Informations about GameCube Officiel SD Adapter / SD Gecko

I'm lucky to have an official SD card adapter for Nintendo GameCube

It was sold only in Japan and was compatible with only a few games (including Animal Crossing).

I wanted to test it with Swiss to read backups or isos, so transform it into SD Gecko. And it does not work well at all! 32MHZ playback does not work at all, and there are many bugs in 16MHZ mode.

The problem ? Unlike a real SD Gecko, the pins of the SD drive on the official adapter are not connected directly to the pins of the memory card reader, there are resistors, transistors, etc ... :
However, homebrews in .dol format can be read without problems (emulators, etc ...).

I am currently thinking about rewiring, but that does not seem possible, even removing all transistors, capacitors, resistors, etc ...

Do people have the same problem as me?

 

some 3rd party SD adapters also has issues with swiss but not with homebrew, for example "datel sd media". GC games needs a permanent fast data stream while emulators tends to load everything into ram first so they dont require a fast sd adapter.

In my opinion the best way for a sd gecko is DIY

 

Thank you for informations ! And yes, I agree with you for a DIY SD Gecko, it's works great ! However, I like the shell of the official SD Adapter, maybe I will try to modify it or create a SD Gecko to set inside the shell

 

Indeed the shell looks great

To mod the official PCB I would cut the traces to the resistors, then try to remove the metal shield and wire the sd pins back to ESXi side. But does it really worth to kill a Nintendo PCB just for the ESXi headers?

cut/mod/destory rather rare stuff is always a bit pain for collectors so a proper DIY inside sd shell while keep Nintendo's official PCB somewhere else would be a amazing solution in my opinion.

 

I totally agree with you ! I don't want to destroy the original PCB, I will try to create a SD Gecko inside the official shell without destroying anything

 

I can certainly appreciate you trying to make everything look stock. I do this too whenever possible

While it's not as fancy as your official Nintendo SD adapter, I did modify an original gray (59) memory card to SD adapter some years ago. Turned out neat enough, but one of the screws on the bottom had to go as it couldn't fit with the SD socket inside.



It's just the SD socket wired directly to the memory card pins. I haven't really used it much, but it loads Gameboy interface just fine through Swiss. I also tried running a US version of a PAL game I own, which worked no problem, but my overall experience with GameCube and SD cards is limited so I can't really comment on compatibility and reliability in the long run.

Had I done the mod today I would use a micro SD slot instead, but they weren't as common when I did this.

...this thing needs retrobright like there's no tomorrow