Cloning the Gamecube component cable

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Unseen
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Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by Unseen »

Hi!

I think the original Gamecube component cable is overpriced, so I cloned it. =) Github repository here. Some random factlets because I'm too lazy to write a coherent post after typing all the READMEs in the repo:

The project linked above is basically a clone of the original component cable using only information that is already available on the net and some of my own observations on a logic analyzer. The board can output analog RGB (both CSync and HV-Sync available) or Component video. While I haven't calculated an actual BOM cost for the parts, it should be MUCH cheaper to manufacture than the current price for the original cable. The downside is that as far as I know there is no source for the original plug, so it has to be mounted internally in the Gamecube.

No, I won't be selling this. Build your own or find someone who builds it for you - it's an open source project after all. I made the mistake of offering kits for another of my projects once and that required far more of my time than I'm willing to spend. Fully-assembled boards aren't an option at all for me as the local laws require a lot of paperwork, certifications and money when you want to bring your own electronic devices into the hands of end-users.

HDMI is possible and works on my devboard, but that version currently suffers from featuritis and lack of motivation (and maybe skills) to design a PCB for it. If anyone can locate (or provide) a source for simple, cheap Spartan 6 FPGA boards with an HDMI output connector on them I can probably port the code to it.

The board does not handle audio at the moment, although the pins for it are connected to the FPGA. Fun fact: At least the PAL Gamecube I have hear uses the wrong audio sampling rate. The correct rate would be 54MHz divided by 1125 (48000 Hz), but I measure exactly 48042.8Hz or 54MHz divided by 1124. The difference is not noticable on the analog outputs, but I suspect that the SPDIF mod the GC that uses an external 12.288MHz crystal for its SPDIF chip has faint clicks in its output (or slight distortions).

Based on a few preliminary measurements, the Wii seems to use the same video data format internally, but with 1.8V levels instead of 3.3V. Since the Wii already has a component output, connecting this board to it probably isn't worth the hassle unless you've fried our video output. It also seems that the Wii internally transports audio using I2S, so why isn't there an SPDIF mod for it yet?

If you look at the board another way, it's an FPGA with a few input lines (12 on the connector plus a few pads with spare pins) and a video DAC. This means that is someone writes the code for it, it could also be used to generate RGB or component output signals for other consoles that use 3.3V digital video signals internally. The one that I'm thinking of is the N64 - but this is only a "possible in theory, but someone needs to do it first" situation.

Linedoubling would be possible with a larger FPGA (available with the same footprint, about 2-3 USD more expensive), but I'm not sure if it's worth it since most non-progressive Gamecube games are 480i/576i and the memory in the FPGA is only big enough to hold a single line, not a complete field that you would need to do at least half-proper deinterlacing. (and I also haven't figured out a way to generate "good" 480p timing from a 480i input yet)

-ik
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by The_Atomik_Punk! »

This is extremely interesting to me. I was literally just looking at purchasing a Gamecube Component cable, but I couldn't in good conscience justify spending $300+ on Ebay for one. I'm looking forward to anyone who will be offering ready-made cables based on these schematics- I'm certainly one customer here ready to buy one!
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by speedlolita »

The_Atomik_Punk! wrote:This is extremely interesting to me. I was literally just looking at purchasing a Gamecube Component cable, but I couldn't in good conscience justify spending $300+ on Ebay for one. I'm looking forward to anyone who will be offering ready-made cables based on these schematics- I'm certainly one customer here ready to buy one!
eBay US pls.

Used a D-Terminal cable myself to make an RGB SCART lead.

However, the potential of the OPs project seems amazing. Linedoubling would be awesome for native 480p output on PAL/NTSC stuff that doesn't support it natively possibly?
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by blizzz »

Wow. Those cables have become a lot more expensive and rare than last year. When I last looked you could get them easily for 70€ or if you're lucky for less from someone who sold his Cube with it and didn't mention it in the eBay description. I'm not exactly sure what happened, but a lot of Nintendo stuff has become crazy expensive on eBay.

Great work with figuring out how to clone the chip / cable! :D
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by Lord of Pirates »

blizzz wrote:Wow. Those cables have become a lot more expensive and rare than last year. When I last looked you could get them easily for 70€ or if you're lucky for less from someone who sold his Cube with it and didn't mention it in the eBay description. I'm not exactly sure what happened, but a lot of Nintendo stuff has become crazy expensive on eBay.

