20th January 2004, 11:33 PM
I'm sure most of you saw the IGNCube story about the developers who are working on getting a Linux distro running on a GameCube. So far all they have is an image of Tux, so it's hard to say if the rest will be successful.
However, I also learned that there is a lot of work on creating an open source software development kit for GameCube, something Nintendo normally chargers thousands of dollars for and only gives to "real" developers. They are working on reverse engineering the hardware and developing C libraires that will allow you to develop Cube games. The best part is that it is completely legal. There has already been some progress, and you can download some demos and games from places like gcdev.com. The trick is, at this point the only way they can get stuff to run on a GameCube is through PSO. Apparently, Sega wrote PSO to automatically check for new patches, and if it finds any it automatically installs them onto the memory card and runs them. They created a program that tricks PSO into think there is a new patch, which is really the program they wrote to run on the GameCube. I'm gonna check out the SDK as soon as I can and see what else I can learn, but I am really excited.
However, I also learned that there is a lot of work on creating an open source software development kit for GameCube, something Nintendo normally chargers thousands of dollars for and only gives to "real" developers. They are working on reverse engineering the hardware and developing C libraires that will allow you to develop Cube games. The best part is that it is completely legal. There has already been some progress, and you can download some demos and games from places like gcdev.com. The trick is, at this point the only way they can get stuff to run on a GameCube is through PSO. Apparently, Sega wrote PSO to automatically check for new patches, and if it finds any it automatically installs them onto the memory card and runs them. They created a program that tricks PSO into think there is a new patch, which is really the program they wrote to run on the GameCube. I'm gonna check out the SDK as soon as I can and see what else I can learn, but I am really excited.