I worked as a mastering Lab Technician at THQ during the GameCube days. We used to burn test builds to these 100s of these drives each day for testing. We had 3 NPDP writers which were Desktop Computer sized devices that had 8 slots to burn games to slots 8 at a time. We also made NR discs, but those were used less for things like testing load times and other compliance testing. I used to have 3 NPDP readers on my desk to test burn builds in different regions. I wish I had thought to keep some of that hardware, but back then it was just office equipment, like a stapler.
@@MachoNachoProductions When I got relocated to Montreal they told me to fill up moving boxes with what I needed. At that point, we were in the 360 / Ps3 / Wii era so I was like "well I won't need any of this GameCube stuff." And gave it back to IT.
@@teknohed to be fair, the dev consoles are technically property of the console maker, in this case Nintendo, not the company who uses them. Therefore, grabing it COULD have let to some legal trouble. Also dev consoles from the last few generations are really annoying, they have remote bricking if they are not returned.
@@teknohed With the amount of junk being sent to Montreal when all the studios were closing before THQ fully went under I'm kind of surprised dev kits didn't get out in the wild. btw Billy here from the Montreal THQ IT team. It was my job to make sure all hardware was accounted for at that time. I guess I did a good job lol
Unfortunately, most of the interesting bits are inside the NPDP cartridge - it's basically an optical drive emulator running off a HDD and just exposes an interface that matches the one of the original optical disc. The HDDs they used were little laptop drives and seemed to have a fairly high failure rate, although that might just be down to the fairly hard life they had - the cart also had shock watches inside it so Nintendo could refuse warranty repairs in the (common) case where someone dropped it and screwed up the drive.
@@MachoNachoProductions Yeah, it's honestly a really strange design decision - if it had been up to me, I would have just used interchangeable drives and put the emulation hardware into the console rather than forcing the user to buy multiple sets of fairly expensive circuitry. They are also the same cartridges that plug into the NPDP-GDEV, although in most cases they weren't actually used because people used the PC based ODEM instead. You don't see many of them because they were fairly quickly replaced for most uses by the disc based NR-Reader.
@@AUATUWVSH Yes - the drive was 6GB and partitioned into 4 1.5GB areas, which you could select using the buttons on the NPDP-Reader - it was also locked and "encrypted" - I put the latter in quotes because it was just XOR and more like obfuscation than anything else. Unfortunately, I don't have any of the hardware any more, so this is all from memory. I do remember being told that "NPDP" was "Nintendo Pseudo Disk Pack", but have no way of verifying this. Oh, and although the user password on the drive is device specific the master password is common - since the security mode is set to "high" (rather than maximum) you can just unlock the drive using the master password without erasing it - the password (common to all units..) is "N-PDP Master Passwd", so you can just unlock it using something like hdparm, dump the drive then figure out the XOR constant by looking at the parts of the GCM headers that are normally zero. Honestly gives me the feeling that the engineer that designed it was told to "add security" - but thought it was pretty much a waste of time and didn't bother to put any effort into it. On top of this, if you plug in an unlocked drive then the code in the SH3 will helpfully lock it for you, including setting the passwords - so if you have access to an IDE analyzer you can just see what the passwords are (both user and master) simply by looking at the logs.
Like others have said, the error button emulates a disc read error. There was a standard message that had to be displayed by the game code when this error was encountered. This was much easier to accomplish on the NPDP reader as opposed to "the nose grease test" or "tape test" we employed on NR discs back when I was working at TDK Mediactive which became 2K.
what games have you worked on back in the day? if u can remember back. i'd enjoyed quite a few of ur companies games from the Gameboy Color/Advance era.
I would imagine the "pseudo-read error" button probably forces the devkit to think it had problems reading from the game disc (cartridge in this case). I'd imagine this is so they can see how that affects the runtime of their game and gracefully handle that situation. Since otherwise they may be unable to reproduce such an issue and may not know if their code works.
