2002 Nintendo GameCube Restoration & Modifications

I recently bought my first Nintendo GameCube on eBay – I never actually had one back in the day, I had a PlayStation 2 at the time instead, though a couple of my friends did. I’d been after one for a while due to their game library and available modifications.

The Nintendo GameCube is a sixth-generation game console, the successor to the Nintendo 64 – it primarily competed with Sony’s PlayStation 2, Sega’s Dreamcast, and Microsoft’s Xbox. It is Nintendo’s first console to use optical discs instead of ROM cartridges, with memory cards for saved games. Unlike its competitors, it is solely focused on gaming and does not play mass media like DVD or CD.

GameCubes are pretty common, and you can pick them up in non-working condition for fairly cheap – they go for quite a bit when refurbished and modified, though. Their nostalgia value and interesting game library make them quite collectible.

It was sold as working, and it seemed to be in reasonable physical condition. I powered it up using the PSU that it was sold with, connected to a TV using a composite video cable and with a game disc inserted, and sure enough it worked fine.

I wanted to clean the console up and perform some preventative maintenance, as well as some usability modifications.

The first step was to disassemble the unit and check over everything inside.

Disassembling the GameCube

The console is easy to dismantle with basic tools: remove the four 4.5mm Gamebit screws in the corners of the underside of the case using a Gamebit driver, and the top case should just lift off easily upwards.

With the case opened, you get your first look inside the console – everything seemed to be original and pretty much untouched.

The controller port cover can then be made loose by unsnapping the two snaps, one at each side of the cover; the rear I/O port cover can be removed by simply lifting it out; the fan assembly can be made loose by removing two Philips screws, one at each side.

To remove the optical drive assembly, the two memory card shields must be removed (two Philips screws each, one at each side of each shield), followed by twelve Philips screws around the perimeter of the mainboard. The optical drive assembly should then lift off, taking care not to damage the board-to-board connector that holds it in place.

The heatsink over the CPU, GPU, and RAM can then be removed – the six Philips screws around its perimeter need to be removed, then the heatsink can be lifted upwards. There will be resistance from the thermal pads underneath – it is very important to remove the heatsink carefully, as if it shoots off sideways it can shear delicate components from the mainboard or cut into the board itself, and using tools underneath it to pry it off can also damage the board if you’re not careful.

If you’re finding it difficult, heat up the heatsink using a hairdryer to loosen the pads.

Remnants of the original thermal pads on the ICs and heatsink can then be removed carefully using a plastic spudger, and the surfaces cleaned using 99% IPA.

The controller port board can be removed by carefully pulling its connector cable upwards from its socket on the mainboard.

The mainboard should then lift out from the lower RF shield; this lower RF shield can be removed by removing four Philips screws (some models only have two), giving access to the DC-DC board underneath; the DC-DC board can be removed by removing the four Philips screws around its perimeter.

Mainboard Servicing

As I mentioned before, I wanted to do some preventative maintenance on the mainboard – primarily, replacing all of the aluminium electrolytic capacitors.

Aluminium electrolytic capacitors are commonly used for filtering, smoothing, and decoupling in both high- and low-voltage electronics. They are quite cheap in comparison to their solid-electrolyte counterparts (such as tantalum and polymer electrolytics), so are very common in consumer electronics.

Their useful lifetime is highly dependent on the specific application that they are used in (i.e. frequency, ripple current) and temperature, as well as the manufacturer and series of the specific component. They typically comprise aluminium windings which are coated with a liquid electrolyte, which can dry out over time (negatively affecting the performance of the capacitor, often causing them to fail dead-short), or even leak out and cause corrosion to the PCB and surrounding components.

SMD aluminium electrolytic capacitors are common, well-documented failure points in other pieces of equipment from the 1990s (i.e. Amiga 600, Amiga 1200, Apple PowerBooks, Apple Macintosh Classic / Classic II / SE / SE/30, etc), where they physically leak and cause board corrosion. I’m not aware of capacitors leaking like this in any variant of the GameCube, but apparently the capacitors on the optical board commonly start to fail (lower capacitance, higher ESR) and cause problems reading discs.

