Weekend review for 6/7/14 - 6/8/14.

 This weekend was actually really busy, but had some fun parts. Friday night, we watched some Netflix. We watched some documentary on if all men are pedophiles. That was some crazy ass shit. I'm not even gonna put the IMDb  link like normal.

 Saturday:

We had to do some shopping for a housewarming, first birthday, two other birthdays and a baby shower. Just thinking about all the events we had to buy for is overwhelming. So in order to buy me off make up for last weekends search for a GameCube. Melisa, said we could go to Value Village so I could look for a GameCube. 

 Well this time my hopes were not up. We got back to the electronics section and no GameCubes. Melissa said I should ask an employee if they had any in the back. I asked the first employee and they said they had one out in the morning, but that's it. I said okay and they said they would ask someone else. I waited for a little bit and out comes an employee with a GameCube and a bag with the a/v cable, power adapter and a controller for 15 bucks! Score! I said thank you and started walking away. I stopped and I had a moment of maybe I shouldn't do this. Maybe I shouldn't waste my money and time for this project. All in all it will be close to 160 bucks after everything is all said and bought. That's a lot for a gutted game console with a mini computer to play roms. 

 An Ouya console is 100 bucks and straight out of the gate, it can play my roms. So why would I spend so much more money, time and effort. Well, my answer to myself was, I have always been a tinkerer. I like building things, I like programming computers. And the biggest part of all, I am going to slowly piece this together and buy bits and pieces when I can. So my total investment so far is 20 bucks. That's for my PS1 and now the GameCube. I am still going to build my PS1 Raspberry Pi. That is going to be a XBMC player and small emulator functions. So I won't need a usb hub and stuff like that. The GameCube, I want as just exclusively as an emulation machine. I want to be able to pop sd cards in and out, possibly a hard drive, multiple controllers and add on usb accessories. The GameCube build will be highly detailed and involved.

 Saturday when we got home from shopping, i decided to try out the GameCube. It actually worked and played a few games on it, then I gutted it. 

I wasn't going to wait for a gamebit driver to show up. I decided to use the tool I had available.

And here's the little proprietary bastard. 

Obviously it worked. 

This GameCube was not shown any love for a long time. 

So I wanted to be able to place a game disc in to make it look as stock as possible, just like the PS1.

I gutted as much of the disc drive as I could and then used a couple screws to hold it in.

Finished project. You wouldn't be able to tell anything was up unless you looked for the laser and didn't see it.

So after I was finished with the delicate surgery, here's the finished product. 

 I wanted to be able to use the stock power button and reset switch. The Power cable goes into the cube then to a pcb board with two connectors. One for the fan and the other for the main power. What I want to do is, keep the power stock and bump the power down to 5 volts. I want to be able to use the whole assembly. So the stock power block, power switch, fan and have power leads for the Raspberry Pi. I didn't take a picture of the fan shroud that I cut apart to have the fan pull all the hot air out, not just down near the original heatsink.

I actually put the memory card doors back in. 

 The openings on the bottom of the case were for the add on stuff made for the GameCube, like the Game Boy player, serial port and network port. These openings will be beneficial for me later. I eventually want to get a broken Game Boy player, attach it to the cube and use it as a usb hub housing area. The holes will be able to fit usb cables coming up the Pi itself. Explaining it is harder than seeing it, but that's what's in my head. The openings on the back where the a/v and digital a/v will house the hdmi and usb hub power cords. But I might cut small holes in the back of the Game Boy player for them instead. I don't actually know until it happens.

 Saturday night:
After I was done working on my GameCube, I tried my Logitech PS3 controller on my laptop to see if it worked for my emulators. It did! Windows 7 is amazing and it installed the drivers itself and the Logitech controller was installed and ready to go. I tried a Windows version of the Super Nintendo emulator and fired up A Link To The Past. I configured the emulator to work with my Logitech and it worked. I had a couple of resolution selection issues but that was my fault. I was trying to go big balls straight out the gate. I got the resolution fixed and I was playing Zelda. I tried a Nintendo emulator, it worked. I was amazed. Now I have to find a DOS emulator or something and load up my Doom WAD file backups and play some Doom. After I was done in geek heaven, we decided to rent Lone Survivor. This was one of the most amazing movies I have seen in a long time. You felt every emotion watching it. If you haven't seen it, definitely do. This will be a buy for me.

 Sunday:
We went to Melissa's cousin's house for a house warming/birthday parties. The drive was an hour and a half. It was all the way out near Black Diamond. We got there and it felt like we weren't really mean to be there. Family issues abound and it's hard to act like everything is fine and dandy. We got some food out of the deal and I talked to a guy who was going through a lawsuit for L&I and hospital negligence. It was interesting to hear another person's story about their lawsuit and pain management. I try not to complain about my stuff, but talking about that, brought up some old wounds (No pun intended.). After another hour and half drive home we got to relax and watch some shows. We did our house chores on Saturday, so that was a good thing. Well I feel like I have been writing for awhile, so that's it for now. I hope you had a good weekend. Till next time.