NPDP Carts.

Hello All,

Recently, I have been able to buy a NPDP reader (two of them in fact). Both are NTSC.

I have a NPDP cart coming from a UK studio. For the moment, the NPDP reader tell me that the cart can't be read.

So, my question is : Do NPDP carts are also region locked ? Like NTSC and PAL.

I don't know if the region lock is on the Data on the NPDP cart or if the NPDP cart is itself region locked.

Thanks for your help !

Regards,

Baptiste.

 

Apparently, the NPDP-GDEV/GBOX boxen had a PAL upgrade that would add an NTSC/PAL switch at the back.

Considering all the magic happens in the cartridge (the NPDP Reader itself just uses the same DVD interface, except hooked up to the cartridge connector, which would lead to having regions) and the GameCube SDK has a tool to set the country code (read: region code), although it's uncertain if it applies this to the disc or AMC-DDH/GDEV itself, I'd make an educated guess that yes, NPDP cartridges are region locked in some way.

In what way, I'm not entirely sure. I've uploaded a preliminary PAL patch to the GameCube SDK that was distributed back in the early days when the GameCube SDK wasn't entirely PAL-ready yet, maybe the readme provides some insights: https://mega.nz/#!YZZBRKaA!YI8g3QrgHFdq8lgjAQfWM8f39Tvb2htgFjpkMNJmqyI

 

Thanks a lot for your answer beep boop !

You seems to know gamecube dev hardware very well !

And thanks a lot for the Download link !

 

They're not region locked, but the IPL (menu) on each console is either PAL or NTSC-U/NTSC-J locked so if you're using the NPDP cart on the wrong region console then you'll get the same error on the IPL that you'd normally see if you put a NTSC disc based game in a PAL console and vice versa.

Don't go thinking a NPDP cart is blank because all it does is throw that error in the IPL, use something like Swiss to try and boot the content (as a "disc") or CleanRip to dump it and verify.

 

Thanks a lot for your answer.

I will connect the hardrive dock to a retail PAL system. It should work, right ?

 

Swapping drive units should work, yes.

 

Thanks ! I will try this.

 

Yep it works fine, connect it to a modded PAL system and dump those carts!

 

I will try the swapping thing soon. The Dumping thing will not be done soon as I don't have a modded gamecube (I have 6 of them, all unmodded). Do you guys know if the Phantasy star exploit can be used to load a dump tool on a retail gamecube ?

 

Does cleanrip work on gamecube hardware? It always seems to be implied it works on woo hardware, but can read gamecube disks?

 

Yeah, that should work. I believe that's how some scene dumps were done.

 

Of course it can, but you'd either need PSO on the NPDP cart or do a "drive swap" while the console is on - a little dangerous.

It sure does, there's a GameCube build in the 2.0.0 release: https://code.google.com/archive/p/cleanrip/downloads (until I migrate the releases to github). The GameCube build can only dump GameCube discs obviously, but I've used it before to dump NPDP carts in a modded console.

 

"dangerous"....sounds like I better have to buy a modded gamecube, as I really don't know to damage either datas and hardware.

For the moment, the drive swap to play the cart is my next step. A dump may be not needed if the cart is really empty.

Thanks a lot guys !

 

I've dumped multiple NR discs using the drive swapping method.
The NR cube is still going strong.

 

Just to make sure Im following here, boot with retail drive with some sort of homebrew app (I know I have PSO still), then swap out the drive? Do you power them with two cubes so you arent yanking the power?

 

You can't power the drive separately. The data and power connector are the same

 

Ah okay, been a while since I looked at the internals of a Cube and thought I remembered a separate cable.

 

I took apart a retail and NR gamecube.

I put the retail drive on the NR gamecube and booted up Datel's SDML.
I loaded swiss, then swapped the retail drive for the NR drive.
After that, I selected 'DVD' from the swiss menu. This loaded the new drive and disc.
From there, I just dumped the NR disc like any other.

 

Suppose the proper way is a qoob or viper with Swiss on the chip so no need for drive swapping

 

Yes, a qoob modded cube would have been great but I will try the Paul Strickler1 method, as I have most of the hardware and software needed. Just need to get the Datel's SDML from a friend.

Thanks guys !