Great work with figuring out how to clone the chip / cable! :D
An acceptable price has become a rarity, I never thought I'd regret passing on one for $70 :lol:. Here's hoping this project makes the prices on the component cable crash and burn; nice work on this, Unseen :D.
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by Seraphic »

Hoping this progresses as it is a great project for those who are unable to secure an official cable.
I'm interested in the SPDIF mod though, as I have been interested in having it done for my Gamecube.
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by Zets13 »

This is great to hear. Been trying to get the best video output from my consoles and the stupid high prices of Gamecube component cables has been a big deterrent.
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by darcagn »

This sounds awesome! I sold my GameCube component cable on eBay for like $60 when the original Wii launched, as I figured I'd never need the cable again since the Wii could play GameCube games and had cheap component cables. Now, years later, I would really love to have one.

How big is the the board? I'm wondering if it is possible to get it small enough to fit inside of a GameCube, in which case you wouldn't have to even worry about the plug for the digital out port, you could just mount component or d-terminal jacks on the GameCube somewhere.

Although there probably won't be enough space...
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by Unseen »

darcagn wrote:How big is the the board?
It's 30mm x 49mm - here is a screenshot directly from KiCAD with dimensions.
I'm wondering if it is possible to get it small enough to fit inside of a GameCube
That was the original plan - design the board so it uses the same connector pitch as the DV port, mount a pin header on the bottom of the Cube board and attach the video board there. You can even see a small remainder of that plan in the top left of the picture linked above - there is a lot of free space around the sync connector. Originally the board had a partial cutout on the top left as seen on an old render here. This cutout ensured that there was enough clearance to avoid one of the screw mounts of the GC's board.

Unfortunately I made a mistake with that design - I mismeasured the pitch of the pins of the GC DV connector. The old design was designed for a connector with 2mm pitch in both dimensions, but the connector actually has a horizontal pitch of just 1.7mm - I don't think you'll find a pin header for that and if you construct it from single wires you can just as well wire everything directly. Connecting the board directly to the existing pins of the connector (e.g. similar to the way some modchips are soldered directly against existing components) wouldn't work either because there are SMD components in that area of the GC's board that enforce a minimum distance. The current 2.54mm pitch of the connector was chosen mostly for my own convenience: To ease deleopment, I unsoldered the DV connector from my cube and added an external connector with that pitch that is now hanging outside the case.

Still, the current board should be small enough to be mounted somewhere inside the cube even if you have to add a few cm of wires to connect it. I'm not sure if I can recommend the removal of the DV connector - it does free up a bit of space to add a custom video connector, but unsoldering its (many) ground pins from the board was rather annoying.
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by bobrocks95 »

Image

I'm unbelievably hype for this. I've been waiting literally years for someone to do this. Following tons of people working on it, seeing them run into some road bump, not hearing from them again... Amazing that someone just comes out of the blue with it. Maybe their problems were PCB development, haha.

Here's hoping someone can design pretty cheap PCBs for this. Or maybe my logic circuits class will require me to buy an FPGA dev board I can repurpose later (how much to those run usually anyway? I'm not well-versed on the hardware end of things).
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by Xyga »

Sorry for the most certainly very stupid post but I don't get it, how does this require so much engineering ? I thought the GC component cable was just... a cable ?

I was actually thinking about doing this myself someday (add simple RCA plugs to the back of my GC for component) since I have a model with the 'digital out' I though this would be simple rewiring/soldering work...
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by bobrocks95 »

Xyga wrote:Sorry for the most certainly very stupid post but I don't get it, how does this require so much engineering ? I thought the GC component cable was just... a cable ?

I was actually thinking about doing this myself someday (add simple RCA plugs to the back of my GC for component) since I have a model with the 'digital out' I though this would be simple rewiring/soldering work...
Inside the cable is a custom IC that converts the strangely encoded digital signal to an analog one. So you can't simply pull YCbCr from the port, and you can't just use a regular dac to make it analog.
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

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bobrocks95 wrote:I've been waiting literally years for someone to do this. Following tons of people working on it, seeing them run into some road bump, not hearing from them again... Amazing that someone just comes out of the blue with it. Maybe their problems were PCB development, haha.
I'm still surprised that I seem to be the first one to finish this... It didn't feel that hard as the small amount of info in the gamesx.com wiki is almost sufficient to implement everything and the missing pieces were simple to pick up by looking at a few logic analyzer traces. The first black-and-white only version (sending luma to all three RGB signals) was running on the same day I hooked up the Cube to my FPGA board (mid-may IIRC), getting it to the current state did take "a bit" longer though. Looking back it's funny how well a design can work that technically misterprets some of the input signals. =) The color conversion was also a rather "interesting" piece of the puzzle, I still have "report sythesis tool bug to Lattice" on my ToDo-list from that.
Here's hoping someone can design pretty cheap PCBs for this.
If you think your soldering skills are good enough for 0.5mm pitch TQFP ICs on pads that are barely longer than the legs of the chip(*) you could order the PCBs from OSHPark (should be 23 USD for three boards) and parts from Digikey and build it yourself - or maybe order a larger number and make a name for yourself by selling the boards? ;)

