the other day i was thinking about the idea of gamecube homebrew. i wonder if it'll ever become a thing. i suppose it's hard to test on the real hardware without somewhat invasive modding since the disc format is proprietary... which would also make physical game releases almost impossible...
@Hearth physically it's the size of a dvd but im pretty sure the format differs. iirc it's something to do with encryption that involves a YAG-laser burst cutting area engraved into the disk
@typhlosion i think that's just the copy protection that a modded console would ignore anyway
-F
@Hearth i mean ideally you wouldn't need a modded console to play a homebrew game you bought a disc for
@typhlosion @Hearth yeah there's a reason the dreamcast tends to receive more of these in comparison
@typhlosion gamecube homebrew is extremely a thing, there are plenty of popular games (including melee) with exploits that let you launch software from special memory card files and hardmods that can do basically anything up to and including replacing the disc drive entirely
the reason wii homebrew was so big so fast was that it's basically a funny gamecube, and so it benefitted from a healthy gamecube homebrew scene. a lot of wii homebrew (GCMM comes to mind) is one project with the wii and the gamecube as supported compilation targets
@monorail sorry - i guess i meant "a thing" in the sense that e.g. nes or dreamcast homebrew are a thing, with fully standalone homebrew games still being made and sometimes physically released to this day. i'm not aware of such projects for the gamecube
@monorail (granted that might be just cos im not looking in the right places)
@typhlosion ohhhh i gotcha
fully standalone and physical might be a ways off? not sure, i'm not that close to that kind of scene. but i have at least heard of smaller games (like, really small, game jam kinda games) being released in a format that you can load the same way you load backups
@typhlosion I forget which console, but seem to recall that some console had a thing someone made that could plug into an expansion port and just shove data into the system, avoiding the disc drive entirely. I wonder if something like that could work for the GameCube?
Especially since you can shove a first-party thing in the bottom and play GameBoy games on it already...
@typhlosion (the lines between mod and add-on get blurry sometimes, but it at least would leave the main device 100% stock which is nice!)
@typhlosion Is the disc format proprietary? I thought it was a standard 8 cm mini-dvd, like the ones they sold for camcorders
-F