Yet another off the cuff mod of mine that spawned from boredom. |
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- What is it?: A GameCube with the GBA player built-in.
- What does it do?: Plays GB/GBC/GBA games without the need for the GBA Player tumour attached to the GC.
- Why?: Just to see if I could.
I compared the layouts of the GBA player internals and the bottom of the GC and it became clear that it was possible to make enough room to fit everything required as well as the Serial port for SD loading. There wasn't enough room to keep the BBA port however and that is the only compromise this mod makes to the OG unit.
Using Tesser Wolf's GC bottom shell model as a base I gutted the internals of the model and began rebuilding both the GC and and GBA player mounts using my 3D scans as a reference.
It took 4 printed iterations to settle on a final design and a good couple hours of port removal and wiring.
Due to the GBA player already having poor signal integrity to the GC even in stock form it was very important to keep the wiring as short and clean as possible between the units to minimise any potential issues. I ended up soldering 34awg magnet wire to the GBA player connector port and fed them through the corresponding ports on the GC side, making sure to keep them as short and tight as possible.
On initial testing I did have issues with system instability and audio not working correctly but after a push in the right direction from Extrems the issues seemed to be the audio RAM. It seems that during the port removal phase of the build the hot air had broken some connections between the board and the audio RAM, reflowing the legs resolved these issues.
Files are attached if you want to give it a go yourself, but be warned that the wiring side of this project is pretty tedious and it could really do with a flex PCB to simplify the whole process.
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