Why Did Nintendo Make A GameCube With A Cartridge Slot? | The NPDP Reader
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- Опубліковано 22 лип 2024
- Nintendo Made A GameCube With A Cartridge Slot. What’s Inside?
In today’s episode, I’ll be taking a look at an interesting and very RARE piece of Nintendo Hardware, the NPDP Reader. This device, which looks very similar to a Gamecube, has a very unique feature. It has a cartridge slot! Instead of just taking a look at the exterior features of the device, I’ll be taking it completely apart to show you the inside and what makes this device so unique!
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Timestamps
0:00 Intro
3:11 Exterior Features Overview
3:42 Teardown: What’s Inside This Thing?!?
7:21 Major Takeaways
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#Gamecube #Nintendo #MachoNachoProductions
DISCLAIMER: This video is only for entertainment purposes. Any injury, damage, or loss that may result from improper use of tools, equipment, or from the information in this video is the sole responsibility of the viewer and is to be used at the discretion of the end user/viewer and not Macho Nacho Productions or Tito Perez. If you are uncertain about any step of the process or feel unsure about your skill level, seek a more authoritative source. - Ігри
I worked as a mastering Lab Technician at THQ during the GameCube days. We used to burn test builds to these 100s of these drives each day for testing. We had 3 NPDP writers which were Desktop Computer sized devices that had 8 slots to burn games to slots 8 at a time. We also made NR discs, but those were used less for things like testing load times and other compliance testing. I used to have 3 NPDP readers on my desk to test burn builds in different regions. I wish I had thought to keep some of that hardware, but back then it was just office equipment, like a stapler.
Dude that is so cool! Man, would have been sweet to keep some!
@@MachoNachoProductions When I got relocated to Montreal they told me to fill up moving boxes with what I needed. At that point, we were in the 360 / Ps3 / Wii era so I was like "well I won't need any of this GameCube stuff." And gave it back to IT.
@@teknohed to be fair, the dev consoles are technically property of the console maker, in this case Nintendo, not the company who uses them. Therefore, grabing it COULD have let to some legal trouble. Also dev consoles from the last few generations are really annoying, they have remote bricking if they are not returned.
@@JF743 Oh yeah, that's totally true. But the fall of THQ was not real organized. A lot of dev hardware went unaccounted for, I'm sure.
@@teknohed With the amount of junk being sent to Montreal when all the studios were closing before THQ fully went under I'm kind of surprised dev kits didn't get out in the wild. btw Billy here from the Montreal THQ IT team. It was my job to make sure all hardware was accounted for at that time. I guess I did a good job lol
Like others have said, the error button emulates a disc read error. There was a standard message that had to be displayed by the game code when this error was encountered. This was much easier to accomplish on the NPDP reader as opposed to "the nose grease test" or "tape test" we employed on NR discs back when I was working at TDK Mediactive which became 2K.
“Nose grease test” eeewwww…
what games have you worked on back in the day? if u can remember back.
i'd enjoyed quite a few of ur companies games from the Gameboy Color/Advance era.
The wires soldered to the bottom are just a bog standard region switch mod. The wire connected to the via runs to one of the pads of R6 on the top of the board, and the wire connected to the capacitor is just going to ground. You can use these as alternate solder points for doing a region mod on a standard NTSC-J Cube. I'm pretty sure they used those points as they were probably pulling the mainboards for these units out of retail units channel and modding them and they didn't want to pull the heatsinks off.
Unfortunately, most of the interesting bits are inside the NPDP cartridge - it's basically an optical drive emulator running off a HDD and just exposes an interface that matches the one of the original optical disc. The HDDs they used were little laptop drives and seemed to have a fairly high failure rate, although that might just be down to the fairly hard life they had - the cart also had shock watches inside it so Nintendo could refuse warranty repairs in the (common) case where someone dropped it and screwed up the drive.
That’s super interesting. Kinda stinks there wasn’t more complex components inside, but still really neat overall! Cheers!
@@MachoNachoProductions Yeah, it's honestly a really strange design decision - if it had been up to me, I would have just used interchangeable drives and put the emulation hardware into the console rather than forcing the user to buy multiple sets of fairly expensive circuitry. They are also the same cartridges that plug into the NPDP-GDEV, although in most cases they weren't actually used because people used the PC based ODEM instead.
