What was the story with the digital AV port on the GameCube? As I'm sure we all know, the GameCube has two video ports on it. The regular AV port and a digital AV port. The latter is a bit unusual as a digital video connection wasn't done again until many years later with the PS3. But, from what I can see, they ever actually used the digital connection for anything, well, digital. There's the infamously expensive component cables that plug in here, but these are actually analogue cables. There's a digital to analogue converter in the cable which is why there's no 3rd party component cables. So what was Nintendo's original plan for this port? HDMI wasn't around back then, so what form of digital connector could Nintendo have used? And has there ever been any attempt to build a homebrew digital cable? It's understandable that since Nintendo never released the specs for the digital to analogue converter that no one can make something similar, but what about leaving it as a digital signal? Or is there something unusual about the digital signal the console puts out?
I think it was just because they'd used all the pins on the other connector and couldn't run component through that. There was another cable (DVGA? early morning, brain sleepy) released in Japan which plugged into it as well. http://gamesx.com/wiki/doku.php?id=av:nintendomultiav & http://gamesx.com/wiki/doku.php?id=av:nintendodigitalav
HDMI didn't exist at the time of the Gamecube's release, but DVI (which uses the same video signal as HDMI) did - so maybe they intended to use it for that at some point. I believe there have been attempts to get the GC to output HDMI, but so far they haven't been successful. There is a clone of the component cable circuit - there's a thread about it in the modding forum: http://www.assemblergames.com/forum...pen-source-GameCube-component-cable-solution/ You're probably thinking of the D-terminal cable, which is a component video signal on a single connector.
Hmmm, do you think the clone converter will be in action any time soon? Yup, he's thinking of a d-terminal cable. While the connector isn't used outside of Japan, it's idential to component, you just need an adapter for the plug. Which is handy, since the D cable seems to be a bit cheaper than the component cable.
Yup, that's the one I was thinking of! Could've sworn it was called DVGA somewhere (liksang?), or maybe I was thinking of it being modded into a VGA cable. Fuzzy memories.
It's probably the latter, back in the day there were quite a few homebrew / semi-profesional VGA-cables out there for use with the digital AV port.
I didn't know that. I know Nintendo recently said that Luigi's Mansion was originally going to be in 3D.