@@MachoNachoProductions "pseudo" just means "artificial", as in the error is not an error created through an actual failure, but initiated in a controlled sense. Imagine a game like Metroid Prime. Before you go through the door into the next room, the game has to load in the room data from the disc. If the game disc is scratched and it is unable to successfully load the room, the game has to handle that case. In Metroid Prime's case, the gameplay pauses and an error screen is shown that the disc is unreadable, and you have to reset the GameCube. Having a way to simulate that error would have been necessary in order to test that the error screen works. If they couldn't test it, or flat out ignored the possibility of read errors, the game would most likely crash due to other aspects of the game trying to access data that isn't there.
I can confirm. I worked on a GameCube game years ago, and Nintendo required that you gracefully handle read errors, so you needed a way to simulate this.
@@Matt23488 I remember playing prime 3 off a flash drive on my Wii. The flash drive failed on me mid game and I got trapped in a room the game didn't crash for like 6 minutes but none of the doors would open in that room and even the morph ball door in the tunnel that opens automatically got stuck. At first I thought ooh neat but then it got creepy once the game music stopped just bad vibes felt like the game was watching me like it knew I was there and it had me under a spot light. I would rather the game just crash.
@@amaiorano yeah I figured that was probably one of the requirements. I know they typically have like a QA checklist of things you must make sure of before they will even consider accepting the game, and handling a disc-read error would definitely be on the list. Thanks for confirming!
I actually bought almost the full setup many many years ago during a garage sale. It came with the reader, the gdev, the Marlin tower, controllers, carts and various boards. It's been sitting on my shelves. Interesting to learn a little more about it.
I have the next generations version of the gdev, a NDEV. It had advanced at that point that it ran of a mostly regular PC, which i also have the software for.
The wires soldered to the bottom are just a bog standard region switch mod. The wire connected to the via runs to one of the pads of R6 on the top of the board, and the wire connected to the capacitor is just going to ground. You can use these as alternate solder points for doing a region mod on a standard NTSC-J Cube. I'm pretty sure they used those points as they were probably pulling the mainboards for these units out of retail units channel and modding them and they didn't want to pull the heatsinks off.
On the switch at about 7:40, this is quite common at least in my company for product development, we all use internal naming for parts within a device we're designing like those, and pretty much the same naming scheme. It all organizes stuff a lot better when you have ~50+ technical drawings of several parts on a device/machine, and since we gotta do it for organization internally anyway, I imagine Nintendo printing it on a silk-screen is a no-brainer, also helping fixing the device when it inevitably needs it.
This doesn't look like a devkit actually, it looks like a test kit used by QA teams. A devkit used by programmers would have some sort of debugging interface.
Hard 4 games covers this model and the other two dev kits. in a few videos. There were 3 different Dev kits the original Dolphin Dev kit and the two "Modified" GameCube dev kits. Edit: you might want to hit him up to borrow one of his NPDP Cartridges
Dude, this was GREAT. I've never even heard of this before. It's always nice to get to learn something new in the retro space. It's a rare treat these days.
My guess is the error button simulates a disk failung to read data. I guess it could be pressed when a level is being loaded or something like that so the devs can handle it by either attenpting again or proving an error to the user.
Might also be used to test things like ability to soft reset on crash, memory card corruption during read/write, whether assets were fully loaded into memory during a level etc
It is up to the game dev to determine how the software handles the read error. Some games completely quit, others continue playing. How many times do you retry, what does your retry screen look like? Do you tell the user right away there is a disc error, or do you notify after X number of errors. And so on…
I rememeber this as well back in the good days of the Cube. Everyone had these on their desks as previously mentioned from other posters. Tested and ran compliance on these for Namco back in the bay area. When we moved to 360 and ps3 these just sat in a storage never to be heard from again.
What I find really interesting is the physical region switch, because there's a hardmod to install a physical region switch by soldering wires to a specific pad and installing a switch. This makes me wonder if this physical region switch is a leftover from these types of devkits or not.