You don't see many of them because they were fairly quickly replaced for most uses by the disc based NR-Reader.
@@MachoNachoProductions mr macho is it possible to make a 3ds home console like the gameboy or the gameboy advance?
so a laptop HDD like those old 2.5 inch PATA hard drives?
@@AUATUWVSH Yes - the drive was 6GB and partitioned into 4 1.5GB areas, which you could select using the buttons on the NPDP-Reader - it was also locked and "encrypted" - I put the latter in quotes because it was just XOR and more like obfuscation than anything else. Unfortunately, I don't have any of the hardware any more, so this is all from memory. I do remember being told that "NPDP" was "Nintendo Pseudo Disk Pack", but have no way of verifying this. Oh, and although the user password on the drive is device specific the master password is common - since the security mode is set to "high" (rather than maximum) you can just unlock the drive using the master password without erasing it - the password (common to all units..) is "N-PDP Master Passwd", so you can just unlock it using something like hdparm, dump the drive then figure out the XOR constant by looking at the parts of the GCM headers that are normally zero. Honestly gives me the feeling that the engineer that designed it was told to "add security" - but thought it was pretty much a waste of time and didn't bother to put any effort into it. On top of this, if you plug in an unlocked drive then the code in the SH3 will helpfully lock it for you, including setting the passwords - so if you have access to an IDE analyzer you can just see what the passwords are (both user and master) simply by looking at the logs.
I would imagine the "pseudo-read error" button probably forces the devkit to think it had problems reading from the game disc (cartridge in this case). I'd imagine this is so they can see how that affects the runtime of their game and gracefully handle that situation. Since otherwise they may be unable to reproduce such an issue and may not know if their code works.
That’s an interesting hypothesis. That actually makes a lot of sense. I guess if they make a pseudo error they can test how the game handles it.
@@MachoNachoProductions "pseudo" just means "artificial", as in the error is not an error created through an actual failure, but initiated in a controlled sense.
Imagine a game like Metroid Prime. Before you go through the door into the next room, the game has to load in the room data from the disc. If the game disc is scratched and it is unable to successfully load the room, the game has to handle that case. In Metroid Prime's case, the gameplay pauses and an error screen is shown that the disc is unreadable, and you have to reset the GameCube. Having a way to simulate that error would have been necessary in order to test that the error screen works. If they couldn't test it, or flat out ignored the possibility of read errors, the game would most likely crash due to other aspects of the game trying to access data that isn't there.
I can confirm. I worked on a GameCube game years ago, and Nintendo required that you gracefully handle read errors, so you needed a way to simulate this.
@@Matt23488 I remember playing prime 3 off a flash drive on my Wii. The flash drive failed on me mid game and I got trapped in a room the game didn't crash for like 6 minutes but none of the doors would open in that room and even the morph ball door in the tunnel that opens automatically got stuck. At first I thought ooh neat but then it got creepy once the game music stopped just bad vibes felt like the game was watching me like it knew I was there and it had me under a spot light. I would rather the game just crash.
@@amaiorano yeah I figured that was probably one of the requirements. I know they typically have like a QA checklist of things you must make sure of before they will even consider accepting the game, and handling a disc-read error would definitely be on the list. Thanks for confirming!
On the switch at about 7:40, this is quite common at least in my company for product development, we all use internal naming for parts within a device we're designing like those, and pretty much the same naming scheme. It all organizes stuff a lot better when you have ~50+ technical drawings of several parts on a device/machine, and since we gotta do it for organization internally anyway, I imagine Nintendo printing it on a silk-screen is a no-brainer, also helping fixing the device when it inevitably needs it.
I actually bought almost the full setup many many years ago during a garage sale. It came with the reader, the gdev, the Marlin tower, controllers, carts and various boards. It's been sitting on my shelves. Interesting to learn a little more about it.
imho get in touch with Tito so he can show all of us who havent seen these things :)
please get in touch with this guy or hard for games it would be awesome to have this documented
I have the next generations version of the gdev, a NDEV. It had advanced at that point that it ran of a mostly regular PC, which i also have the software for.
