Article: The cartridge gamecube: Inside the NPDP gamecube.

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Go here for pictures and info on the internals of the NPDP gamecube!
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The first time you see a NPDP gamecube you're sure to be shocked. First, it's a beautiful reddish-purple color. Second is the huge cartridge shooting out the top. If it's seen without the cartridge, you're probably even more confused.

What is this strange device? This gamecube from the deep, dark depths of gaming? Obscure pretty much defines the NPDP gamecube.

Gamecube development has to be explained in short for you to get an idea.
First gen units were large, grey, rectangular enameled boxes called the NPDP-GDEV and the lesser and much cheaper NPDP-GBOX. Marginally cheaper than the NPDP-GBOX,the NPDP cube filled a cost niche but was soon outdated and quickly replaced by the NR reader (uses gamecube sized optical discs). As you can guess, there aren't an awful lot of them around in use. To give some sort of scale of use, the huge international development company these came from had only about seven in use.

The beta and first generation NPDP-GDEV development units used hard drives in cartridges for quick and portable storage. Theoretically, you could remove the cartridge and take it anywhere to program, demo,and debug. To play test, you could take it to a gangcopier and make copies for the playtesters or other team members.

In reality the cartridges are expensive. Monstrously so. They break easy if you drop them. So much so, the cartridge is designed to indicate if it's been abused. When you return it to nintendo for service (because you played desk pong with it), your asset management clerk is assured a nice call to tell him that you've voided the warranty.

The cartridge media is very fast, much faster than an optical system like the NR-reader is based on. The cartridges had enough room for four gamecube games. You can have a double disc game and room for programming tools on the cartridge. Eventually making copies to playtest was reduced, and when you had a new build you took it to the copy room and had them crank out 30 NR discs for the testmonkies. If you're like developer "X", you then shoved the unused NPDP gamecubes in a closet and forgot about them.

Mind you nintendo isn't too helpful a source for confidential information, or known for faxing over specs to people who possibly privately hold dev hardware. I'm not aware of any other sites with pictures of the unit, let alone the internals.

So let's crack this baby open.

Oh yeah, this is going to void the warranty, so I guess I'm screwed.



Gamecube, hexdriver. Hexdriver, gamecube.



What you are looking at is the motherboard cable running to the interface mounted in the lid. There the boot selector PCB plugs into the hdd interface.



This is some sort of hdd to gamecube bridge.



There's not much to the interface. I was expecting some huge asic there, but I guess not.



What is very interesting is that this board is practically a straight pass through from motherboard to the HDD interface. Possibly there is a large amount of circuitry in the hard drive cartridge itself.

I'll close this out with a nice picture of the machine top to bottom. Please remember that all images are property of assemblergames.com, and if you use or modify them without permission, your children will be born gay.

 

Didn't someone here have npdp cart internal pics?

 

Hey Shiggsy, is there an asic buried on these somewhere?

 

Here's a shocker, this is all IDE. So basically you're looking at those two little boards in the gc and under the HDD as being an ATA adapter for gamecube!

[size=+2]MK6015MAP[/size] [font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica] [/font]2.5-inch Hard Disk Drive
6.007GB capacity with 9.5mm height on 2.5'' form factor
Extra-thin, light and low power-consumption design suitable for mobile computing
SFF8201 standard compliant dimension
Read ahead cache and Write cache [size=-1]Basic Specifications[/size] [size=-1]Functional Specifications[/size] [size=-1]Reliability Characteristics[/size] [size=-1]Power Specifications[/size] [size=-1]Mechanical Specifications[/size] [size=-1]Environmental Limits[/size] [size=-1]Bios Setup[/size]
Basic Specifications Formatted Capacity 6.007GB Number of Disks 1 Number of Data Heads 2 Number of Cylinders 15,200 Bytes per Sector 512B Interface AT(ATA-2/ATA-3/ATA-4/ATA-5)

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Functional Specifications Seek Time Track-to-Track 3ms Average 13ms Maximum 24ms Average Latency 7.14ms Rotational Speed 4,200±0.1% rpm Data Transfer Rate Internal 103.9–192.7Mb/s Buffer to Host 16.6MB/s (PIO Mode) 66.7MB/s (Ultra DMA Mode) Buffer 256KB Interleave 1:1

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Reliability Characteristics MTTF 300,000H Product life 5 years or 20,000 POH

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Power Specifications Allowable Voltage +5V±5% Power Consumption (TYP.) Start 2.7W[font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica] [/font]Seek 2.3W Read/Write 1.9W[font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica] [/font]Idle 0.58W Stand-by 0.25W[font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica] [/font]Sleep 0.1W Power Efficiency* 0.097W/GB (Class D) [size=-1]*the Energy Saving Law-Japan[/size]

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Mechanical Specifications Dimensions 9.5(h) x 69.85(w) x 100(d)mm Weight 92g

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Environmental Limits Temperature Operating[font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica] [/font]5–55°C Non-Operating[font=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica] [/font]-20–60°C Humidity(No condensation) Operating 8–90%R.H. Non-Operating Vibration Operating 9.8m/s2 (1G) Non-Operating 49m/s2 (5G) Shock Operating 1,470m/s2 (150G) Non-Operating 6,860m/s2 (700G)

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Bios Setup Number of Logical Cylinders 12,416 Number of Logical Heads 15 Number of Logical Sectors per track 63 Number of Sectors
(LBA mode) 11,733,120

 

exactly what I was thinking, gamecube RAID BABY!!!

But in all practicality it makes trading HDD images of unreleased games very easy.

Pop the cart, copy the drive. Load to ftp. Trade.

Hey oldengineer, have anything interesting on your nr carts?

 

I added more names, I'll probably have to do larger ones next time, unless someone can tell me how to do semi transparent watermarks in photoshop with a new layer.