Ok, cool, because it was sold out for a while everywhere and I couldn’t find one for weeks.
I bought mine when they were first released but I’m not surprised they were sold out for a bit given the youtube hype.
Looks nice. It’s incredible just how much things have progressed in the last 3 years. The retro scene is completely different with all the new hardware mods/options available.
Picked up Resi 4 on GameCube because I only previously played Wii Edition and wanted to revisit the games with the original, more tense, controls.
What a game! The game-y scenario only helps ground the game-y tank controls which in turn still make it a very tense game of survival (horror) given you can’t move and shoot at the same time.
You can really tell it’s been designed with the GC controller in mind given how easily accessible and well placed all the main actions are across the pad. And the aiming with that large, gated stick is so precise.
Because game mechanics have become more homogenous in shooters over time it is rather refreshing to play this game, since it maintains a unique feel (even the inventory/weapon changing is surprisingly fresh feeling) today despite being the game that invented the modern shooter while tossing away a well worn template for survival horror.
That said, wish I had a CRT to play it on, it would smoothen out the resolution while making the textures look perfect. It isn’t bad at 480p on my old Bravia though.
I can’t really forgive Capcom for not including the original textures with the latest version of the game on Switch and consoles, instead opting for the upscaled outsourced textures instead. And I’m still sceptical over its accuracy given they ported it to MT Framework.
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If you weren’t aware, you can plug a GC controller into your Wii and play the Wii Edition of 4 the way it was meant to be played, except you get proper 480p widescreen support.
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Cheers. I never got it working for some reason back in the day, so I thought I’d pick up a GC copy just for some strange purist’s sake. Silly I know!
That said I think 480p is bugged on European Wii systems and games across the board so I dunno how different 4 Edition looks - been a while since I’ve booted it up…
You’ll only notice that if you’re playing on a display with native 480p resolution. And even then it’s slight. And most loaders have now integrated the fix.
I wanted to recieve it before I shared too much about it but there’s a new IPL replacement modchip for GameCube similar to the old Qoob Pro called HyperBoot from Badass Consoles: https://www.badassconsoles.com/hyperboot/
To get it out of the way, the creator and seller of this modchip has some history with not delivering on promises; you can google more but the short version is he was an early GC Video / HDMI modder that came recommended by RetroRGB and MyLifeInGaming but it seems a lot of people were left in a lurch with preordered kits undelivered, GameCubes to be modded not returned, standalone cables never released when competitors caught up long ago. I’m not sure what the current situation is there but he seems to still be working on it but 
needless to say I don’t recommend putting money into GC HDMI mods from this website.
However this is a new kit that overrides the IPL (inital program loader, kinda like a bios) on GameCube and it is unique in that there aren’t other IPL mods available at this time. Qoob Pro was the last one that I’m aware of and it hasn’t been available for sale in at least a decade, and GameCubes that happen to have it installed very infrequently appear for sale and go for hundreds. This is $25 USD and occasionally actually for sale, and amazingly is actually being shipped and arriving at people’s doors so it’s not vapourware.
I installed mine yesterday (it’s a 6 wire solder job) and it works pretty well; I get a boot to Swiss in about a second, and it’s even faster using the compressed DOL included in the Swiss release, virtually instantaneous.
My main goal here is to be able to easily run disc games on GC that benefit from video patches such as forcing RE 2&3 to 240p or Tales of Symphonia to 480p. But I can also see it being useful to those who want a no-disc method to boot homebrew or just get into swiss with little fuss, or to create a seamless consolized GBA with the GBI dol & GC+GBPlayer.
I am however trying to figure out how to modify swiss to boot direct to DVD as it going to an SD card menu is a bit irritating when I mostly just want to run discs immediately with my preferred video settings. If I can work that out I’ll share my fork later.
Since it’s not up anywhere I’ve also included a copy of the install instructions. If that’s not OK or when they end up on the actual product website I’ll remove them.
I ran into a one issue on install. The wires included with the kit I got were too long and I needed to cut them in half or the signal reaching the modchip was unusable. Apparently they can’t be longer than 70mm and the ones I got were >100mm. Hopefully future ones that ship out just come with shorter wires to begin with.
Long story short I can recommend this kit if you’re looking for an IPL mod despite of the history of the creator/seller as it’s pretty much the only game in town.
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Perfect set up honestly, exactly what I want. Auto-boot with forced 480p on PAL games etc.
I managed to modify swiss to show the device selection menu on boot and to have the DVD as the first option which is enough for what I wanted to do.
So on boot I just need to hit A a few times to get my forced video on real discs.
Also I noticed the release 7z I produced for this fork has the wrong number in the DOL files but oh well I’m not sure anyone else will find this useful anyway.
Edit: alternatively I was able to find a very old version of swiss from Feb 2016 which is missing a lot of new features and may not have as well built out resolution forcing but boots to the game with forced video in about 1/4 as much time (5 seconds rather than 20 seconds).
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Very interesting! I was in the market for such a device a couple years ago because I wanted to use a GameBoy Player without the original disc. I couldn’t find any of the old ODEs for sale so I wound up buying a XenoGC chip for a few bucks from eBay and a generic SDGecko for a few more dollars. I burnt a special mini-DVD that lets me boot right into Swiss and then I launch GBI from the SD. It would be nice to ditch the mini-DVD all together though.
HyperBoot doesn’t appear to have a built in SD card slot. Does it have on-board flash memory that can hold Swiss or do you still need to launch it from an SD?
You may have heard but a brand new GameCube ODE was just announced. At $80 it’s probably not the best value for our use-cases but it’s still pretty cool none-the-less:
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You still need an SDGecko+SD Card. There is some amount of built in memory but all it does is run a program that launches a DOL file from SD card or USBGecko.
I think depending on your use cases an ODE would be fine. I just prefer using discs.
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GC Loader and the new serial port SD card option looks rather nice but then you check international shipping and you may as well clone the board and produce it yourself.
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Seems reasonable : o
Hoping someone in Europe will stock GC Loader. F that price!
Edit: Just checked another place in the EU, no reason it should be that much to the UK
@Suteneko Seems there’s a bug on his site. I can get the same reasonable cost to the UK if I put in the country first then postcode second with the state last
So GC Loader will be $95-ish + Import Tax to the UK
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Holy shit, GC Loader with a connector so you don’t need to solder it at all.
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Would love to see something like this where the original drive can still pass through so you can have both SD and drive at the same time.
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Yep, that’s my issue with these, I want to be able to play discs too, so then you need two consoles.
There are already ways to play GCN games off SD cards without losing disc support though. Use those.