How do I load games from SD on gamecube?

[ehabcharek]

I'm thinking of getting a Xeno GC chip, as I found a cheap one, and was wondering how I would go about actually reading the games from the SD card. I read something about an app called swiss. Do I put it and some ISO's on the SD card and simply play?

 

[DuHasst0]

No, you burn the Swiss iso on a dvd, then with the xeno installed you can play your backup games from sd thru Swiss. Or you could burn your backups on dvd as well cause that's what the xeno was used for.

 

[ehabcharek]

oh..
Is there a way to load games from the SD card without the CD? I've seen portables that can do that
If not, do I burn swiss on one of those small DVD's?

 

[Blargaman91]

Loading games form an SD card without discs involves more or less replacing the disc drive with a Drive Replacement board, like a Wiikey Fusion or Wasp. There are good ways to go about doing that on badassconsoles.com

 

[ehabcharek]

I couldn't find information about wiikey nor wasp from the website you gave me, but that's ok. I don't think I'll be making a gamecube portable anytime soon. You know, with school and all. Though I got an extra gamecube today along with a gameboy player all for $12 . No GBP disk though, which is why I asked this question in the first place Also I have a japanese super mario sunshine I wanna play, and I read that the xeno is region free

 

[Diminuendo]

if mega restocks this, this is the absolute easiest way to load form an SD card while keeping your disc drive

http://www.badassconsoles.com/megadrive-v4/

 

[DuHasst0]

http://www.badassconsoles.com/drive-replacement/

Wasp for sale, also check the mega sticky for ashens wii drive and wii key fusion on gc guide and you should read thru his trimming guides, both of them

 

[ehabcharek]

so, I decided to go with the xeno chip for now. Don't have the time to make a portable, and I'm not gonna pay more for the same function. I do have another GCN though, and I'll probably use the wasp for that one.
Going back to the Xeno, does the DVD speed matter (the 2X or the 4X)?
I found this for cheaps, and it's 4X. Don't know if it's good for the job or not

 

[ehabcharek]

the XENO chips just arrived and I installed one of them to my GC. I don't know if it's a clone or a v2 cuz the second light is orange. Anyways, to try it out, I put in the only japanese game I have, Super Mario Sunshine. It boots up! and the menu works, but when I play the game, right after the plane crashes, I get an error with yellow text and black backround. I can't read it because it's japanese, but it has the english word "off" in it. I'm guessing it's this text
is that because of the chip or the disk?
other games (all of the other games I have worked on the GC before the installation of the chip) run fine

 

[ehabcharek]

I just got 20 ritek miniDVD's and burned 2 games. the first one was the gameboy player, and it works well. The other one is LOZ: wind waker. I think wind waker gives me the same error the japanese super mario sunshine does. here is a picture of the error message(both messages have yellow text and black background). I adjusted the laser pot to as low as 150, as I read online that this is the least I should go, otherwise the laser will be rendered useless. Nothing changed. I still get those messages. I think the only reason the gameboy player disk works is because the gamecube only needs to read it when it boots up, because it stops spinning after a little bit of powering on the system.

HOW DO I FIX THIS PLEASE HELP MEEE!!!

 

[megalomaniac]

I adjusted the laser pot to as low as 150, as I read online that this is the least I should go, otherwise the laser will be rendered useless.

not sure where this information is posted but it is not true at all!!
some drives wont even read at 150 ohms and needs to be adjusted further to like 100 ohm or 50 ohm.
If a drive cannot read a disk at about 150 ohm then the laser is really weak and needs more "power" so adjust the pot lower as needed until the disk can finally be read.

what does it mean if a pot needs to be adjusted really low? it means the laser is weak and will eventually fail...eventually can be 1 day or 1 year. There is no way to determine when it will fail.




If you have another DVD drive, replace the drive board onto that other DVD drive and try it out to determine if the problem was the DVD drive.
If you have a Wii, play it and see if you have the error again. if you have errors, then it might be the discs or the iso you loaded...if you have no errors, then its your GC DVD drive..


....But why did the Gameboy player disc work?
if using the same type of discs as the other titles you tried, then your media / burning software must be fine. So those titles giving you errors are either bad iso's or they need to read an area of the disc and failing to read that area which points to a laser or motor issue.


good luck

 

[ehabcharek]

thanks for the laser pot info! I will look into it.
About the games not working, I just tried wind waker again today, and as expected, it didn't work. However, after holding x while booting up the game it magically worked! I tried that again many other times, but only about 30% of the time holding down x fixed the problem. I don't understand why that is. Especially since the rom is NTSC to begin with. I used the same program and dvd drive to burn both wind waker and the gameboy player boot disk. I also used the same mini-DVD's (ritek). I also made a copy of swiss and that works perfectly fine.

I do not own a wii currently, but speaking of it, I know it's possible to connect a wii drive to the gamecube, but is it possible to wire a xenogc to it? cuz if that's possible, then we could load backups using a wii drive! I know there are more efficient ways to load backups nowadays with the wasps but what if someone would want to include a dvd drive to his GC portable? a dvd drive would be the best choice in my opinion

 

[trevor403]

It is no wonder the gameboy player disk is working for you. All it does is loads the executable then it stops the disk spinning (as you can probably see) so the cube isn't reading the disk anymore. The same goes for Swiss, it loads up then stops reading from the disk, unless you are loading your homebrew content from the disk obviously. Anyways the laser pot is a big factor in getting your games to work. You start to realize that different disk companies (SanDisk, Verbatim, etc.) like different settings. I use Verbatim at 200 ohm. You should pull out your multi-meter and stress test different ranges to find where your disks work well.

 

[megalomaniac]

trevor403, While media brand can also impact pot value, keep in mind the values that work for you might not work for others...
As I've pointed out above using 100 ohms or even 50 ohms, these values were required to successfully read the exact same disc across different drives tested...this directly points to a weak laser. This should also stand as proof alone that there is no exact value to use when adjusting a laser. For the most part, 150-250 ohms is a good rule of thumb, but the same rule of thumb does not work for every case and has to be broken sometimes.



ehabcharek, if you know how to jtag, you can convert the Xeno to a Wiikey 1 and wire that to a wii drive assuming you have an early drive which allows use of a Wiikey 1..you will have to investigate your options if you choose that route.

 

[ehabcharek]

to be honest, I've never heard of this jtag before. And I don't think I can explore new things with school and all T^T
So, because of that, I thought that the best thing to do was to get an SDgecko to play the ISOs from an SD card. I got the adapter in the mail yesterday (it says WiiSD on it), and I used a 2GB sandisk SD card I had laying around. Swiss could see the SD card and show the contents of it. I tried 3 games on it and none of them work! I tried megaman anniversary collection (this one loads but with only a part of the loading screen visible and freezes after a second or 2), gameboy player startup disk (this one displays an error saying "failed to find necessary functions for patching" and then flashes green and then freezes on a black screen), and finally I tried smash bros melee (this one doesn't show the error but also does the flash thing and freezes on the black screen).

what do you think the problem is? is it the SD card? what is the best brand/size of SD card to use with swiss?

 

[ehabcharek]

I just tested a couple of games on the SD adapter, and only 2 seem to work so far. those 2 are mega man x collection and DBZ budokai 2. Both of these games have no info in the patch options in the swiss compatibility page, and swiss mentions that both games are in 4 fragments. How do I get other games to work?

PLEASE ANSWER MEE!!!

 

[ehabcharek]

bump

I still need an answer, you guys! DX