GBOXs only operate with NPDP cartridges, there is one on eBay right now: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nintendo-Dolphin-Cart-GameCube-NPDP-/251318707285 GDEVs can operate with both NPDP cartridges and the Optical Disc Emulator (ODEM), which you'd use by the hooking the GDEV up via an SCSI cable to the ODEM PCI card in your PC and then loading the compiled .ELF file directly to the GDEV. Sadly, this is not the case for the GBOX - they require NPDP cartridges.
Well, thanks for telling me anyways. Hopefully if I make enough money again & people are still selling cartridges on eBay I could get one then, but until then, the GBOX still makes a nice collector's item.
To add to my previous post, to write to an NPDP cartridge you also need an NPDP Writer or NPDP Gang Writer, I believe the latter is also up on eBay currently. The serial connection on the GBOX is purely used for debugging purposes.
Just to correct you on that, it does NOT hook up via SCSI! The connector is SCSI but if you connect it to a SCSI card you're going to damage something or get smoke, it ONLY connects to the GDEV ODEM card.
Also, finding an ODEM card is damn near impossible, and if you find one be prepared to shell out some cash.
The GBOX is a piece of Nintento Gamecube development hardware used to test games on NPDP cartridges, the re-writable hard drive based storage medium used by gamecube development hardware.
Maybe someone who is familiar with these things could tell me something - I used to have an NPDP-Reader with 8 cartridges - but all of them had bad HDDs in them (they wouldn't even spin up) - are they really that unreliable, or did I just have some bad luck?
Sounds like you didn't use them correctly. I've never used one but for 8 to fail... That's pretty spectacular. Were you listening for the loud spin-up sound of a 3.5" HD? The NPDP cartridges have 2.5" HDs in them so will run quieter.
No, they were most certainly dead - if you took the case off you could hear the head assembly going <click><click><click> when the unit was powered up, and when I removed the drive and connected it to a computer it just sat there and didn't do anything (to be specific, the drive just sat there with the BSY bit set in the status register, and it wouldn't clear even if you sent a reset command). I did try replacing the drive in one of the units (it was just a 6GB laptop drive), and although the clicking stopped and the drive came up normally it still didn't work - it also turned on the ATA security feature on the new disc, which was annoying.
It's possible the original developer trashed the drives with a big magnet before getting rid of them. Putting a new hard drive in would work, but the drive would be blank and nothing would happen. An interesting thing to try would be to put the disk in a computer and delete any partitions. As far as i know the NPDP Reader doesn't care for partition tables anyways. It just looks at 0x200000 for the beginning of the first game image. If you were to write a GC disc image starting at 0x200000 i wonder if the NPDP reader would read it correctly? This is all assuming the NPDP reader expects the file system to be the same as retail disks.
It's possible, I guess - I was also thinking that they might have been subjected to severe shock at some point, although the external plastics looked OK. I was thinking of writing something to the drive, but that was when it discovered that it had been locked I guess I could have borrowed an IDE protocol analyzer and found out what the password was that way, but it all seemed too much like hard work. I ended up selling them (very cheap) to one of my friends who didn't care if it wasn't working, since he just thought it looked cool.
The NPDP cartridges also employ simple XOR 'encryption', there was information on a thread right here on this site on how to break it.
