the things you have suggested will not work anyway, so 1) these are just ideas that you would like to have done, but have no ability to do so (kind of like Karl Marx), 2) you are incredibly good at reprogramming so you may program gamecube to accept these things (sincerely doubt it), or 3) you have no idea how the gamecube works and are just humiliating youself online because of your ignorance.

I have a crazy idea:
How about you do some research before you ask questions like this? Here's how this forum functions: you research questions or ideas on this forum and find if one is similar, and find if the idea was shot down or not. If you can't find a similar question, THEN you post.

Only your LAN idea will work because Nintendo has already made an adaptor that clips on the bottom of the GameCube (again, research), so you will not really need to do modding on your own, since it's already out there for you to use. The problem with this is that you can only use it with LAN compatible games, such as Kirby Airride.
Also, 10000 mAh? Holy crap! That thing would be huge!
Get a li-ion or li-ion polymer. They are smaller, and all around better, and aren't that expensive, if you know where to look. 6500 mAh is a good start, as it is more cheap and will get you around 2 hours of playtime on your GC if you use a screen that has the same power consumption as a PSone screen, then LED mod it.

[eagle5953]

1) these are just ideas that you would like to have done, but have no ability to do so (kind of like Karl Marx)

Historical reference win.
<-- (History major)

[64M320N3]

Nice.
I have my Masters Degree in History.
IN JO FACE!
That's cool, dude. At least it means that everybody here isn't invigorated in just electronics...
Also, that was a total flame. My bad.

[Tibia]

Front loading disc drive?
You mean like slide in, like on the wii or imac, or disc holder like on a pc or xbox 360? You can not do this without the original gc disc drive hardware.

I'm gonna argue this one's doable. You do need the original disc motor and lasers from the GC, but it is possible to make them work with a tray loader. I've done it. I ended up canning it because it was so damn huge, but it is possible to make it front-loading.

[eurddrue]

Front loading disc drive?
You mean like slide in, like on the wii or imac, or disc holder like on a pc or xbox 360? You can not do this without the original gc disc drive hardware.

I'm gonna argue this one's doable. You do need the original disc motor and lasers from the GC, but it is possible to make them work with a tray loader. I've done it. I ended up canning it because it was so damn huge, but it is possible to make it front-loading.

Then there's really no point in doing it

[Tibia]

But the point was that part of it is doable. I might have been able to make it smaller if I'd built it all from scratch, but I wasn't going to do that for a half-baked idea. In any case, once he saw how big I'd made it, he gave up his idea. The drive was almost half the height of the cube again, and stuck out the back.

[eurddrue]

Who's this magical person who showed up in our conversation "he?"

[gabman]

In all fairness to me this post was made after 2 months of research and all the concepts I have put forward are sound.
Basically for the CD drive, what tibia said. Only I should be able to keep the size down by using an old school laptop disc drive my friend Dowd (the other half of this mod) has. It's relatively small, the laser is internal rather than sliding on the disc drawer and also I'm going to be planarising the Gamecube rather than trying to cram all the internals into a CD case
By linking all the connectors with chopped up IDE wires with gamecube board connectors soldered to the ends I also plan to planarise without having to solder directly to the hard to get hold of DOL-001 (EUR) board (I will post pictures of the connection wires later.)
I want to make absolutely clear that at no point did I intend to use a standard DVD drive (although its a shame GC loader never got off the ground, a harddrive would have been a great addition to this mod).
Also the laptop screen issue is going to be problem, I originally also thought that the output would be impossible to use however since my friend Dowd currently has a broken laptop he's determined to try, on the reasoning he might be able to use the original VGA input of the laptop board (if they're on a separate module). Plus we would quite like a nice big screen, not another 5" PS1 job.

I really do however, before I start work on the screen, need to know whether the mainboard (DOL-001 (EUR)) I have really will give VGA out.
I know quoob will force VGA out but will it also allow backing up of games as easily as viper does?

Thanks dudes!

[Tibia]

A GC laser isn't going to fit in a laptop CD drive. The tray loading mechanism will be a lot smaller than the desktop drive I used, but you're still going to have to use the same principle as that type. Only the tray will be useable, all the motors that control the disc and laser will have to be the GC's. They aren't swappable, and they aren't able to be reduced to fit in a laptop drive. The motor that turns the CD itself is thicker than a laptop drive. It may be tray loading, but it's still going to be at the very least almost as thick as all the GC drive electronics are now.


Eurddrue- I built it for Truck. He saw Vomitsaw's Super Genintari, and decided he wanted to make one with every console he owned. He wanted a tray loading GC, so he told me to make it happen.

[gabman]

Yeah good point, well on the plus side you just saved me half an hour of pointless head scratching, however theoretically (before I even say this I going to make clear there is no way in hell I'm actually gonna try it), you could swap the motors that power the GC laser carousel for a thinner. The challenge would be in finding a motor which either has identical revs, (pretty easy to calculate once you can measure the angular velocity from the speed it moves the laser carousel at a set voltage), or by limiting the input voltage so the revs match with a resistor. A problem would only arrise if they had differing velocity under load speed e.g. as a reasult of a lower torque... (<-- this is all theoretical, again theres no way in hell I would waste my time trying to make it happen)

Yep I think I may use a full size drive. The height of my laptop would of course then be set to the height of a standard disk drive but then again thats no massive loss.

Also see below for idea mini monitor for not only this mod but others of this type

http://www.esaw.co.uk/catalog/mini-lcd- ... escription

with both VGA and composit input it seems almost to perfect, I dred to think what the price is but thats what summer jobs are for. The only draw back is the 12V power required, i would have preferred a lower voltage but meh it sill seems pretty good. Give me your thoughts!