My bet is that the "mystery cable" soldered to the underside of the board is for the US/JP IPL selection switch, and is used to bind an EPROM address pin to a 0 or 1 state depending on the toggle switch. It's a trick I've used to toggle between different boot ROMs on old 8 and 16-bit computers.
This thing looks so amazing. Hard4Games too had those a while ago, I would have loved to see Nintendo releasing more colours than just purple, silver (and orange in Japan with black being contrast rather than colour) to the market.
I could imagine a working retail Gamecube with that region switch implemented. Being able to go from playing say Super Mario Sunshine, turning off the Gamecube, flipping the switch from US to JPN and then being able to play a game exclusive to Japan or a version of a game released in the US that might be an earlier version only released to the Japanese player base.
This video was a nice change of pace! It's too bad you couldn't procure an actual cart for this dev kit. That would have been cool to see! On a side note, I kinda dig that shade of red it came in; would've been nice to see a regular GameCube shell in that color
I work as a software tester and a psuedo disc read is as what people have already commented. It simulates a disc read fail, e.g an example test would be: When prompted to insert disc 2 hit read error for expected read error outcome.
(5:23) I think that button fakes a disc scratch when pressed, so developers could simulate scratched GameCube game discs (or Wii game discs in the case of the RVT-H)
9:05 - The HC08 is just a quad 2-input AND gate chip. The HC04 is a hex inverter (six NOT gates in one chip). They are likely just buffering some basic chip select, control, or clock signals to/from the cart. (HC usually stands for "High-speed CMOS", a very common type of standard logic chip.) EDIT: I should add that the HC family chips normally have part numbers starting with "74". But on these tiny TSSOP package variants, they tend to omit the 74, so they can fit more (readable) text on. So the full part number would be 74HC08T14 and 74HC04T14, where the T means "TSSOP", and the 14 is the pin count. I never really looked into this dev console much before. It's interesting that almost all of the "magic" happens in the cart, there's barely any logic added to the GC itself. Oh, btw, the smaller chips on those interface boards are mostly labelled as "DA" on the silkscreen. Those are likely just clamp diodes for ESD protection or voltage clamping. DA usually just means "Diode Array", so more than one diode in each chip. IIRC, the GC DVD drive is a bi-directional 8-bit bus with a few control signals.
Rough pinout of the LED board. I was a bit bored tonight. lol... 1. 2. Green LED D3 (DISK 0). 3. 4. Green LED D4 (DISK 1). 5. Green LED D5 (DISK 2). 6. 7. Green LED D6 (DISK 3). 8. Yellow LED D7 (NO DISK). 9. 10. Amber LED D8 (?). 11. Button SW1 (COVER). "Open / Close" 12. 13. Button SW2 (DISK). "Disk Change" 14. 15. 16. Button SW3 (ERROR). "Error" All unlabelled pins here are likely all connected to the Ground plane.
RU-vid algorithm brought me here. I am not a collector, tech wizard, or Nintendo buff, but genuinely appreciate your excellent tear down and documentation approach to this. There is room for improvement, sure; but you provided sufficient information for people to at least attempt to recreate this device with an original gamecube, one-off pcb manufacturing, and 3D printing skills. Part of me hopes somebody tries this. Now, if only an owner of that special cartridge would do a similar teardown...
Tito, loving the content you've been bringing to us lately. Don't get me wrong, I love the console modding but getting to see development kits that I will never have a chance to own/open is pretty awesome. Keep up the great content! 🙌🙌🙌
*MachoNacho:* "This is a Nintendo Gamecube. But you may notice there's something strange with this particular model" *Me:* "IT'S BURGUNDY COLORED!!! 😍🤩"
Dang, that’s a really cool piece of history that I’ve never known of! Sort of thing I’m used to seeing from other channels, but I’m glad you’re getting into showing off this sort of stuff 👍
The HC08 and HC04 chips are most likely a 74HC08 (a quad 2-input AND gate chip) and a 74HC04 (a hex inverter chip.) Not sure what they're doing there though.
