Hi, I've heard that it was possible to do homebrew Gamecube development using a retail unit, the broadband adapter and a copy of a game (PSO). Can someone confirm this? Does a retail Gamecube have the same "technical specs" as the NPDP-GDEV ? (CPU, GPU...except for the size of the memory) I've also been told that the code had to be sent to the GC in small packets (up to 1Mo)
yes, but its a pain to debug code. The gc will just lock-up when an exception occurs. An easier way is to code and use an emulator as a target. For example Whinecube. Once your codebase becomes stable switch to a real GC as your target.
Hmm... a tad bit offtopic, but can a Wii be used to debug GameCube code through the USB ports, or does it have to be a USB Gecko. (I guess what I'm asking is can the GameCube mode on a Wii access the USB ports...)
Retail GC units have 24MB of RAM, debug units including the T-DEVs used in UK universitys have 48MB of RAM. The T-DEV unit used here has a debugging port in the SERIAL2 port, I haven't tried it in my retail modded GC to see if it works or not. Other than that, recent GC dev hardware has the same CPU and GPU inside them.
You can try to use GCNrd for debugging but it won't work with backups so you could also use extreme finder (needs the Viper GC extreme Chip)
If you'll be debugging homebrew code that isn't using the SDK, go grab a USBGecko. You can use GDB (and insight) to debug your code over it with breakpoints. The only thing that it lacks is watchpoints, but apart from that, it's pretty helpful. Basically you need some way to boot code: Phantasy Star Online + BroadBand Adapter (Expensive - slow to load) or SD Media Launcher by Code Junkies/Datel (Cheap/easy/faster) or XenoGC modchip + SDLoad (Cheap/easy/just as fast as above) or IPL Replacement modchip (Hard to come by/fastest) Then some way to debug: The BBA or USBGecko can be used to debug via GDB. I've noticed the BBA suffers a little packet loss so I'd go USBGecko
Another option is an Action Replay disc and SDLoad. The way I used to do it was with an AR that could be tricked into patching itself with a 'cheatcode' to boot SDLoad off a card. I think the official Datel launcher was just a later retail equivalent. Cost me a total of something like £20 including SD card back in 2007/8.
oh yes, totally forgot about that one. There's also the Super Smash Bros NTSC exploit but it's hard to find that one and you'd need the now rare and costly Datel USB memory card manager too.