There are several production variants of the GameCube mainboard, each of which have different electrolytic capacitor values and locations, so take note of which you have.

The GameBoy C/DOL-CPU(P)-01 mainboard is fairly easy to recap as it only has six SMD electrolytic capacitors, as follows:

• C1: 33uF 25V SMD
• C2: 220uF 25V SMD
• C3: 33uF 25V SMD
• C115: 10uF 16V SMD
• C116: 10uF 16V SMD
• C118: 10uF 16V SMD

You can usually buy capacitor packs for these machines from sellers such as Console5, but I just made up my own by noting the specifications of all of the electrolytic capacitors on the board, and ordering a set of high-quality known-brand parts.

I decided to use tantalum electrolytic capacitors for the smaller capacitors and a polymer aluminium electrolytic capacitor for the large capacitor, both of which are equivalents to standard aluminium electrolytic capacitors – these use a solid electrolyte, meaning that they will not physically leak.

When substituting electrolytic capacitors, the capacitance needs to be the same, and the voltage rating can be the same or higher (within reason) – when you’re going through all this effort to recap something, be sure to use high-quality replacements.

For SMD capacitors, I usually remove all of them at once using a hot air rework station with kapton tape and aluminium foil to protect the surrounding areas, or by carefully twisting them off using needle-nose pliers (this technique may not be suitable if the pads are damaged, as they could delaminate from the board – and push downwards, don’t pull upwards!). The pads can then be cleaned up using new solder and either desoldering braid or a desoldering station. The board should then be thoroughly cleaned to remove any leaked electrolyte and leftover flux, using isopropyl alcohol and an ESD-safe brush.

As for through-hole capacitors, I usually remove each one-by-one using my desoldering station, then immediately install its replacement part – this minimises the likelihood of getting it wrong. The board should then be thoroughly cleaned to remove any leaked electrolyte and leftover flux, using isopropyl alcohol and an ESD-safe brush.

When fitting new electrolytic capacitors, you must take care to ensure that the value, voltage rating, and orientation of the new capacitor are correct – electrolytic capacitors are polarised, so must be installed the correct way around, else they’ll get hot when powered on (and probably explode). The polarity is marked on the case: for aluminium electrolytic capacitors, the negative side is usually shown by a white stripe (for through-hole) or a black bar (for SMD); for tantalum capacitors, the positive side is usually shown by an orange or white bar (for SMD). This catches a lot of people out!

You can’t always trust the orientation markings on the PCB silkscreen (if it even has them, not all boards do), as sometimes mistakes were made in the design from the factory (take the PCB layout of the audio circuit on the Commodore CD32, for example), so care must be taken to match the orientation of the new capacitor with the original. Make sure to take lots of “before” pictures for reference, and double-check throughout.

DC-DC Board Servicing

Similar to the mainboard, I wanted to replace the electrolytic capacitors on the DC-DC board, which comprised four 1000uF 6.3V SMD parts – again, I used polymer replacements.

Optical Board Servicing

Similar to the mainboard and DC-DC board, I wanted to replace the electrolytic capacitors on the optical board, as follows – again, I used tantalum replacements:

• C103: 100uF 6.3V SMD
• C104: 47uF 4V SMD
• C235: 47uF 4V SMD
• C238: 220uF 4V SMD
• C305: 47uF 4V SMD
• C401: 100uF 6.3V SMD
• C408: 47uF 4V SMD
• C431: 47uF 4V SMD
• C432: 47uF 6.3V SMD
• C517: 100uF 6.3V SMD

To access the optical board, the shield must be removed by removing the six Philips screws around its perimeter; the optical board is held into its carrier by three Philips screws, a pair of trim wires which can be desoldered, a two-wire switch cable which pulls out, a white ribbon cable which pulls out, and an orange ribbon cable which can be removed by pushing the black bar out of the connector at each side and gently removing the cable.

I also took this opportunity to clean the potentiometers on the optical board and the tray close detect switch with contact cleaner.

