Blog FeedMODern life is Rubbish
Well, I exaggerate just for a cute title, but I’m sure you’ll forgive me. Modding is a very grey area these days. Not illegal, despite Sony and Nintendo’s best efforts, and very difficult to know if it’ll stay that way.
I’m very much against the copying of games, and I’ve been known to buy more than one copy of a game before if it wasn’t selling too well to give to people as gifts, so why exactly would I crack open one of my consoles, pull out a soldering iron and risk breaking the damn thing?
Not just any console either… my beloved GameCube. I got that thing pretty much at launch in the States. Brought it back to England in my back pack, and it was the start of my genesis from PC gamer into gamer. My first ever console too, and home of some of my most beloved gaming memories of the past 5 years.
Sure, there’s a few scratches on the lid now, but that’s no big deal… and out of all three current gen consoles that I now own, it’s still the one I sit down and spend the most time with. The X-Box is close, but there’s just something about the Cube and it’s library of games that I love.
So, as one of those people who loves to line up all his legal copies of games on his DVD shelf, what could have possibly driven me to modding my Cube?
Well, progressive scan actually. For anyone that doesn’t know, like all current consoles the GameCube can output a progressive scan picture when the game supports it. It’s a much crisper picture, and without interlacing, but you need a HDTV or a progressive scan adapter for a PC monitor (very reasonably priced actually) to display the signal properly. At it’s most simplist, it gives you the picture quality you’d expect from a PC at 640 x 480 resolution. It mightn’t sound like much to any PC veteran, but once you’ve experienced it it’s difficult to accept any less.
The key part in the previous paragraph was ‘when the game supports it’. Now most GameCube games do, it’s rarely a problem, but every now and then, a high end title shows up that neglects the feature. For me it’s a must have.
Capcom had been dependable of late. Going back to the first of the infamous ‘Capcom 5′ (five exclusive titles to the GameCube, one of which was cancelled and only one of which remained exclusive to the GameCube) big Capcom cube releases had all been in progressive scan. Resident Evil 4 marked the first Resi game to support the resolution, and all seemed good. So when I heard that Killer 7, a game I’d been waiting for, for years, was not going to support progressive scan I was bummed out.
Through complete coincidence, not 5 minutes later, I heard of a mod chip for the GameCube. This was news to me, I didn’t know the Cube had been cracked yet. It certainly put up one hell of a fight compared to the X-Box or PS2, but apparently, finally, it had been cracked. The thing that piqued my interest though, was one particular feature. This chip could apparently force games into progressive scan. Along with all the other more dubious features mod chips always offer, this was the one that grabbed my interest.
I could still play Killer 7 in progressive scan. But what would it entail? Modchips these days often have dozens of wires. The cube has taken over 4 years to be chipped… I looked with some trepidation at the soldering diagrams. Six wires. Didn’t look too hard at all infact. Now it had been years since I’d soldered to anything, but six wires? I could manage six wires.
The other worry was that Killer 7 wasn’t tested with the chip because it was yet to be released. Most things seemed to work, from what I could see, but not everything did.
Anyway, the chip was cheap, so I decided to go for it. At the worst, I’d be able to play my imports without having to use Freeloader right?
Waiting for the chip to arrive I started reading up on the installation instructions. Nowhere, not even the official site, had a complete set of the things. All the official site showed me were the solder points, so I had to find a different tutorial that described how to disassemble the Cube itself. Then, the chip as shipped, didn’t have the feature I needed most on it’s default bios. So I’d have to flash it. I could apparently do this by DVD or by network. Tracking down the BIOS took long enough, and it shipped with a piece of software called ‘BIOS programmer’ or something like that. Sounded about right anyway, but all the same, I picked up some mini DVD-Rs to burn the bios onto.
Only, my DVD burner flat out didn’t like the things. It’d burn on it all the way until it tried to finalise or close the session and then fail on me. Standard sized DVD-Rs do not fit inside a gamecube case, but you can take the case off and use them. Not ideal, but it’d only need to be done the one time. So I burned to a standard DVD-R knowing that DVD compatibility with the gamecube was pot luck.
The soldering went fine… though it was pretty nerve wracking at times. However after about twenty minutes I had six strong clean, taped off solders I was happy with. I had to cut a small section of metal support away to route the wires a place I was happy with, and mostly reassembled the cube.
No surprises when it didn’t like my DVD-R, but when I held down ‘B’ which apparently would pull up the menu according to everything I’d read, and the text on the new boot screen my cube had, I just got an error message saying ‘waiting for network upda please restart’.
The bios programming software from the official site and the one that came packed in with the bios… would only tell me to ‘check the USB cable’, a feature the chip I bought didn’t have.
Everything seemed to be working though. My imports were booting without any swapping discs, as were my US games… but I was without the feature I’d bought the damn chip for.
So I read up, researched, and found nothing. I took the cube apart and checked all my solders. All still clean. All still strong. Not touching.
On the positive side my cube was still working slightly better than it originally did, but on the negative side it still wasn’t doing what I wanted to, and there seemed to be no way to get the bios update to work.
