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GameCube (Games) Entertainment Games Hardware

New GameCube Network Loader Runs Homebrew Games 296

Posted by timothy from the little-holes dept.
An anonymous reader submits: "Cube Hacker is reporting that a new network loader has been released which allows you to execute retail code by exploiting a known bug in Sega's online game, Phantasy Star Online. Obviously piracy is not condoned but this certainly opens the door for future home-brew development! Linux on GameCube anyone?" Update: 10/13 23:33 GMT by S : Previous update removed, due to it only referencing retail titles.
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New GameCube Network Loader Runs Homebrew Games More

New GameCube Network Loader Runs Homebrew Games

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  • Not explained well... (Score:3)

    by Doomrat ( 615771 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @05:47PM (#7202989) Homepage
    I don't get it. Does this mean that you can now execute non-official code on a Gamecube? The Slashdot post doesn't really explain it properly, and the linked site is intended for people who knew what this all means in the first place. I'm sacrificing myself here so that other people don't have to look stupid too.

    • Re:Not explained well... (Score:5, Informative)

      by L-Train8 ( 70991 ) * <{Matthew_Hawk} {at} {hotmail.com}> on Monday October 13, 2003 @06:44PM (#7203418) Homepage Journal
      A while back, someone hacked the GameCube disc format. They found a way to get the raw data off of GameCube discs. This data then could be posted to the internet or saved on your computer hard drive. However, that was a pretty useless trick, piracy-wise. You couldn't burn that data to a blank CD and put it into a GameCube and play your pirated games. GameCube discs are custom sized. You can't get a spindle of GCD's at CompUSA, and conventional burning software wouldn't write to it properly if you did. So it was a neat mental excercise, but with no practical applications.

      Until now. Now these guys have hacked the GameCube broadband adapter. These adapters are hard to find, and currently the only game that supprots them is Phantasy Star Online (although the new version of Mario Cart coming soon will support it, and they should make more broadband adapters available for that). So now, you can load a game over the GameCube broadband adapter.

      Those GameCube discs you previously could rip to your computer, now you can load them to your GameCube over the broadband adapter. That opens the door for piracy pretty wide. It also opens the door for you to load just about any code you want to the GameCube, hence the remarks about a Linux version for the console. So now it is possible to play pirated games our custom software on the cube. It is still a pretty involved and difficult process, involving hard-to-find hardware and requiring a lot of technical know-how, but it is possible.

      • Re:Not explained well... (Score:4, Informative)

        by L-Train8 ( 70991 ) <{Matthew_Hawk} {at} {hotmail.com}> on Monday October 13, 2003 @06:47PM (#7203443) Homepage Journal
        Here's the link to the article about breaking the GameCube disc format:
        http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid= 03/06/16/ 119233&tid=213
      • The new mariocart supports hooking up to anther cube. Just for anyone who is reading. It does not enable netplay.
        • my friends and i have each reserved kart for november, and when it comes out, we're going to install openvpn on each of our linux nat/router boxes and do an ethernet bridge type thing -- it will pipe all the broadcast traffic and such across a virtual link, and we'll actually see each other's remote machines in the arp table. hopefully our cubes will talk to each other. fortunately we're on the same isp so the latency shouldnt be much higher than if we were in the same room.
      • GameCube discs are custom sized.

        Actually, they aren't. They're 80mm DVDs, which is a standard size. While I couldn't find any at CompUSA, the media is a standard format. You can place a GameCube disc into your PS2, if you really want to. Pop open your CD-ROM drive. Look at the smaller circle groove. That's for 80mm discs. A GameCube disc will fit nicely in there. I haven't actually tried reading one through a DVD drive, but it will fit.

        [C]onventional burning software wouldn't write [a GameCube g

        • Yeah, I think the DVD-R's for camcorder fit in the GC. I don't have a GC, or one of the camcorders, but it's an idea.
        • Putting a GC mini-disc into anything that is not a GameCube will do absolutely nothing. The disc refuses to load. It would be neat to have an audio track warning, similar to many PS1, Saturn, or Dreamcast discs (the audio track as well as a PC-readable track actually were mandatory parts of the DC's GD-ROM spec and some discs had some pretty neat extras or funny sound). The XBox DVDs have a brief, uniform "this disc is an XBox game, go buy an XBox" message when placed in a DVD player.