@@MinorLG you need to dump that shit bro
@@MinorLG dump it!
This doesn't look like a devkit actually, it looks like a test kit used by QA teams. A devkit used by programmers would have some sort of debugging interface.
Dude, this was GREAT. I've never even heard of this before. It's always nice to get to learn something new in the retro space. It's a rare treat these days.
Hey Tito, have you tried swapping in an optical drive to see if it boots as normal?
I haven’t but that would be a very interesting experiment
It should, looks to be a bog standard NTSC-J mainboard with a region switch mod. The special sauce is in the cart reader.
I could imagine a working retail Gamecube with that region switch implemented. Being able to go from playing say Super Mario Sunshine, turning off the Gamecube, flipping the switch from US to JPN and then being able to play a game exclusive to Japan or a version of a game released in the US that might be an earlier version only released to the Japanese player base.
@@MachoNachoProductions I'd love to see this too, was checking comments because I was thinking the same thing.
It probably would work, unless they did something funky with the system ROM image; heck, you might be able to run unsigned code.
What I find really interesting is the physical region switch, because there's a hardmod to install a physical region switch by soldering wires to a specific pad and installing a switch. This makes me wonder if this physical region switch is a leftover from these types of devkits or not.
Hard 4 games covers this model and the other two dev kits. in a few videos. There were 3 different Dev kits the original Dolphin Dev kit and the two "Modified" GameCube dev kits.
Edit: you might want to hit him up to borrow one of his NPDP Cartridges
My guess is the error button simulates a disk failung to read data. I guess it could be pressed when a level is being loaded or something like that so the devs can handle it by either attenpting again or proving an error to the user.
True, that’s an interesting hypothesis!
And not just crashing, very good.
I was thinking the same thing, and most likely makes most sense
Might also be used to test things like ability to soft reset on crash, memory card corruption during read/write, whether assets were fully loaded into memory during a level etc
It is up to the game dev to determine how the software handles the read error. Some games completely quit, others continue playing. How many times do you retry, what does your retry screen look like? Do you tell the user right away there is a disc error, or do you notify after X number of errors. And so on…
I use to be a QA Operation Tech for THQ. I remember having to deal with stacks of these damn things...
I hope you kept some 😅
@@MachoNachoProductions I wish. I did end up with a couple of Wide Boys, AGB and CGB, and a DS kit that lets me play on the TV.
Why didn't I know this existed? I love stuff like this, something fresh.
Same here! I feel like there is so much strange and obscure game tech out there!
I rememeber this as well back in the good days of the Cube. Everyone had these on their desks as previously mentioned from other posters. Tested and ran compliance on these for Namco back in the bay area. When we moved to 360 and ps3 these just sat in a storage never to be heard from again.
My bet is that the "mystery cable" soldered to the underside of the board is for the US/JP IPL selection switch, and is used to bind an EPROM address pin to a 0 or 1 state depending on the toggle switch. It's a trick I've used to toggle between different boot ROMs on old 8 and 16-bit computers.
Is that realy the first teardown of a game cube devkit unit ?
Awesome !!!
I believe it is, I’ve looked around to try and find photos of the internals and couldn’t find any
This video was a nice change of pace! It's too bad you couldn't procure an actual cart for this dev kit. That would have been cool to see! On a side note, I kinda dig that shade of red it came in; would've been nice to see a regular GameCube shell in that color
Glad you enjoyed this one Brian! I’ll definitely open up a npdp cart if I ever get my hands on one
Gamecube in this color exists and called Gundam Char Bundle
(5:23) I think that button fakes a disc scratch when pressed, so developers could simulate scratched GameCube game discs (or Wii game discs in the case of the RVT-H)
This thing looks so amazing.
Hard4Games too had those a while ago, I would have loved to see Nintendo releasing more colours than just purple, silver (and orange in Japan with black being contrast rather than colour) to the market.
Development kit, You can find the Dolphin carts for it ! (they even used them in the bigger dev kit)
I definitely need to find a cart for it. Would be very interesting to see what’s in the cart itself
@@MachoNachoProductions you could try reaching out to hard4games, he has a few
Love these weird looking hardware... keep sharing them.
