Had a customer send in a few consoles, the first of which was an Indigo GameCube for a bunch of nice upgrades!
Got the system fully disassembled so the shell could soak while I worked on prepping the internals. Since the GC is quite modular, I always start in the order the boards/components will be reinstalled so motherboard first! Used my hot air station to warm the heatsink and remove, then brought in the hot tweezers to get the 8 stock caps removed! Once the entire board was dusted and deep cleaned with ISO, I began the wiring process for the Pico boot using 5V VSYS Method (see above) as this needs to be done before reattaching the heatsink.
VSYS is the recommended wiring method as long as you use a protection diode on the Pico boot chip side, which of course I always do. Once wired and secured nicely with some heatshrink, installed the new caps and was done with the first portion.
Next up I turned my focus to the left side where I need to finish the Pico boot but also do the Noctua fan upgrade! RetroFrog designed a nice clip-on solution for the fan, my only change is instead of using some bulky adapter for the silent mode, I install a resistor in-line and neatly splice, and heat shrink wrap the wires coming off the Noctua to the 2-wire harness that the stock system uses.
Once the fan was assembled, I mounted it back to the system then 3d printed a Pico boot holder where it will sit in its final resting place. This allows me to bring the wires out through the shielding and mark/cut to exact length as its very important these are not too long, not to mention we want them nice and tidy! Got them soldered up according to VSYS schematic and the Pico boot had been flashed by me with the latest version before installing!
The customer also wanted the battery replacement mod so they would not get asked to set date and time on each boot which is quite annoying! Its very easy and all future battery swaps can be done by customer easily by just taking top shell off with 4 screws and accessing the holder on the back side of the controller board – pop old one out and pop new one in… viola! An essential upgrade just like on the Dreamcast!
Pictured above is also the SD2SP2 adapter the customer provided as well as generously providing an SD card already formatted correctly and with the latest SWISS and copies of their games. I don’t require customers to do this as I have a test card, but it’s always preferred as I can just confirm no issues with the SD card they are using and the adapter, always a plus to know the system I’m testing is just like it will be when they get it back!
Only thing that sucks about the SD2SP2 adapter is they are slightly too thin so they adapter requires reseating if console gets bumped too hard, which it almost assuredly will during shipping so customer will be given a heads up!
Pictured above is the aforementioned recap of the mainboard but also of the optical drive. Recapping of the optical drive in particular is almost 100% essential on these, so many won’t read discs and its almost always the caps, very few are genuine laser failures. Not too many caps inside but getting to the board is kind of a pain!
Some pictures of the new thermal pads, all correct height and cut to fit, along with the shell being completely disassembled and washed!
As part of the cleaning process, I also shine the jewel to restore its original smooth look, and I applied my JRG sticker inside the expansion slot, hidden and out of the way but hopefully noticeable if anyone ever goes to tear it open down the road!
Console 1 of 2 done and another GameCube in the books for 2026!