Super gameboy color?

Discussion of programming and development for the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color.
tepples
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Re: Super gameboy color?

Post by tepples »

That and the Game Boy Player boot disc doesn't support 240p without hacks that may be hard to get past certain countries' customs, and most GameCube consoles don't support 480p. So you're left with blurry 480i.
lidnariq
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Re: Super gameboy color?

Post by lidnariq »

gcforever wiki:Using a Wii drive replacement on a GameCube.

I'm really not interested in arguing whether it's ethical, legal, or anything else. I just don't think think "Wah, optical drive" is a useful retort.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Super gameboy color?

Post by Drew Sebastino »

tokumaru wrote:I considered doing this, but optical drives have the annoying tendency to fail, and considering how old the GameCube is, I wouldn't expect a used one to last very long.
Isn't it literally just a little electric motor that spins in one direction... It's not like the motor of a toy car that has strain placed upon it. The GameCube is built like a tank anyway, and out of the three GameCube's I have, they all work like a charm. I hadn't even considered them breaking at any point. I think the most legitimate concern is the fact that the Gameboy Player seems to downgrade picture quality, but it seems that you can get a different rom to run it and it looks just fine. I'm not exactly sure how you'd get this rom on a GameCube disk though... Would there be some kind of way to burn information onto a disk using the Wii's GameCube disk drive? (It's easy to run custom software on it via the homebrew channel for this, if the software exists.) I've never really understood how burning a disk works.
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Dwedit
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Re: Super gameboy color?

Post by Dwedit »

Alcohol + Microfiber cloth, and wipe very very gently, that's how you make a gamecube that has stopped reading discs correctly work again. The laser lens area is exposed when you lift the lid, so you don't need to open up the system or anything.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Super gameboy color?

Post by Drew Sebastino »

You mean to tell me most of the problems with disk drives come from the laser being scratched? I don't even understand how that could ever happen under normal circumstances... (The lid is closed 90% of the time, so nothing can even come into contact with the laser.) I was always led to believe that it was from the motor failing, which still seems fairly improbable, especially in only about 10 years with no strain on it whatsoever.
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tokumaru
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Re: Super gameboy color?

Post by tokumaru »

I've always heard about alignment issues or something. I didn't have contact with many disc-based consoles beside the PSX and the PS2, but both would often have problems reading discs after a while. Why would the GameCube's optical drive be better than the typical drive?
tepples
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Re: Super gameboy color?

Post by tepples »

(Guessing)
The GameCube reads mini-DVD-like media, which means the motor moving the laser assembly doesn't have to move as far and thus wouldn't wear out as fast. As far as I can tell, it doesn't do the dual layer thing either.
adam_smasher
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Re: Super gameboy color?

Post by adam_smasher »

Nintendo also just tends to be pretty good about building their stuff to last in a way that Sony generally isn't.
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MottZilla
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Re: Super gameboy color?

Post by MottZilla »

tepples wrote:(Guessing)
The GameCube reads mini-DVD-like media, which means the motor moving the laser assembly doesn't have to move as far and thus wouldn't wear out as fast. As far as I can tell, it doesn't do the dual layer thing either.
That's right, no GameCube game ever used a dual-layer disc. With the multi-disc games that exist we can assume that it was not capable of supporting them.

I don't think the GC has a reputation for breaking down. Ofcourse anything can be broken by a careless or abusive user.
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ceriux
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Re: Super gameboy color?

Post by ceriux »

Well I'm currently broke and probably going to be broke for a while... so! If anyone wants to gift me a gamecube+gbplayer+disk I'll happily accept it lol ;)
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Super gameboy color?

Post by Drew Sebastino »

Well, the cheapest GameCube I found with all the cables and a controller was $40 (Even more expensive than the cheapest Wii I found. :lol: ), and I found the Gameboy Player with the disk for $50, with the actual expansion on the console going by itself for $15 (The disk is where most of the cost comes from). If you were able to somehow burn Gamecube games, you could find the rom for the Gameboy Player (or even the improved one) and burn it onto the disk of some cheap crap game. I don't know feasible this would be though and it might be cheaper to just buy the regular disk. (although the modifications people have made to the rom certainly make it look a lot better, getting rid of the blurriness.) At worst, you're looking at about $90.
MottZilla wrote:Ofcourse anything can be broken by a careless or abusive user.
I've even heard some crazy stories of GameCube's surviving what would break just about any other console. This one kid told me his brother went crazy and threw it out the second story window by its lunchbox handle, and it still miraculously worked, although I can't imagine it looked to good. I don't know if this is true, but I did trip over the controller wire while my sister was playing a game and had the GameCube slam into wall (It was on the edge of the table, next to a wall. It fell of the table and hit the wall) and it still worked perfectly, (and isn't made out of stupid shiny plastic so it also still looked perfect) so it's at least that strong.
MottZilla wrote:dual-layer disc.
What does this mean? I this isn't a double sided disk?

One random thing I was thinking of was that I've never understood the hate for the Gamecube's tiny disks, other than the fact that the Gamecube couldn't play DVDs although we always had a DVD player so that doesn't matter. People just always like to act like it's some sort of serious technical flaw even though you can just simply switch the disks and it acts just fine, as all the information is just dumped onto ram and stays there until it needs to be changed. (Some games I've played will even work fine without the disks in for a majority of the game.) One thing people seem to forget is that load times are often best on the GameCube vs. the PS2 and the Xbox, I think because of faster access times of something, which is also something that could potentially be useful even outside of loading, like rapidly changing graphics to try and avoid something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34sU5DVIGMM#t=1m52s
lidnariq
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Re: Super gameboy color?

Post by lidnariq »

Espozo wrote:[Dual-layer] isn't a double sided disk?
wikipedia:DVD#Dual-layer recording.

TL;DR: Two planes of data one above the other, laser can see one or the other by focusing differently.
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tokumaru
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Re: Super gameboy color?

Post by tokumaru »

Espozo wrote:If you were able to somehow burn Gamecube games
The GameCube can run games burnt on mini DVD-Rs if you install a modchip.
burn it onto the disk of some cheap crap game.
What? This is not how DVD burning works, you can't overwrite a pressed DVD, or even a DVD-R. You need a blank DVD-R.
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MottZilla
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Re: Super gameboy color?

Post by MottZilla »

If you can run homebrew programs then you don't need the GB Player Startup Disc. Either a modchip, Action Replay, or other method of running homebrew programs is nice to have anyway as I think on most if not all GameCube consoles you can then load DVD-Rs. Although you have to use those "mini" dvd-rs.
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Drew Sebastino
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Re: Super gameboy color?

Post by Drew Sebastino »

tokumaru wrote:What? This is not how DVD burning works, you can't overwrite a pressed DVD, or even a DVD-R. You need a blank DVD-R.
I'm stupid... :lol: I guess if you do burn a DVD, you can't overwrite the data in any way, in that whatever is burned onto the DVD is permanent? I really don't understand how CD technology works...
tokumaru wrote:The GameCube can run games burnt on mini DVD-Rs if you install a modchip.
Is this mini DVD-R technology different than what the GameCube normally uses? Is it next to impossible to find blank GameCube disks and a GameCube disk burner? Yeah, I don't have a clue what I'm talking about... :oops:
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