And congratz with your 100k, your content is awesome 👌
Dang, that’s a really cool piece of history that I’ve never known of! Sort of thing I’m used to seeing from other channels, but I’m glad you’re getting into showing off this sort of stuff 👍
Wow this is facinating! I've NEVER heard of this particular model before. Thanks for sharing !
Glad you enjoyed it Retro Crisis!!
I'm just imagining Nintendo making a disc with a cartridge top on the top so your cartridge spins while you play.
That would be insanity but cool 😅
@@MachoNachoProductions Might scratch the disc though lol
It just seems like something they'd do to get backward compatibility into the GC
*MachoNacho:* "This is a Nintendo Gamecube. But you may notice there's something strange with this particular model"
*Me:* "IT'S BURGUNDY COLORED!!! 😍🤩"
Tito. My dude. These production values are insane. You are doing awesome work!
Thank you so much 🙏 that really means a lot! Cheers!
Tito, loving the content you've been bringing to us lately. Don't get me wrong, I love the console modding but getting to see development kits that I will never have a chance to own/open is pretty awesome. Keep up the great content! 🙌🙌🙌
I work as a software tester and a psuedo disc read is as what people have already commented. It simulates a disc read fail, e.g an example test would be: When prompted to insert disc 2 hit read error for expected read error outcome.
The pseudo read error thing is probably to test how your game handles disc read errors.
I remembered subscribing to your channel before you hit 100k . Congratulations bro. Great videos👍
Thank you Stephon 🙏
Loved the video, thanks for this!
Wicked video at the same time the channel is growing . Good looks .
Thank you 🙏!
Your thumbnail made me think it wasn't an npdp reader but it's still cool to get more videos covering it.
Notice that the main motherboard next to the CPU is also labeled DOL-CPU-01
Yep, it’s a standard motherboard
I remember seeing one of these and a real kind of colour one on hard4games a few years ago, never thought I'd get to see inside of one though! Thanks again for another great video Tito!
9:05 - The HC08 is just a quad 2-input AND gate chip.
The HC04 is a hex inverter (six NOT gates in one chip).
They are likely just buffering some basic chip select, control, or clock signals to/from the cart.
(HC usually stands for "High-speed CMOS", a very common type of standard logic chip.)
EDIT: I should add that the HC family chips normally have part numbers starting with "74".
But on these tiny TSSOP package variants, they tend to omit the 74, so they can fit more (readable) text on.
So the full part number would be 74HC08T14 and 74HC04T14, where the T means "TSSOP", and the 14 is the pin count.
I never really looked into this dev console much before. It's interesting that almost all of the "magic" happens in the cart, there's barely any logic added to the GC itself.
Oh, btw, the smaller chips on those interface boards are mostly labelled as "DA" on the silkscreen. Those are likely just clamp diodes for ESD protection or voltage clamping. DA usually just means "Diode Array", so more than one diode in each chip.
IIRC, the GC DVD drive is a bi-directional 8-bit bus with a few control signals.
Rough pinout of the LED board. I was a bit bored tonight. lol...
1.
2. Green LED D3 (DISK 0).
3.
4. Green LED D4 (DISK 1).
5. Green LED D5 (DISK 2).
6.
7. Green LED D6 (DISK 3).
8. Yellow LED D7 (NO DISK).
9.
10. Amber LED D8 (?).
11. Button SW1 (COVER). "Open / Close"
12.
13. Button SW2 (DISK). "Disk Change"
14.
15.
16. Button SW3 (ERROR). "Error"
All unlabelled pins here are likely all connected to the Ground plane.
so awesome,, im damn near a fanatic about the gamecube and i've never heard of this, great informative vid
So glad you enjoyed it Saidai!
your videos are insane u deserve big things
owaa amazing and helpful video with good sound and video quality with proper instruction.its working on my device.
I saw that the base motherboard may be an actual GameCube retail board. I saw DOL-CPU-01 printed on the board, where DOL is for Dolphin and is the same code used for a normal retail GameCube.
Justo lo que buscaba para acompañar mi desayuno ❤️
The HC08 and HC04 chips are most likely a 74HC08 (a quad 2-input AND gate chip) and a 74HC04 (a hex inverter chip.) Not sure what they're doing there though.
