Oops, I guess forgot to post yesterday. Well, that concurrent posting streak didn’t last longer than, like, three days. Oh well, I guess this post starts a new one.

The last few days, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with my old Nintendo GameCube — that’s not mine above, just one I found on Flickr which looks like mine. I loaned it to Ben and Amanda for a few months, but once they got their Wii, it’s just been collecting dust. It’s a perfectly fine game system, and there are a ton of games for it, so maybe I can still get some use out of it on my desk in my office … if it doesn’t get too expensive. First things first, I’ll probably shell out the $20 for a GameCube VGA cable so I can hook it up to my monitor at school, but beyond that?

I’d like to be able to run an emulator or two and, perhaps, some GameCube homebrew. There appear to be very, very few clear tutorials on this out there, but I know of three options:

First option from that link above, forget installing a modchip, just get one of those SD card systems. If I understand them correctly, I’d get a big enough SD card (a gig or two), put the emulator and games on the card, and after loading the disc in the GameCube, it should run with few problems. This looks to put me out around $60 maybe?

Second option, install a modchip, buy a DVD burner which handles the tiny GameCube-sized discs, and run emulators that way. It seems a tad excessive to buy a new DVD burner (and media) simply to burn a few emulators, however I do know of one other person in town who has done this, so maybe if I could get him to burn me a few discs, it’d work out.

Third option, significantly mod both the case and the GameCube’s hardware itself to play full-sized DVDs, like this guy did. This is probably excessive and would only ever be cost-effective if I was into pirating games or something equally unsavory. The only reason to make a GameCube play full-sized DVDs is if you were burning regular DVDs with enough frequency that this mod would cost less than the cost of a new mini-DVD drive and media.

So, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I think I’m definitely going to get the VGA cable, just to play my GameCube games at my desk at school. Is there really any point to this, given that there’s an unused GameCube and a Wii just next door? Probably not, but whatever, I feel like doing it. And when it comes to goofy projects like this, I tend not to question my initial instincts too much.

Any opinions/suggestions would be appreciated!