(*) I messed up there, usually I use footprints with longer pads because it makes hand-soldering much easier. On this board this would basically require a re-layout of all connections between the FPGA and DAC and I haven't had the patience to that yet.
Or maybe my logic circuits class will require me to buy an FPGA dev board I can repurpose later (how much to those run usually anyway? I'm not well-versed on the hardware end of things).
Depends a lot on the board. There are small-and-cheap ones like the MachXO2 breakout board from Lattice at 30USD which is just the largest XO2 part and programming hardware on a PCB that routes out every single pin to footprints for standard pin headers and there are boards with huge FPGAs and lots of peripherals in the multi-thousand USD range. The Digilent Atlys board I used for the (currently unreleased) HDMI version of the code costs 419USD (or 230USD for students) for example. The code on the FPGA is quite small (the XO2-640 is one of the smallest FPGAs you can get these days), the more interesing question about possible target boards is the video output - few provide a 24 bit VGA DAC and I can assure you that a Gamecube reduced to 12 bit VGA (4 bit per color, 4096 colors in total) looks rather horrible. =)

Of course if you want to port the code to a different board, you'll need to adapt it to the changed environment. Doing that will probably be a good learning experience if you don't have any experience with hardware definition languages yet, although I think my code is reasonably clean and the only part that really needs to be adapted is the toplevel module. At some point the individual modules (i.e. GCDV decoder, color space conversion etc.) were synthesizable on Xilinx, Altera and Lattice tools without any changes which simplifies such ports a lot.
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by Xyga »

bobrocks95 wrote:Inside the cable is a custom IC that converts the strangely encoded digital signal to an analog one. So you can't simply pull YCbCr from the port, and you can't just use a regular dac to make it analog.
I see, thank you, I won't waste my time trying then. :o

EDIT: Wait... why in the World did Nintendo design it like this ? :shock:
Last edited by Xyga on Sun Aug 31, 2014 6:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by Unseen »

bobrocks95 wrote:Inside the cable is a custom IC that converts the strangely encoded digital signal to an analog one. So you can't simply pull YCbCr from the port, and you can't just use a regular dac to make it analog.
If you just want a black-and-white picture you could feed the eight digital video data lines into a single-channel video DAC clocked on the falling 54MHz edge following an edge on the CSel signal(*) and combining that with an external sync derived from the analog video port. Color is more complicated because there is only one color component (Cb or Cr) for each luma value and to derive the sync signals from the digital video port you need to decode the flag bits. It's probably doable with a sufficient number of 74xx discrete logic ICs, but with today's cheap and fast programmable logic chips the discrete solution is just unnecessarily complicated.

(*) Although the gamesx.com wiki page calls it "Clock select", it does not tell anything about the currently active clock - instead it signals if the color sample following the luma sample is Cb or Cr. It's toggling frequency can also be used to detect if the Gamecube is outputting a 15kHz or 30kHz video signal.
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by Konsolkongen »

Unseen wrote: Based on a few preliminary measurements, the Wii seems to use the same video data format internally, but with 1.8V levels instead of 3.3V. Since the Wii already has a component output, connecting this board to it probably isn't worth the hassle unless you've fried our video output. It also seems that the Wii internally transports audio using I2S, so why isn't there an SPDIF mod for it yet?
The Wii has a pretty shitty 480p though. Any chance your DAC would improve on that? The GameCube is razor sharp in comparison.

Great job cloning the DAC! Any screenshots of this in use?
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by APE992 »

Xyga wrote:
bobrocks95 wrote:Inside the cable is a custom IC that converts the strangely encoded digital signal to an analog one. So you can't simply pull YCbCr from the port, and you can't just use a regular dac to make it analog.
I see, thank you, I won't waste my time trying then. :o

EDIT: Wait... why in the World did Nintendo design it like this ? :shock:
That part is stupidly obvious: so that nobody else could make one giving Nintendo 100% of the profits. On top of that the digital connector is a custom connector and I've never seen anyone make a clone for obvious reasons.

