Cerysnetics Laboratories

A visit to the UK last month led to a wonderful day with a fellow 40 something nerd and her collection of retro devices. Three things stuck in my mind from that day;

I am terrible at, and terrified by Resident Evil 4.

Gosh, Mega drive games were pretty.

I want a Gamecube again.

30 minutes after returning to where I was staying I had found a Spicy Orange Gamecube online and had ordered it! I hoped it would arrive before I returned to DE.. Of course it didnt.

Turns out I couldnt wait for my sister to post it on, so I ordered a silver gamecube to tide me over.

To the surprise of no-one, I am also too impatient to wait to dive in and modify the gamecube to open up regions and video output options. After all I have an Hue Sync box I’d like to connect it to.

a couple of days later and I think I have all the things I need to perform the mod.

Soldering Iron/wires/general tools (from my toolbox)

A Xeno GC chip &

SD2 SP2 to connect an SD card to the serial port

I was not put off at all that the chip itself is tiny (see above) especially when placed next to A SINGLE HUMAN HAIR!!!!

Neither was I given pause to reconsider and wait to get a small tip for my iron or that, more importantly, my 40 something eyes are ill suited for such small work any more.

Here at Cerysnetics Labs, we work when excited, obsessed and without sleep for best results.

The Xeno Chip connects to the drive, and not the motherboard so its somewhat easier to get to, and all things went very well for 5/6 connections. Somewhat rough, but this was practice for the spicy cube, so rough was, as they say “good enough for opera”.

That “Too Large” tip for my iron, and a broken trace came back to haunt me though, as the final connection shorted 3 of the pins, and in my haste I had negelected to find my Solder sucker, or desoldering wick. so was left with an absolute blachmange of a PCB.

Sloppy work. Happily I was able to clean things up, and confirm the cube was working perfectly (if a little sore inside, bless it)

I decided to wait, for some updated tools, and also ordered a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 Board as an alternative mod option. Depending on how things went I would chose one or the other for my Spicy cube, and hopefully this one would function well enough for my daughter to have and try 🙂

Working perfectly well, despite my best efforts. A happy ending to mod attempt 01.