Usage for the ports on the GameCube?

I've been really curious about the serial ports on the GameCube for a while. Is there anything interesting that could be done with the ports? I've been wondering about some sort of peripheral that goes onto the ports and allows you to play games off a SD card. After digging and searching far and wide, I've found no real interest into tapping into the GC and exploiting it. I really love this cube and I wonder what can be done with it. Being able to use my GBA player without the disc necessary would be great.

 

HDMI mod is great. Not really port specific modding but still very nice.
Modding wise the most I know about is the SD loader but that's probably not what you want since you probably want to use the Serial 2 port.

 

The serial ports on the GC are not that interesting - they use the same EXI protocol that the memory card sockets do. Since EXI is basically just an SPI port with Nintendo custom commands you could presumably connect an SD card to one of the serial ports, although the loader would need to be patched since AFAIK none of them expect to find it there. The other thing is that the EXI bus is not that fast - the maximum clock speed is 27MHz - which would give you a fairly respectable 3.375MB/s peak transfer rate except for the rather large amount of overhead involved in talking to SD cards.

The "Hi-Speed" port is, as it's name implies, a lot faster - and also a lot harder to interface with. It's basically a DRAM interface, so you would have to implement anything connected to it using dual-ported DRAM and use message passing. The only thing Nintendo ever used it for was the GameBoy Player - and for that application (which was basically transferring full sets of screen data from the GBA CPU to the GC) it worked pretty well.

 

sd gecko is fairly cheap and connects to the memory card slot, I would just use that and xeno to run swiss from a mini dvd

 

The GameBoy Player boot disk basically lets the Gamecube know that the GameBoy Player exists and that you want to use it. I guess it's possible to have that run from a memory card device like the SD Gecko.

 

It is. But once you have your Gecko, I would recommend going with this instead of the official disc.

 

I know that SD gecko is a thing, but I'm really curious if there's anyway to circumvent the CD drive and boot games from the SD card without the need of a mini DVD.

 

You can make a Wii ODE work in a GameCube. Yes, seriously.

 

"Wii Key" and its clone "wasp key" will work. Installation can be difficult because they are designed to work with the wii, but will work on a gamecube if wired up correctly.

 

or just use a viper or qoob modchip, you can put swiss on those directly.

 

And then load games through the memory card interface, I take it? How well does that work regarding transfer speeds? Should be perfectly alright for the GBP boot disc, Pokeymen Box etc, but what about other, heavier titles?
Besides, it's not that easy to find any GC chips besides Xenos any more :/

 

I'm just wondering if it's possible to put something on the bottom of the GC, stick a SD card in it, and play games off it without any further modification necessary. Something that does not require the CD drive or a hardware mod.

 

No. Without modification, GC must have both a functional drive and a pressed boot disc. There isn't yet an exploit for the system menu (such as corrupt save data able to crash the file manager), meaning no entry point besides a disc to load software from.