This might drive prices of the cables down a bit after it comes out but there will always be a purist market for them.
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by Unseen »

Konsolkongen wrote:The Wii has a pretty shitty 480p though. Any chance your DAC would improve on that?
Maybe it could, maybe it could not... If it's just a problem on the analog side, my DAC could probably improve the situation. The actual DAC chip in the design is rated for 180MHz, which is waaaay more than required for this application.
The GameCube is razor sharp in comparison.
It depends on the monitor/TV and the signal format though. For example let's use the checkerboard pattern of the 240p test suite running in 480p unscaled mode which is basically the highest-frequency pattern you can expect to see on a GameCube. Using the VGA input of my TV, the result is pretty good with clearly defined pixels:
Image

The same pattern on the same TV using component is much worse though:
Image
I assume this is because on the VGA input, the TV auto-adjusts its timing to find the optimal sampling point for the sharpest possible pixels while it just uses some default timing on the component input that is slightly off. If I feed the same component signal into an Elgato GameCapture HD, its HDMI output also shows clearly-defined pixels similar to the first screenshot, but the preview on the PC is just a field of grey and the recording has vertical "smear bars". You just can't win with analog...
Any screenshots of this in use?
I'll capture and upload a few, probably tomorrow.

Since I have the EGC connected and the 240p test suite is running already I made a quick capture of a few of its test screens in 480p scaled and unscaled here - the GCVideo Lite was connected directly to the component input of the Game Capture HD. Something in the signal processing chain was nice enough to kill the scanlines that were present in the first half of the video even though they're clearly visible in the files on my local disk and other parts of the clip also look much worse than they shoud - looks like I need to use a better workflow for this. =(

Of course I could always cheat and upload a purely digital screenshot instead...
Spoiler
Gamecube Digital Video to DVI (might be an older version of the code with color conversion bugs), upscaled to 1080p using a Gefen HD Mate (hey, it was cheap and has less issues with DVI signals than a Framemeister), captured via Elgato Gamecapture HD:
Image
BTW, I just noticed that I still had a really old test video up on Youtube. That video was captured when the code was still running on a different FPGA devboard with just a 12-bit VGA output, so there is lots of color banding in the image. It shows the switches between the video modes while booting a PAL Mariocart with forced 480p mode, but I think even with the banding artifacts it would be possible to fake everything in there. ;)
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by Ed Oscuro »

I bought a GC component cable recently, but I'm happy as hell for this! I would definitely be excited about this being extended to the N64 as well. Would this be a simple plug-in cable? And what relationship, if any, does this have to the idea of an HDMI N64? Is there enough performance available on the FPGA (or one in the series) to implement that upscaling?
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by Pasky »

I'm curious if this allows the GBA player to be used via component and HDMI now.
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by bobrocks95 »

Ed Oscuro wrote:I bought a GC component cable recently, but I'm happy as hell for this! I would definitely be excited about this being extended to the N64 as well. Would this be a simple plug-in cable? And what relationship, if any, does this have to the idea of an HDMI N64? Is there enough performance available on the FPGA (or one in the series) to implement that upscaling?
It's incredibly far from a simple plug-in cable, as Unseen said he's not even going to make boards for it. That's if someone making boards wants to go through all the hassle. HDMI N64 was also mentioned earlier in the thread, the code would need to be adapted for the N64's digital output. And upscaling would depend on what FPGA you use. You could get a $100+ that I'm sure could handle it, if you also wanted to implement the code for it all.
Pasky wrote:I'm curious if this allows the GBA player to be used via component and HDMI now.
Yes, though of course if you had a component cable the GBA Player worked with it anyway. And OP said that HDMI is not implemented properly, someone will need to come in and finish the work (and the code is open-source, so it's certainly possible).
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

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bobrocks95 wrote: Yes, though of course if you had a component cable the GBA Player worked with it anyway. And OP said that HDMI is not implemented properly, someone will need to come in and finish the work (and the code is open-source, so it's certainly possible).
IIRC, the gba player never worked correctly via component. Or maybe 240P never worked correctly via component. I don't remember the details.
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by blizzz »

No problems with the GBA Player and component in 480p. That was the only reason I bought a component cable a couple years ago.
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by EmperorZelos »

If someone makes these I'd be interested for sure =)
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by Unseen »