Region-Free Modification

I also took this opportunity to install a XenoGC mod-chip which bypasses the in-built region protection and allows use of discs from any region. It’s a bit tricky to install as the solder pads are quite small, but there is a good guide covering the process here.

The assembly of the optical stack is the opposite of its disassembly.

PRAM Battery Replacement

The GameCube uses a battery to retain certain settings (such as locale and date/time) in PRAM when mains power is disconnected – given the age of these consoles, most of them are dead or pretty much dead at this point.

The battery is located on the controller board – it’s a non-rechargeable 3V CR2032, which is soldered in place. Replacing it requires desoldering the original cell – you can replace it with another soldered battery, or you can fit a CR2032 holder and standard cell. This allows easy battery replacement without soldering, so that’s what I did.

SD Card Modification

I wanted to load game images easily and quickly on my GameCube, and I decided to install a PicoBoot mod as it’s cheap, easy, and allows you to still use the optical drive. There is a very good installation guide for this process.

This involved buying a Raspberry Pi Pico, and flashing it with PicoBoot firmware via USB – this allows you to load the homebrew image-loading software Swiss from an SD card.

I decided to use a pre-built flex cable to make installation easier – the programmed Pi simply solders to one end of this, and the other end to the IPL chip on the mainboard. The flex cable is thin enough to pass through the original RF shields, and it is pre-fitted with double-sided adhesive to attach the back of the Pi to the fan assembly.

For the other end, I bought an SD2SP2 adapter which fits into the serial port 2 connector underneath the GameCube, and a 512GB SD card which fits into the SD2SP2. Make sure that you use an SD card that is compatible with Swiss.

To prepare the SD card for use: format it for exFAT; download the latest Swiss release, find the “swiss_rXXXX.dol” file, copy it to the root of the SD card, and rename it to “ipl.dol”.

Game images can be copied directly into the root of the SD card, too – Swiss supports loading raw GameCube .iso files directly.

ISOs can be downloaded from the Internet Archive, which has a collection of both European and US games. I used about 500GB-worth of these, hence the 512GB SD card.

Swiss apparently doesn’t like fragmented image files, so I made and used a batch file on my Windows PC to copy the ISO files across to the SD card sequentially to limit fragmentation – this is a lot easier than manually copying them one-by-one.

@ECHO OFF
ECHO starting copy from E:\Game Images\GameCube\ to F:\.
for %%x in ("E:\Game Images\GameCube\*") do (
	echo Copying file %%x
	xcopy /s "%%x" "F:\" /v
)
ECHO All files have been copied.
PAUSE

I waited until the unit was reassembled to test these modifications out.

Console Reassembly

The console reassembly is just the reverse of its disassembly.

I also took this opportunity to fit a set of new thermal pads on the CPU, GPU, and RAM.

Controller Cover Retrobrite

Before the console was completely reassembled, the only area that was letting it down aesthetically was that the controller port cover was quite yellowed with age.

I decided to try and “retrobrite” it, which involves bleaching the plastic with hydrogen peroxide – in this case I put a small amount of 12% H2O2 solution into the bottom of a small plastic container with the controller panel, covered it in cling film, and left it in the UK sun for a couple of days.

The results are quite impressive, and by using “vapour-briting” with H2O2 solution rather than directly-applied cream, there were no patches or burns and there was no need to tend to it during the process.

Controller Refurbishment

The two controllers that I bought for the console were not in brilliant condition, and were suffering from sticky and drifting analogue sticks, so I decided to refurbish them.

The controllers are easy enough to dismantle, and use the same GameBit screws as the GameCube console itself. I stripped each controller down and thoroughly cleaned each part; I cleaned the carbon contacts on both side of each button and the trigger potentiometers using contact cleaner; I desoldered each analogue stick and fitted a suitable replacement part; I also replaced the stick covers with suitable replacement parts, as the originals were yellowed and deteriorated.

I reassembled the controllers, and they looked and worked like new.

Console Testing

After its modifications and preventative maintenance, the GameCube looked great and worked perfectly! Game images load quickly and reliably from the SD card.

I’ve been playing through Beyond Good & Evil, and my wife has been able to play the original Animal Crossing for the first time.