The Penguin and the Cube

[Laser Link]

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.

[A Black Falcon]

http://www.gc-linux.org/

Without a harddrive the uses are limited...

[javapimp]

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 hope that isn't seriously the first time you've heard of that hack... how do you think people have been playing all the cube iso's floating around kazaa and suprnova?

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, you hadn't heard about that? I heard of it months ago... and yes, it's the way that hackers got into the Cube. Without PSO there still wouldn't be any use for Cube ISOs...

[OB1]

Wow, this is cool.

[Laser Link]

Sorry, I guess I don't keep up on the priating scene like the rest of you.

[A Black Falcon]

It was news... on emulation websites, anyway...