Any steering wheel recommendations?
Would be great if it did GC and PS2. Though I have a PS2 to GameCube adapter if that would work with a PS2 wheel?
Has to have rumble. Pedals not essential.
That’s a good question. Confession - I’ve never used a steering wheel with a console before. Unless you count the shells that came with Mario Kart Wii (I don’t).
I imagine that the games are harder to play with a real steering wheel though.
I’m looking at a Thrustmaster Universal Challenge. It’s small but works on PS/GC/Xbox. And WiiU/Switch/PC/Mac with a GameCube USB converter.
I’m likely to use this for one game and then store it. You know the drill.
I’m currently playing The Italian Job, mostly with the wheel I mentioned above. It’s great.
Because the game can’t be forced to 480p on my hardware setup, I’m using Dolphin to play it. SSAA 2x down to 640x480 - just beautiful.
GameCube never been so fun and looked so good!
I finally got my GC Loader yesterday and spent the whole evening installing it, setting up the SD card, backing up my games (I initially wanted to manually do it myself by ripping my discs using my hacked Wii… but I decided to just download the ISO files instead. Much faster and I don’t have to drag out my Wii and wrestle with the wiimotes and such.)
Oh man, once it was up and running… what a huge improvement! Not having to worry that I’ll get a disc read error every time I open a door in Metroid Prime is such a major relief. Not having to worry that my optical drive won’t read my SD Media Launcher disc just so I can load GBI to play some Advance Wars is absolutely amazing.
I’m so happy to be able to play my GC games again without a lot of pain. No more tuning the damn laser pot. No more fussing about with dodgy lasers from AliExpress that may or may not work. I can finally just play my games!
I do have a question for anyone else who owns a GC Loader: does Swiss cancel the GC boot up sequence midway before it loads? It kind of sucks not being able to see the whole sequence with the cube jumping.
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I’ve not set mine up yet but that sounds great. My GC collection is pretty big but if you recommend downloading the ISO I’ll probably do that. Looking forward to experiencing the improved loading times!
Is it cutting it shorter than this (5:40)?
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Looking forward to experiencing the improved loading times!
You’ll love it, I’m sure! Even the autodisc switching is so seamless and convenient. I accidentally loaded a disc 2 save file on Tales of Symphonia while on the disc 1 ISO, and it was smart enough to switch. Absolutely fantastic.
Is it cutting it shorter than this (5:40)?
Much shorter. The small cube barely makes it to the part where it scrolls downwards and skips
immediately to Swiss. It’s so fast my OSSC barely has time to sync before Swiss loads.
Hmm. I see Madlittlepixel’s gamecube loads normally. I wonder what’s wrong with mine? If I take out the SD card it loads to the boot menu like normal.
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Gaddam that is fast! Did it ship with the 1.0.1 firmware? I see “Decreased FPGA boot time.” in the change list, I wonder if that could be it
No, mine had 1.0.0 and it booted up fast even then. I was actually initially confused and thought something was wrong with my GC when the boot sequence cut out but then when I saw the Swiss menu, I immediately upgraded the firmware to 1.0.1 heh.
I do wonder if the decreased FPGA boot time is related to my issue though.
Well, I raised an issue on the firmware’s github. We’ll see what the creator has to say!
As cool as the speed to Swiss is in your clip I’d prefer the full boot sequence! Need my bouncing cube and jingle.
Nice, hopefully he can sort it out.
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You can set Swiss to start each game with the IPL boot sequence. AFAIK it makes things a bit more compatible in general.
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Yeah, I saw the Boot with IPL option but would rather have it play out fully before Swiss loads. Extrems says its something Swiss is doing and nothing to do with GC Loader, but then didn’t give any workaround 
edit: ohhhh i just saw this on an older release of Swiss:
“A new fastboot apploader has been introduced. Users with an optical drive emulator can now enjoy near-instant access to Swiss. You can use the boot through IPL feature to bring back the boot animation when loading games.”
I guess it’s a feature!
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I just wanted to express my appreciation for the Octo-gate analogue stick on the GameCube, which may well be the best analogue stick Nintendo has ever shipped.
Was playing through my PS2 copy of Burnout until I got to where I did on GameCube all those years ago, so I thought I’d switch over.
And wow, what a difference the analogue stick makes. Like with Super Monkey Ball, F-Zero GX and Kiririn Squash, this stick absolutely excels at minute precision control, and the large surface area combined with Octo-gate make precise movements along specific directions extremely easy to pull off.
The Muscle car in Burnout basically auto-drifts if you push the analogue stick beyond a certain point, so you need to constantly make minute movements, especially to avoid traffic, and I was floored by how much more manageable this was with a GameCube controller compared with the trusty DualShock 2, despite the GameCube version being a port with less development time behind it.
This style of stick got one more outing with Wii, do you think Nintendo ditched it with Wii U and the Switch because shooters and third person twinstick camera controls became dominant? Either way, the move to DualShock style sticks certainly makes them less versatile for other genres and even things like using the stick for selecting items on menus.
Does anyone know why the N64, GC and Wii sticks had a neutral position check at the start of game boot?
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I think I remember having one off-centre at boot a couple of times, and it treats wherever it is as the centre until you reboot.
The controller was face down on the carpet and off to the side. When the stick returned to the centre Mario was wandering off by himself.
As for why this is the case though, I’m not sure.
Probably because as the stick ages it’s dead zone Increases in diameter. So each time you start the system, it would check what “neutral” is at that time.
That’s just a guess though. Remember, this is before systems had an OS to configure such things.
Whatever reason they have must be a poor one for me. That octo-gate is brilliant. Super Monkey Ball excels because of it and many games are made better because of it. I wish they’d bring it back
I agree the octo gate is superior to the circle gate. It gives you 360 degrees of control but with more precision since you have the 4 cardinal and 4 intercardinal directions as physically tactile reference points.
I think they removed it out of a desire to blend in more with “modern” controllers or whatever.
I think it’s a downgrade though.
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I kept wanting an octo gate when playing Celeste.
You played Celeste with an analogue stick? You madman.
I’d never thought of it like that, for some reason I thought maybe it was down to how the stick works on a technical level but this makes sense. The 3DS and Switch both have calibration at a system level (not sure about Wii U) and they ditched the neutral position check at boot.
Tell me about it! I played Super Monkey Ball Deluxe for the first time on Xbox earlier this year and while technically speaking it’s a much better port than the choppy PS2 version, like that PS2 version the analogue stick just isn’t up to the task, just rolling down thin straight pathways is a real challenge in itself. Had similar problems with the (rubbish) outsourced 3DS and Vita games as well.
The new sticks certainly are smoother for crosshairs-style aiming camera control in shooters, but something has been lost in almost every other genre, the octogate added immense versatility to the stick. Just remembered how good it was in Trauma Center on Wii - each of your eight tools was mapped to a direction on the stick. The clack-y Octo-gate made it a pleasure to switch between them, and muscle memory meant you’d automatically just move your thumb toward the right tool when you needed it. Great interface design there from Atlus
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