I saw that the base motherboard may be an actual GameCube retail board. I saw DOL-CPU-01 printed on the board, where DOL is for Dolphin and is the same code used for a normal retail GameCube.
Two things: Using tamper stickers to void warranties has been ruled illegal. The FTC link is in the response below. On the small PCB thing, they just use leftover space on a larger main PCB. They break it out and build it. That's why you see those broken perforated legs around the outside of it.
I assume the error button would be to simulate a DVD read error. EG scratch on the disk, vibration that causes it to skip etc. Im sure they would be very useful as a game dev to ensure your game handles it in a graceful manner and doesnt just lockup and crash
Nice teardown Tito! :-3 I have a retail GC since April 30th 2001. 4 days before the official release here. 😁🙈 I have never seen a video teardown of the NPDP until now!
Can you dump the IPL from that unit? You can custom code on it by replacing the NPDP-SubA-02 board by a modded drive or a GC-Loader or you can solder in a picoboot.
Would be interesting to see what's on it, but I think it's probably running the stock IPL as this would make the most sense for a dev unit like this -- running finished or near finished code on a retail unit to match the environment of a retail unit as opposed to a dev kit that allows you to access memory and has more debug features.
Between simply being so out of the ordinary, and the exposed microswitches and 5mm LEDs (Seriously, no buttons to click the switches? No light-pipes or lenses for the LEDs??) I totally thought this was a mod somebody made, or at the very least some Taiwanese magicom-style device. From appearance alone, I never would've guessed it was official NCL hardware, devkit or otherwise! 🤔 Love that exclusive red GC, it's a rad look.
I don't know if it's been answered, but the psudeo-read error button is to test how a game would react with a disc error. For things like read error displays and to make sure the game wouldn't just crash. Hope I helped!
Oh come on. This has to be viral video man. This is unreal! Thank you for being the final push for inspiration for me to get my channel going Tit! Keep slaying it here man. You are doing amazing work for video game history preservation.
Before watching the video: Probably a dev kit. Dev kits need to be able to play new builds made many times a day (handfuls of times for artists, hundreds of times for programmers), and burning that many DVDs isn’t a good solution. Also, just because it had a “cartridge slot” doesn’t mean there wasn’t expensive (at the time) high-capacity flash memory or a laptop in the cartridge.
Cool video! Have you ever thought about doing modding videos on the Japanese exclusives PS2/DVR? I just got one not too long ago, and IMO it's the best looking ps2
@@MachoNachoProductions I got mine through sendico, payed 60 bucks for a fully working DESR-5000 model and also got a Japanese Playstation vita slim for 100 bucks.
Amazing video as always Tito. If you allow me to do a little critique. Is it possible to switch the BGM in you videos or doing a little playlist of BGMs. Or not music at all since your voice is not annoying to hear. Keep the good work.
_"The NPDP Reader's packaging differs greatly from the retail version."_ When compared to the US retail version, perhaps. But the size and shape of the box and its compartments is pretty much identical with the *Japanese* retail version. (Source: I'm owner of a Japanese GameCube, purchased in 2001, shortly after the console's launch. 🕶)
The pseudo read error button is clear. Due to Discs being physical media, misreads are common for scratched discs or worn readers, the button is supposed to check if a game can recover from such an error by observing parity checks when reading.
The Error button works like a time stamp and the code from the last 10 to 30 seconds and the next 10 seconds, all data is recorded for debugging. Usually this unit would have been connected to a PC before the screen.
I remember seeing one of these and a real kind of colour one on hard4games a few years ago, never thought I'd get to see inside of one though! Thanks again for another great video Tito!
I'm sure it's been stated a few times by now for the two wires in the bottom are how we used to do reaching mods for the GameCube back in the day so it's just an extension cable that goes and leads to the switch
It looks like you could take the pink shell and put it on a regular GC model, then you'd have a funky two-tone console. Obviously you'd need to also harvest the lid from another console, which might be a bit of work.