Great content! Can't believe I've never heard of this thing
Can you dump the IPL from that unit? You can custom code on it by replacing the NPDP-SubA-02 board by a modded drive or a GC-Loader or you can solder in a picoboot.
I’ll definitely do that just need to make sure I understand how to
Would be interesting to see what's on it, but I think it's probably running the stock IPL as this would make the most sense for a dev unit like this -- running finished or near finished code on a retail unit to match the environment of a retail unit as opposed to a dev kit that allows you to access memory and has more debug features.
Oh come on. This has to be viral video man. This is unreal!
Thank you for being the final push for inspiration for me to get my channel going Tit! Keep slaying it here man. You are doing amazing work for video game history preservation.
The wire soldered to the motherboard is the region switch. I'm pretty sure you can do that mod to a standard Gamecube
0:55 "I'm sure many of you wonder if it can play NES cartridges."
*_*OH I WONDER WHY THAT MIGHT BE, MR. THUMBNAIL.*_*
This is fantastic! Thank you for sharing
That's really cool. Hopefully you'll find a cartridge to complete the set!
Let’s hope 🙏
Between simply being so out of the ordinary, and the exposed microswitches and 5mm LEDs (Seriously, no buttons to click the switches? No light-pipes or lenses for the LEDs??) I totally thought this was a mod somebody made, or at the very least some Taiwanese magicom-style device. From appearance alone, I never would've guessed it was official NCL hardware, devkit or otherwise! 🤔 Love that exclusive red GC, it's a rad look.
UA-cam algorithm brought me here. I am not a collector, tech wizard, or Nintendo buff, but genuinely appreciate your excellent tear down and documentation approach to this. There is room for improvement, sure; but you provided sufficient information for people to at least attempt to recreate this device with an original gamecube, one-off pcb manufacturing, and 3D printing skills. Part of me hopes somebody tries this. Now, if only an owner of that special cartridge would do a similar teardown...
I assume the error button would be to simulate a DVD read error. EG scratch on the disk, vibration that causes it to skip etc. Im sure they would be very useful as a game dev to ensure your game handles it in a graceful manner and doesnt just lockup and crash
If you did not know, NPDP stands for Nintendo Pseudo Disc Pack. We only learned what the acronym stood for thanks to the 2020 Gigaleaks!
Nice teardown Tito! :-3
I have a retail GC since April 30th 2001. 4 days before the official release here. 😁🙈
I have never seen a video teardown of the NPDP until now!
I always thought the GameCube had two faces on the front 😂 the two controller ports are eyes and the card slot was a mouth
I'm sure it's been stated a few times by now for the two wires in the bottom are how we used to do reaching mods for the GameCube back in the day so it's just an extension cable that goes and leads to the switch
The HC08 chip is most likely a quad 2-input NAND gate chip, aka 74HC08.
HC04 = 74HC04 Hex Inverter.
That’s super awesome! It’d be cool if someone could create an NPDP cartridge to use with this.
It looks like the SubB01 board has traces that were drawn by hand, instead of by a computer program. Really neat.
Two things:
Using tamper stickers to void warranties has been ruled illegal. The FTC link is in the response below.
On the small PCB thing, they just use leftover space on a larger main PCB. They break it out and build it. That's why you see those broken perforated legs around the outside of it.
Thats awesome man thanks!
I don't know if it's been answered, but the psudeo-read error button is to test how a game would react with a disc error. For things like read error displays and to make sure the game wouldn't just crash. Hope I helped!
Also the region switch can be applied to a retailer one finding some random resistors pads on the board and bridging or not bridging thats pads to ground
that color of the gamecube npdp looks cool, would have brought a retail one like it.
I never met this gamecube before first time watching one thank you.
The mystery wires to the bottom are for the region switch. This version of the mod needs to get more screen time IMO since it's easier to install without the need to remove the heatsink.
Gcforever wiki has a good picture of this exact thing on their region switch page under the "how it works" section.
“Tear it down which has never been done before”
That tamper seal says otherwise…
I bet that region switch maps to the same 2 points you could bridge or switch to do the same thing to a retail GameCube. I got mine imported from Japan and had the region switch installed weeks before it launched in the US.