          Oh, and FYI, puttin
      • How come the games, which expect to be running off the CD, work when there is no CD? I would think that even if they did not try to prevent this, there would be plenty of calls to the system that would act different because there is no CD in the drive and the game does not work.
      • What if a game needs to stream data from CD(i.e. music,speech, etc)? I mean, unless you change the game intstructions to load data from the network, I don't see how you can load 1.5GB "into" a Gamecube with limited memory.

      • about the 80mm disc:
        just burn the game to a regular writeable DVD and cut the GC's box to fit the discs.

        and I can recall a rip-off GC by pioneer (?) which could also play regular sized DVD's due to it's size.
      • "These adapters are hard to find, and currently the only game that supprots them is Phantasy Star Online (although the new version of Mario Cart coming soon will support it, and they should make more broadband adapters available for that)"

        I thought you were full of it until I tried to find one online. I've seen them at my local Walmart in the past and assumed they wouldn't be too hard to find.
        Doesn't really matter to me though unless someone comes up with a hack to play Mario Kart across the internet.

  • Maxconsole (Score:5, Informative)

    by CrazyConsole ( 715391 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @05:47PM (#7202992) Journal
    www.maxconsole.com has lots more information about this subject matter.

    • Re:Maxconsole (Score:2, Informative)

      by CrazyConsole ( 715391 )
      http://www.maxconsole.com/?mode=comments&newsid=10 33 , this link will help you alot as will the whole of www.maxconsole.com , I honestly don't know why cubehacker was reported for this news , as it maxconsole was certainly the first to report of it and most informative.
  • Granted, I know it's a n00b question. I looked at the Gamecube site and couldn't quite understand the gist of this. Anyone want to step up to the plate?
    • Short version:
      Using a GC and a GC ethernet network adapter, along with a copy of Phantasy Star Online, one can upload code to the Cube which the cube then runs.

      Longer version:
      Combined with the ability to read in a GC disc over the broadband adapter, and write it back similarly, this makes GC Game piracy possible, although it also makes possible other things like writing a version of Linux for the Cube. There exists a GCC cross compiler for the Cube, and people have been using this write their own homebrew
      • you only have a delay in load times as the network transaction occurs.

        Ummmm... With optical media access time in the 10s of milliseconds combined with their relatively low throughput, wouldn't fastethernet and a hard drive have both a faster access time and a faster throughput? :P
        • Well, from what they're saying on the page, it can take 1 to several minutes to transmit the data over. So I'm just going by that. In theory, with a hard drive and a 100mbit ethernet, then you're probably right. All I know is that the load time on my GC is very, very low for most things.
  • How would you do Linux on the Gamecube? It uses a smaller disc, so you can't just stick it on a CD-R (I don't know if the mini ones work). The only way I can see is through the broadband adapter or something. Does the Gamecube have any USB ports or the like? It'd be awesome to have a cluster of $100 computers, though... I'd love to see some benchmarks comparing them to other computers...

  • No! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PhoenixFlare ( 319467 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @05:54PM (#7203046) Journal
    Linux on GameCube anyone?

    For the love of god, no. Can't we have a (modern) console that just stays as a gaming machine?

    If you want an everything-box that can run Linux, go buy a PS2, Xbox, or just a cheap computer, but leave the Cube. It's designed to be for gaming and gaming only.

    I guess that sounds incredibly jealous, narrow-minded, or fanboyish of me, but that's my gut reaction upon seeing this story.
    • Can't we have a (modern) console that just stays as a gaming machine?

      The GameCube is now under $100. It has a fairly fast processor, Ethernet capabilities, and a very small case. Put these together, and you have a serious option for cluster nodes. Of course, real benchmarks would be needed to tell if the price/performance is good.

      That said, I do tend to agree with you -- a single GameCube, hacked to run Linux, is pretty much useless.