I bet that region switch maps to the same 2 points you could bridge or switch to do the same thing to a retail GameCube. I got mine imported from Japan and had the region switch installed weeks before it launched in the US.
Also the region switch can be applied to a retailer one finding some random resistors pads on the board and bridging or not bridging thats pads to ground
The mystery wires to the bottom are for the region switch. This version of the mod needs to get more screen time IMO since it's easier to install without the need to remove the heatsink. Gcforever wiki has a good picture of this exact thing on their region switch page under the "how it works" section.
The mystical unreleased hot pink color, never thought I'd see it outside the obscure images from IGN! It would be super fun if someone made a 3rd party case in this color.
As others have said, the “mystery” wire is for the region switch which is a common mod to change the boot up bios from US to Japan. This is why you need the system off when you switch between regions as the bios is booted up during power. American region is selected when the white wire is grounded out. Guess that the black wire is going to the (-) side of the capacitor and the switch connects the white wire to the black wire. Very cool video, thanks so much for sharing the tear down. I am wondering why the fan is connected through the NPDP-SubB-01 board. If I remember correctly, on a stock GameCube the fan is connected to the power adapter/switch board. Probably just a pass through, but why?
Isn’t this color similar to the famicom disk system? Nice video, I have a fascination with dev kits, some look very professional and others look like a bunch of wires recovered from a crash landing XD
I'm guessing the two mystery wires have to do with the region switch, since I didn't see anything else interfacing directly with the mainboard that would enable changing which IPL is loaded.
I would assume that a Pseudo Read eError would be a simulation of the disc being too scratched/damaged/smudged to be read by the device, it's simulating a disc read error. More than likely to show how the framerate or runtime of the game/bugs and other various things that may happen during the disc running and having a read error, you know the same kind of bugs that speed runners use to get halfway through a game
That's pretty cool! I wonder if Nintendo was going to have the GameCube use cartridges in the beginning of designing it? And if so when did they decide to use disks?
I'm guessing that error button is for when the game is being read off the disk but say there's a scratch on it that's too deep for the laser, and it spits out an error message about the disk. I think some games used unique visuals to show the message, or maybe to simulate opening the lid, causing the disk to stop spinning. Probably making sure it's reporting errors properly. I bet you could swap the cart reader with an SD Loader and play games on it
This is pretty neat i never knew on of these existed. Hey on another note I think a video of your collection is in order we all know you have plenty to show lol
hi Tito you may not be able to use the memory card manager on this as it's dev menu is different than the retail gamecube so the gameboy player also won't work with this unit as it's dependent on the gameboy player startup disc
I looked at the pcb where the mysterios caple goes and it is connected straight to the region switch. I wonder if it would bei possible to add this to an normal gamecube
Dang, I was really hoping this was a backward-compatible, Power Base Converter type of thing. Either way, this was really neat. Learning about these types of systems and dev kits is precisely why I love the internet. Great job, as always!
I would think a pseudo read error is just going to simulate a disc not reading. Possibly useful when in the middle of a game to see how it reacts to a read error on the disc. Possibly trying to guarantee that it goes to the disc read error screen instead of crashing or something else
Yes and it would make sense that because you don't have access to opening closing of the lid you can't manually casue a disc read error without that button. Thanks as always for the video
Warranties can not be legally voided by a sticker. The manufacturer would have to prove that the damage to the sticker caused the defect you are trying to get a warranty repair for.
No, they can't (depending on where you live), but it doesn't stop them. Most likely that sticker wasn't for warrantee purposes, but for anti-tampering and anti reverse engineering. You would most likely have had to agree to a NDA and been instructed not to tamper with the dev units before you could get one of these and the sticker was there so they could "prove" that the unit was tampered with if they had to take someone to court over it.
you should have a chat with the "Hard for games" Channel for the npdp cartdrige, they went in to deep with this device long time ago, maybe they can help...
