http://www.nintendojo.com/infocus/view_item.php?1026862918

Datel is releasing a boot disk for imports, this should pave the way for a disk that boots backups. =)

Ok, but has anyone made working backups yet?? I really hope someone does though, cause I kinda wanna get a cube.

well, supposedly someone has copied them, but what i'm sayin is that a company other than Interact (which has a contract w/nintendo) Datel, has made a product that boots up on an unmodded GCN.

Are you sure that interact has a contract with nintendo?? I have a GS for my N64 and it says "this product is not sponsored endorsed or approved by nintendo" my playstation GS says the same thing, and gamesharks work on non-modded consoles.

I am not an expert on the subject but I don't think modding or finding a bootdisc for the gamecube is the problem for the back up scene on the Gamecube. From what I know is that actually backing up Gamecube games is the problem. Once someone comes up with a way to back up the games, the rest would be easy. It has been known for a while that it wouldn't be much harder than the dreamcast to crack the Gamecube because Nintendo put most of the copy protection in making thier own proprietary discs much like Sega did. Once someone comes up with a way to make backups of Gamecube games, it shouldn't be hard to do things like make a bootdisc or selfbootable games wich are much harder to make on something like the PS2 or the XBox where most of the copy protection is on the board itself. I do not consider myself an expert. If anything I have said is wrong or totally off base, I apologize in advance.

Yes what good is a boot disc if we cant backup the games?

Sound good 4 all u cubers out there. Looks like ur getting 1 step closer.

This sounds great.

CHECK THIS INFO OUT - LOOKS LIKE THERES DISC EMULATORS FOR THE GC ALREADY AVAILABLE!

"Unlike most next-generation development kits, GameCube's is sensibly priced and user-friendly. It, of course, contains all the hardware and software one would need to create a game, but it's most important feature revolves around the disc drive. Unlike other disc-based development systems, GameCube's uses a large 1.5GB hard-drive, hand-cart. This cartridge can easily be removed from the kit by yanking it out by its large, sturdy T-shaped handle.

The most important function of this cart is it's ability to perfectly emulate the GameCube's disc drive. Other development systems may offer the ease of pulling the data from a networked hard drive, but this can often lead to neglecting load times until later cycles of development. With GameCube's large capacity, disc emulation cartridge a developer can repeatedly update the information on the cart by plugging it into a "burner" of sorts. This "burner" writes information to the cartridge and stores it just as it would on the actual miniature sized DVDs that GameCube uses. "

MMM interesting!

ive heard from a good source that those nice little men in china have already made backups for the gc and they will be out very soon , now isnt that good news !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! .
:) as soon as i hear more i will let you know,ps im asian myself,sorry if i have offended anyone non intended.

@rudey, that could be considered racist and racism has NO place on this board, OK??

Originally posted by rudey
ive heard from a good source that those nice little slanty eyed men in china have already made backups for the gc and they will be out very soon , now isnt that good news !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! .
:) as soon as i hear more i will let you know,

Some of my releavies are 'slanty eyed men' and you have no right to call them that.


Fool.

sorry 4 offence :( non intended

lighten up people!

interesting,thanks for the article
if i hear more about this i might consider buying a gamecube..

ITs ok m8 i just have a very mixed family and I dont like people who are raceist in anyway what so ever.

The point people are missing about the gameshark cd is that it allows us poor brits to play cheap imported ntsc games ,and also play res evil instead of waiting till september for the pal version.
now where can i get one!

Originally posted by stuart1997
The point people are missing about the gameshark cd is that it allows us poor brits to play cheap imported ntsc games ,and also play res evil instead of waiting till september for the pal version.
now where can i get one!

Cheap???? Aren't most Japanese games 9800 Yen??

Which is about 50 quid ( today 1 GBP = 182 Yen)

Usually i found that grey imports were way more expensive than UK games. You payed for the privelige of owning the game before your mates.
Mind you ...it's been a while since i bought an import game...things may have changed

i think we may b jumping the gun a it in that where r the burners gona come from to make these mini me disks????i cant c them being widespread which means prices will stay relatively high for the backups-say in comparison to ps2-i hope im prooved wrong tho!!

they have been copied in china i think u will see them flood market soon, be a bit patient its only been 2 months since ngc has been released !

Erm the xbox didnt take to long.

you know why that is , people hate bill gates and microsoft , hackers go out of there way to hack anything to do will bil gate$ :)

Thats your good source then about the Backups??

THE DISCS HAVE BEEN CRACKED - THE GC FREELOADED!
Datel have cracked the discs and made the GC import CD called freeloader!
Oh and apparently nintendo are suing the arses off them right now!
BUT AT LEAST THEY WERE CRACKED!

hey man wat u do is you grab a pack of little cds from memorex and copy your gc games. HAHA! genius.....

sorry to disapoint you ThE FuNk

but no ones found a way to read gb discs, and dont think well will ever see it either,

Fool people have been selling them in the BST forums

on the mini disc for 15 a back up

and theres no way to boot them yet
hahaha

really

i can't wait for the bootdisk to be released and all problems with copy protection are resolved

how have datel created these discs?
Obviously they have been pressed but how have they by passed nintendos copy right?

Come on, theres always someone cleverer than the person who copy protected it......just 'em time to work their magic...

not to mention, the funk... those mini cds only hold like 200mb of data

Originally posted by thegoatherder13
not to mention, the funk... those mini cds only hold like 200mb of data
Actually they can only hold about 50 MB

This is gonna be great.

I have some of those mini cds that can hold up to 245 megs... so you never know

Correct me if I'm wrong,but are'nt we talking Mini DVD,s here.The Gamecube is based around DVD technology.It won't play CD,s and the capacity of the proprietary medium is 1.5GB.

