What happens when you have two generations of a company’s gaming console cluttering up your living room? If you’re a hacker, you merge them together, of course.
Over on the Made by Bacteria forums a user by the name of Hailrazer, who is popular for his various mods of the two consoles, has done exactly that. He essentially attached his Nintendo 64 to the bottom of his GameCube, and this is the result:
The main reason this is such a clean hack is because of the GameCube’s Game Boy Player add-on, which allows you to play Game Boy Advance (GBA) games on a Game Cube. Hailrazer took out the add-on’s innards, dropped in the corresponding hardware for the Nintendo 64, and attached it neatly to his GameCube.
The GameCube had to be modified only slightly: it require the addition of a mod chip and an SD card to hold GameCube disk images. The N64 portion of the mod, however, required a bit more hardware hacking since it had to fit inside the GBA player. He also used an Everdrive 64, which features almost every US N64 release on an SD card, eliminating the need for the cartridge port.
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The hack still means Hailrazer has two consoles, not just one. As such, he added a switch on the side of the GameCube to toggle the video and audio output between the two devices. Once you’ve picked the console you want, all you have to do is plug in the relevant controllers.
If you prefer the old Nintendo days to today’s Wii and Wii U craze, this hack is one you may want to look into. For more pictures and details, head over to the Made by Bacteria forums.
See also – Nintendo’s N64 could have had an embedded dial-up modem, making it the first console to go online and Forget the App Store, Nintendo should build a phone
Image credit: Josiah Gordon
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