DOL-101 Gamecube and XenoGC clone

It doesn't fail, because surface mount components still have legs, and sometimes gap with glue from the pick & place machine. Don't get me started on big BGA's (PS3 YLOD anyone?), we all know those fail, and it's not just due to lead free solder, again heat related.

 

Its directly related to lead free solder - its more brittle and that is what cracks. Also requiring higher temps and doesnt wet as well.

I have been installing cube chips a long time, never had one break in the way you describe. The leaded solder has enough "give" to account for the tiny amount of movement you are describing.

This is even a actual manufacturing technique, look at anything using a module with castellations - same thing.

 

All my xenos were wireless, well I've only done three so far, for myself

 

The quick soldered (wireless) xenoGC I've had fail, and people reported to me, were between 3-5 year old installations. Either retouch the solder points with a soldering iron, and have it fail in another year or so, or do it proper by wire.

I know the big brands (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple...anything made at the foxconn factory in China) don't give shit about reliability these days as long as it doesn't fail within warranty period, but here we deal with retro stuff, which deserves better quality than the short term profit driven markets provide.

BGA is total fail as a package, which gets worse the more balls/points it has. Just search around for research about this, and you will see all tests typically fails after a few years of stress testing with "normal" consumer change in heat (power off and on cycles). It's a compromise, to be able to deliver advanced chips at reasonable cost soldered directly to PCB, as opposed to having an expensive socket racking up the BOM cost.

 

The only failed installs I've ever had were because of bridging under the chip doing a quick solder install. I don't believe any of my Xenos were "originals". I just do wire installs in case someone wants to remove it for whatever reason as I've had requests to not have one installed and I simply install them into every cube that goes into stock.

I'll also +1 the picky AF nature of the cube. My Taiyo Yudens have the best success rate with 100% for me so far. Most cubes need some amount of adjustment in order for them to consistently read them and one or two out of 100+ that refused to read anything I've fed it regardless of output power. Just swap in another DVD-ROM and mark it as only usable for retails.

 

Welp. I received my new chip from Zer0-2k11 yesterday and I installed it. Sadly, the Gamecube still behaves the same: it can't reliably read original games with the chip, but it reads them fine without. I'm really starting to think there's something wrong with that Gamecube.

I went straight to a wired install this time to avoid problems. I also thoroughly inspected the CN302 connector and its surroundings before and after the install and I cannot see anything wrong. None of the pads are lifted, all traces have continuity from pads to vias, none of the solder joints are bridging, and all the wires go where they should go.

The LEDs on the new chip are yellow/red instead of red/red which is much more informative. I can't tell whether the microcontroller is a ATMEGA8L or ATMEGA8A because the markings were ground down. The PCB says "xeno" instead of "xen8".

Looking at the PCB layout and the XenoGC source code, the red LED is connected to PD2, which is where a green, blue or yellow LED is supposed to be, and the yellow LED is connected to PD3, which is where a red LED is supposed to be. This means they're essentially inverted, and red means blue/green/yellow while yellow means red.

The LED sequence I get when I press on the cover switch and let a disc spin is yellow, small pause, yellow, longer pause, and constant red. I also get the same sequence if I start the Gamecube without pressing the cover switch.

Since the LEDs are inverted, what I'm really getting is red, red, yellow, which would indicate success, as far as the modchip is concerned. That is the same sequence I'm getting as in this video: , but with inverted colors.

I really don't know what's going on. The modchip really seems to work as it should, but somehow, the patch it's uploading keeps the drive from reading original games reliably.

I guess my next course of action should be to try with another Gamecube...

 

What about a modchip other than XenoGC? Narrow it down further yet.

 

Good news! Today I received the untested Gamecube I bought for relatively cheap on eBay, installed the chip and it finally worked properly!

Indeed, with the chip installed, the new Gamecube still reads original games without a hitch, as well as a backup I burned today (at 2.4x, on TYG02 media, with the old IDE burner in my HTPC ("if it ain't broke...")). I played 2 hours of the backup and I didn't get a single DRE. All that, without even touching the potentiometer! I also tried to restart the Gamecube a few times, with an original game and then the backup, and it worked every time.

You guys weren't kidding about the Gamecube being finicky about media. I have some backups I burned in the past for my Wii on the same media, and they don't work with the Gamecube. That's got to be because I didn't use the right burner and/or the right burning speed.

The Gamecube I received is a platinum DOL-101, the same as the other. They even have the exact same DVD drive revision, so I wasn't confident it would work. I actually asked the seller to send me a DOL-001, and they confirmed me that all the consoles they had were DOL-001's, but I guess I was communicating with a moron. At least it worked out in the end.

When I opened the Gamecube, although the exterior was rather crummy, there was barely any dust inside. That indicates it was either cleaned (I doubt it), or not used very much. As such, the laser is likely much less worn out than with my other Gamecube. There's also no problem with the console, other than it's missing one of the covers at the bottom.

Apparently, according to this page, on top of removing the unused serial port and the rarely used digital AV port, the DOL-101 was designed to decrease the incidence of DREs with aging lasers. It could be that it does that by having more leniency in its DVD drive firmware, but that the patch the XenoGC injects makes the drive behave like that of a DOL-001. That would explain why my original Gamecube worked fine without the chip, but stopped reading discs reliably with it.

With a bit of luck, the first XenoGC I had (which I thought I damaged) might turn out to still be working fine. If I were to replace the laser in the older Gamecube, and install the old chip in it, it might work too, and I'd have two functioning chipped Gamecube's.

Otherwise, if it's not the laser, it could be that I damaged the DVD drive itself when I didn't solder the VCC pad properly during my first wireless install. There actually was a point afterwards where I tried to disable the chip in by desoldering the power wire and setting it aside with a drop of hot melt glue. That's when I discovered I also had to desolder the ground wire because even without the power wire, the LEDs on the chip still lit up, and the Gamecube wasn't reading discs, indicating that the chip was doing its thing. During that scenario, not only is the microcontroller on the chip not designed to receive power from one of its GPIO pins, the DVD drive itself likely isn't designed to put out enough current to power the microcontroller through one of its data pins either.

One way I could know for sure would be by swapping the laser assembly between the two drives, but now that I finally have things working, I'm reluctant to even clean the bit of dust in the functioning Gamecube!