Great video that I geeked out over. How did you get this thing?
I'd love to see a video on that NR Reader. I have so many questions. Can it read retail discs? Is it region free?
I’ll be doing a video on that as well!
Would love a follow up if you ever obtain the special cartridge.
I would most definitely do a follow up video if I get my hands on one 👍
The Error button works like a time stamp and the code from the last 10 to 30 seconds and the next 10 seconds, all data is recorded for debugging. Usually this unit would have been connected to a PC before the screen.
Can't look right now, but that mystery wire appears to be for shunting that resistor which would function the region switch.
I looked at the pcb where the mysterios caple goes and it is connected straight to the region switch. I wonder if it would bei possible to add this to an normal gamecube
Pretty amazing video. Just curious, how close is that color of the unit to the original Famicom?
Before watching the video: Probably a dev kit. Dev kits need to be able to play new builds made many times a day (handfuls of times for artists, hundreds of times for programmers), and burning that many DVDs isn’t a good solution. Also, just because it had a “cartridge slot” doesn’t mean there wasn’t expensive (at the time) high-capacity flash memory or a laptop in the cartridge.
Thank you for your video
I'm guessing the two mystery wires have to do with the region switch, since I didn't see anything else interfacing directly with the mainboard that would enable changing which IPL is loaded.
That's pretty cool! I wonder if Nintendo was going to have the GameCube use cartridges in the beginning of designing it? And if so when did they decide to use disks?
It would have been very interesting to have gotten another Nintendo home console generation using cartridges.
I would never guessed that, thats just so wierd seeing gamecube with cartrige slot
It’s the strangest thing I’ve seen in a while 😅
I wonder if the 2 hand soldered cables are for the region switch, they are not soldered to the usual points you find on region switch mods,
great video
The region switch can be added to regular retail gamecubes by bridging two solder points on the MB.
Cool video! Have you ever thought about doing modding videos on the Japanese exclusives PS2/DVR? I just got one not too long ago, and IMO it's the best looking ps2
I really want to get one. If I do get my hands on one I’ll definitely mod it out 👍
@@MachoNachoProductions I got mine through sendico, payed 60 bucks for a fully working DESR-5000 model and also got a Japanese Playstation vita slim for 100 bucks.
This is pretty neat i never knew on of these existed. Hey on another note I think a video of your collection is in order we all know you have plenty to show lol
I definitely plan on doing that at some point!
Please do a teardown of the NR Reader next!
Can’t wait for another great video!!
Hope you enjoyed this one!
@@MachoNachoProductions I really did. Thank you for all the hard work you do.
Amazing video as always Tito. If you allow me to do a little critique. Is it possible to switch the BGM in you videos or doing a little playlist of BGMs. Or not music at all since your voice is not annoying to hear. Keep the good work.
Thank you Gonzalo! I definitely need to update the music 😅
The ICs on the main board appear to be for controlling the LEDs on the sub board.
It looks like you could take the pink shell and put it on a regular GC model, then you'd have a funky two-tone console. Obviously you'd need to also harvest the lid from another console, which might be a bit of work.
I think there is one GameCube version that has that color. The Char Aznable special edition Zeon GC. Man I wish I had one of those!
Que interesante Tito, esta si no me la sabía 🙂
on that cartridge pcb when he says NPDP all i thought of when i saw the solder joints was "No Person Damn Play"
Do you know where I could find a photo of the controller, I want to know if it is red/burgundy or a generic color
My guess where the wire hook to the under side maybe for the USA/JPN switch.
Totally agree!
Yes, it's just alternate points.
So its a test kit. Cool, worth a 15 minute video for sure.
Isn’t this color similar to the famicom disk system?
Nice video, I have a fascination with dev kits, some look very professional and others look like a bunch of wires recovered from a crash landing XD
Hmm I hadn’t thought of that. I’d day it is pretty close. The disk system may be a bit more red
I think it's interesting that the cartridge reader seems to have a parallel port as its slot. I imagine devs could copy their games straight onto the cart by plugging it into their development PC.
The mystical unreleased hot pink color, never thought I'd see it outside the obscure images from IGN! It would be super fun if someone made a 3rd party case in this color.