    • Can't we have a (modern) console that just stays as a gaming machine?

      Note to PhoenixFlare.

      When I port Linux to my Xbox, your Xbox is unaffected.

      Thank you.
      • I don't own an XBox, and I never will, as I absolutely abhor the things.

        I own a Platinum Gamecube.

        Where in the world would you infer that I own an XBox?
    • It has very fast memory access speed (and a decent amount of RAM anyways). Opengl CPU command extensions to play with, ethernet potential, a nice controller, small size/low power consumption, and a nifty GPU to explore.

      Its definitely a game machine, but its cool because of that. The xbox is a pc with known PC parts. Gamecube is the current frontier! And its about as elegant as it will get nowadays.

      Why not linux on Gamecube? Wheres your curiousity gone?
      • Why not linux on Gamecube? Wheres your curiousity gone?

        My curiosity hasn't gone anywhere. I just want to use my gaming console to actually....play games :)

        If I want to run Linux, i'll just boot into the happily stable Redhat partition I already have set up on my PC.

        Why hassle with finding a broadband adapter for the Cube, getting a copy of PSO, getting a keyboard and mouse hooked up somehow, making it work with a network-mounted harddrive, etc....When I can just wait 30 seconds and be set to go?

        And yes
    • Nobody is forcing your unadventurous self to boot Linux in your machine.

      Leave that to people with natural curiosity and a passion for experimentation.

  • Maxconsole more helpful (Score:3, Informative)

    by CrazyConsole ( 715391 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @05:54PM (#7203056) Journal
    Maxconsole [maxconsole.com] shows a tutorial on how to actually use this and explains it in more depth! maxconsole [maxconsole.com] has lots more information on this , I don't know why cubehacker was mentioned at all.
  • From what I have read, the hack consists in exploiting a weakness in the sega video game PHANTASY STAR ONLINE using the same method than with the xbox memory card exploit: a modified saved game that will cause a buffer overflow. Exploiting the overflow allows the user to gain control of the ethernet adaptor, enabling him to transfer the 'loader' bootstrap, causing the reboot of the Nintendo Gamecube, and from there, the loader will open a connection to the user's computer, and using the server software inc

  • The article forgot to mention (Score:5, Funny)

    by imadcow1 ( 559289 ) <imadcow1 AT yahoo DOT com> on Monday October 13, 2003 @06:08PM (#7203155) Homepage
    that the webserver was running on the Gamecube as well.

  • Here's the software to do it (Score:4, Informative)

    by TheBadger ( 131644 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @06:11PM (#7203174) Homepage
    All the software is available from dextrose [dextrose.com]

  • Slashdoted

    I wonder if Nintendo submitted this link to /. to take down www.cubehacker.com.

  • Gamecube viruses? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Carnildo ( 712617 )
    Thinking further on this: This is a security hole that allows remote execution of code on the affected machine. Sure sounds like what's needed to write a worm!

    Any bets on how long it'll be until the first ones show up?
    • There's already a virus for the Gamecube. It's called Animal Crossing. Since it 'infected' my Gamecube, I haven't got a damn thing done. I do know how to spell coelacanth now though.

  • Hebrew? (Score:3, Funny)

    by waldoj ( 8229 ) * <waldo&jaquith,org> on Monday October 13, 2003 @08:08PM (#7204016) Homepage Journal
    Man, for the life of me, I could not understand why it was such a big deal that the "New GameCube Network Loader Runs Hebrew Games." I mean, don't they sell Nintendos in Israel? I found myself quite literally scratching my head over the matter, and even headed over to nintendo.co.il [nintendo.co.il].

    Oh. Homebrew. D'oh.

    -Waldo Jaquith
  • So what do you think of the Panasonic Gamecube [lik-sang.com]? It's more than a game console and a major manufacturer is producing it.

  • the gamecube loader based on PSO is several months old...

    wheres the news?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Sorry, I misread that. But they could be missing out on the lucrative Hebrew games market.
  • Boy, I was beginning to think that "haxors" had it in *just* for MS's Xbox. At least now I know they're not discriminatory.

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