Albion (by the way I,m not a newbie.I joined this forum in April 2000-and
am still waiting for my number of posts to be updated)

Since when do these mini DVDRs become essential? All we have to do is take the top off of the GCN and then regular size DVDRs will fit. Or we could use an external reader like the DR64.

THE OFFICIAL NINTENDO DISC LAYOUT FOR ALL INTERESTED

some VERY intersting info - JUST AS I SAID......

The nintendos optical discs are NOT written backward, nor do they read or SPIN backwards AND they dont read from inner hub to outer edge!

Nintendos discs nearly have been backed up! - its not far off
before we see some emulators and backups!

Names of the relevent GC kit, star wars dev video and some other websites for info.

DDH = Dolphin Development Hardware
NR = Nintendo Reader Debug console (Green)
NPDP = Cartridge based debug console (red)
GOD = GameCube Optical Disc
GC-R for developers beta disks (no bar code)
GC-ROM for final production disks (bar code present)


Quote
After modification I get several different readouts from my system. Some of this is incorrect,
i suspect there is a fake TOC in there somewhere.

There are at 2 checks for the system setting. Once to setup the bios menus etc
but if i change my switch after bootup i can put in a JP disk and it will come up with corrupted fonts!
it will load however

I've swapped disks with a GC-R i got and not had much luck there, the system bios puts up an error msg
in japanese saying turn of the power and read the user guide as the disk is not recognised.

As soon as the disk is inserted the bar code is read, then after that sucessfully completes the disk is
loaded, with the tracks starting in the centre and working out.

waverace has the audio track streamed, the track is on the outside of the disk as you can see which area
it is accessing.

as the check is only done once if that can be faked a homebrew min-dvd-r disk could be booted.

pikmin
data track 1 audio 509:43:34 play time
1049.00MB


Wave race miss information, real size in section below
2,147,450,880 bytes 253:45:34 (34 is the frames of a second) play time LBA 2293759 (lead out also starts here)
LBA 712880 length till next 2,293,759

track 1 was 2,293,759 blocks (509 Min, 43 Sec, 34 Frames).
lead out starts at block 2293759.

CD Serial: 11846C
1392MB, Datas 2047Mb
start 0020 length 99:57
correct end 158:255 data (mode 1)"
What was interesting was that it showed up as a mode 1 audio track, well personally I don't
mind how I read it, as long as I can get at the 2048 byte sector and rebuild an ISO9660 from
it later.

I also got some readings from another disk with 2 tracks, but that ones still a work in progress.

When ripping I was able to determine the full size of the disk when the errors changed, a subtle
difference in the MMC-3 SCSI command set
all 0x58

So to sum up the GC Disk size is 1,459,976,192 bytes total size max sector 712,879


#####################################here r
some VERY interesting links about the structure of nintendo discs - THIS IS OFFICIAL INFORMATION PLEASE HAVE A LOOK!

pattents:
matsu####a disc with barcode
http://www.delphion.com/details?&pn10=US06009057
http://www.delphion.com/details?&pn10=US05382776
http://www.delphion.com/details?&pn10=US05250787
http://www.delphion.com/details?pn10=US04831610
other references from there

Kewl-it sounds like somebody is have a crack at it...........i had wondered about the barcode bit as it is actually on the data surface unlike normal cds where it just relates to who manufactured the cd and is not read by cdrom anyway.

and as for the boot disc, i don't think it will do anymore than the regionfree mod does. but this is a sign that process is definately being made.

Dont GC discs spin the opposite direction? Someone told me so... anyone confirm this?

it wont be able to boot backups becasue we cant even copy them duhhhhhhhh

Yeah but progress is being made to where a non nintendo company has made a disc that works with it.. meaning the protection cant be that hard!

I can confirmed the the GC spins the same way as an other disc. I opened the lid while the disc was being accessed and it was spinning the same old way.

The same thing can be said about the DVD Region X for the PS2, that is on a offical PS2 cdr and it reads fine and I dont think Sony licensed it because it breaks the dvd region laws and if im not mistaken, that was by Datel also, seems like the company are good at getting discs made that can read like official games.

All i can say is well have to wait for broadband adapter to come out - If it does (i herd nintendo were trashing the internet capabilities) so we could rip data how the DC discs were ripped.

Or if you have a DVD drive in your PC that can read sub data try using ddump and front end to rip data off GCN discs. I herd it can rip up to 30% off the discs.... im not sure if its true though!
I know 30% not much but it would be interesting to see if it does work

http://www.geocities.com/ddumpfrontend/files/DDump110full.zip
use securom rip method!

man i had no idea that GC was going to get a bootdisc that fast

no limiy that site doesnt work?

you have to right click and save as - It works fine 4 me!

Its a good step in the right direction I think. Maybe not as fair of a progress we wanted but its a start.

Seems like the Big N put a lot of time and effort into protecting their discs...but I'm sure people will put a lot MORE time and effort into cracking it. It will happen, no doubt in my mind, just as every other console has been cracked, we just have to have patience...

yep - I hope it doesnt get cracked really because it will costs nintendo millions in piracy each year if it does!
I just think it will be interesting if it does and would love to see the emulators for the GCN to come out.
I bet it gets cracked whe when the broadband adapter get released!

first of all, why is everyone talking about the games not fitting onto a mini-Cd? It doesnt matter because the games wont be burnt onto a 220MB Mini-Cd. in case you didnt know, mini-dvd-r are available and if u buy them in bulk they can be as cheap as $3 ea.

do a search on google, im sure you'll find lots of sites selling mini-dvd, which coincidentally hold 1.5 GB of data. =)

i think i remember www.its-digitalmedia.com selling them, not sure if they still do though.

:)

all we can do it sit and wait!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! lol

yup

ps - the freeloader disk, btw is supposed to be released sometime this month.