Ed Oscuro wrote:I would definitely be excited about this being extended to the N64 as well. Would this be a simple plug-in cable?
As mentioned by someone else, no - the signals you need to create a better video output for an N64 are only available internally in the console, not on any external connector.
And what relationship, if any, does this have to the idea of an HDMI N64?
None - based on what I've seen on the net someone else is already working on that though. The problem with the N64 is that it seems to use an unusual pixel clock, resulting in an unusual horizontal resolution. To make a standards-compliant DVI/HDMI signal from that, you basically have to scale it at least horizontally, a problem that doesn't exist if you just convert it into an analog video signal. The Gamecube is much nicer in this regard, its output is very close to standard video resolutions.
Is there enough performance available on the FPGA (or one in the series) to implement that upscaling?
Unless you want to use nearest-neighbour scaling (which can be nice for 2D if done properly, but IMHO looks horrible for 3D) upscaling needs a different FPGA. Multiplication is a basic building block for the interpolation algorithms used in upscaling, but the MachXO2 series does not have any hardware multipliers since it's a very low-end FPGA series. Since it's programmable logic, nothing would stop you from building multipliers from that (and in fact the toolchain will happily do so if you use something like "a <= b * c" in the code), but that requires quite a bit of resources in the chip. Something like the Spartan 6 FPGA series from Xilinx would be better for this job, these chips have dedicated function blocks for implementing signal processing maths. It would also be my preferred chip for a GC-to-DVI solution as the Spartan 6 can easily be made to output the TMDS signals required for DVI/HDMI.
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by Unseen »

Twilight Princess via GCVideo in component mode, scaled to 1080p60 and converted to HDMI using a Gefen HD Mate (reduces capture problems when the video mode changes) and captured with an Elgato Game Capture HD: Youtube video

Same game, GCVideo in RGB mode, scaled to 1080p60 with an XRGB Mini (because the Gefen has decided that any signal on its VGA input must be displayed in some bright shade of purple?!), same capture device, might be a bit too dark because I forgot to check the settings on the Mini: Youtube video
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

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Unseen wrote:
darcagn wrote:How big is the the board?
It's 30mm x 49mm - here is a screenshot directly from KiCAD with dimensions.
I'm wondering if it is possible to get it small enough to fit inside of a GameCube
That was the original plan - design the board so it uses the same connector pitch as the DV port, mount a pin header on the bottom of the Cube board and attach the video board there.
Thanks for your response, this sounds awesome! I'm going to crack open the GameCube when I get some time and see just how difficult it is to desolder and remove that digital video port. It'd be awesome to replace it with a VGA or D-Terminal port instead, and eliminate the need for any proprietary style cable whatsoever.
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by Einzelherz »

This is all so over my head, but it sure seems awesome.

My question, not really understanding most of this, is would it be possible to make this chip, and then wire the YUV lines to the multi-av port RGB lines and have a not-too-complicated 5 plug component cable thrown together to get everything working? Getting a parent cable for that would cost ~$5 from almost any used game store.
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by bobrocks95 »

Einzelherz wrote:This is all so over my head, but it sure seems awesome.

My question, not really understanding most of this, is would it be possible to make this chip, and then wire the YUV lines to the multi-av port RGB lines and have a not-too-complicated 5 plug component cable thrown together to get everything working? Getting a parent cable for that would cost ~$5 from almost any used game store.
If I understand everything correctly, if you got an FPGA dev board, or someone manufactured a PCB with an FPGA, where it was small enough to fit inside the Gamecube, you could solder its outputs to the multi-out after cutting some traces on the underside.

If you soldered things in the right place I guess you could use a SCART cable for the SNES after removing its capacitors? That or make a custom cable of some kind. Ooh, or thinking really outside the box, do a separate Digital Audio mod (I think someone at some point made custom boards that just extracted digital audio), and then wire the multi-out up so you could just use a standard composite AV cable as YPbPr/YUV.
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Re: Cloning the Gamecube component cable

Post by darcagn »

Einzelherz wrote:This is all so over my head, but it sure seems awesome.

My question, not really understanding most of this, is would it be possible to make this chip, and then wire the YUV lines to the multi-av port RGB lines and have a not-too-complicated 5 plug component cable thrown together to get everything working? Getting a parent cable for that would cost ~$5 from almost any used game store.
This is actually a pretty good idea, especially since NTSC GameCubes do not output RGB anyway, you could put YPbPr on the pins that are RGB pins on the multiout connector. So you would lose no functionality by doing this.

Another option would be removing the multiout port and replacing it with one of the 3D printed Wii AV connectors that Helder/BuffaloWing make and sell on the AssemblerGames forum. If there is enough clearance for it to fit properly, that is. However you would lose S-video output without more custom work as the S-video pins and YPbPr pins are the same and the output is selected with the mode select pins, so you'd have to come up with something to replicate this behavior.
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