Finally, after about an hour of hair pulling, I found reference to something called ‘dolstream’ that could send gamecube programs via the network to the Cube. It apparently supported my chip. Also, it supported the file extension that my little bios file had. Could it be that my bios file was actually a cube executable?
After some fiddling about, getting the cube into that ‘waiting for network upda’ message, the file shot across the network (thank god I have a BBA for my Cube!) and the message updating bios flashed up on my screen.
Even when it said it had finished flashing I was hesitant to switch it off, but after a quick on off, I had a new bios menu, and best of all, I could force games into progressive scan. I dropped in Killer 7, crossed my fingers…
…and wouldn’t you know… the damn thing worked.
So, right now, I’m happy. Sure, I don’t know (or really care) what media I should use to run ‘back ups’. All I care about is rescuing a few more games from interlacing and that’s been achieved… but my experience has been less than joyous. The problem with something that’s border line illegal is there’s no helpdesk. There’s no reliable FAQ. The only people that do this type of thing don’t have much time for newbies…
And if you break your console you’re screwed.
I’m in no rush to mod any other console, but it’s been an interesting experience all things considered.
12th July | Reply
The GameCube definately seems the least PC-like of all the current generation consoles, so I’m impressed that it can actually be modded at all, without unreasonable complications. It’s quite different from just tweaking one’s XBox to run Linux, as that thing is basically a PC inside an ugly VCR’s casing.
Modding is definately an increasing trend, though it will be interesting to see to what extent it can be done with the next generation, with all those expensive and damn complex parts, all of which seem to leave PCs completely in their wake. But then, I’m sure all the games for the new consoles will have good enough picture quality for your tastes =)
12th July | Reply
yeah, progressive scan support is a must for me, but that’s no worry for the next gen machines. the revolution hasn’t had 480p as standard confirmed, but the ps3 and x-box 360 are both going to be 720p at least.
the only thing that would get me to go near a mod chip next gen, is to play imports. i wish they’d just do away with region locking games, espescially when japan sees so many releases that the rest of the world misses out on.
still, i’d be surprised if it takes more than a couple of months for the 360 and ps3 to be chipped. the only reason the cube took so long was because it used custom discs and couldn’t play DVDs or CDs. i’m surprised that they stuck at it as long as they did.
12th July | Reply
What puts me off ever modding any of my consoles is the risk involved. I am personally happy with what I have right now, and feel no need to change. But just looking at the effort Plagiarise put into modding his console, I know I would have no hope in hell of pulling that off.
Seems to PC like to me…
12th July | Reply
What the fuck are publishers putting out in Europe that almost every European person i talk to either mods their console or knows someone who mods their consoles. It’s really astonishing how much i hear about this from European geeks. Even amongst American gamer geems it’s a pretty out there sort of thing to mod your console.
12th July | Reply
Maybe the European ones are just more intelligent, and don’t see it as much of a risk =P
Modding ones Xbox is quite popular down here in Oz, but both people I know who have done it didn’t do it themselves. They got others to do it for them, not sure who exactly (as I don’t own a console, I didn’t care enough at the time to ask). But I think there is a bit of an industry for it.
13th July | Reply
well, europeans mod for this major reason… most games in europe come out months after their us/japanese releases, and are more expensive. that makes modding that much more appealing for the gamer who *does* like to buy their games. they can get them cheaper, and months before anyone else in the country by using sites such as dvdboxoffice.com that’ll send the games to the uk.
cubes are pretty cheap these days, and now that i don’t have to use the swap disc to play imports, and now that 7 of the 10 games i had that didn’t support progressive scan do… i’m pretty happy with it. i’m not about to dive head first into moding any of my other systems though. i live in the states, and therefor i have less urge to mod without good reason.
27th July | Reply
Pretty interesting article, plagiarise. You didn’t mention the name of the modchip you used, but I would assume it was the Qoob, right? I was also considering getting this modchip for exactly the same reasons as yours: getting progressive scan output on non-proscan games. I still wasn’t sure if this chip would do the job cause I read it would allow games to be run in proscan mode on european consoles (where, I believe, no games officially support proscan on the Gamecube). I was thinking, it’s probably just for proscan enabled games (like the 1st party games from Nintendo) where they hide the proscan switch on european versions.
I’m in Canada, and what I want is for non-progressive scan enabled NTSC games to actually work in progressive scan, with the help of the chip. It seems it does work, from your experience with Killer 7. Could you name any other non-proscan games you tried that successfully worked in proscan with the chip? Or, more to the point, did you find one game that absolutely didn’t want to convert? Thanks for the feedbacks, buddy!
27th July | Reply
Cribbed from MaxConsole.net, all NTSC games.
I hope that helps. People hope that REmake and RE:zero are fixable. the 2/3rds of the gameplay you can see in zero looks wonderful, but REmake just dumps after displaying the violence disclaimer.
There are a bunch of problems if you force a game that already supports progressive scan into progressive scan using the mod chip, incidentally, so if you do pick one up, boot your prog scan games as normal.
9th August | Reply
Been looking at ways of getting non pro-scan games to work in 480p and came across this brilliant article, now gonna look into somehow getting a pro to fit the Quod mod to my US gamecube.
Cheers Plagiarise.