If there’s one thing the gaming community is really good at, it’s modding and the community loves resurrecting old game consoles. Today we’re sharing a really cool GameCube Raspberry Pi-powered modchip known as the FlippyDrive created by ChrisPville and Trevor Rudolph. Chris is responsible for the hardware side of the project while Trevor worked on the Cube Boot menu interface.
To get an idea of what this chip does, it allows users the ability to load ROMs (dumps of game discs / cartridges from old arcade cabinets and consoles) onto an original GameCube using an SD card instead of the optical drive. This makes it really easy to check out homebrew titles on original hardware. It’s worth noting that the legality of ROMs can vary depending on where you live and we at Tom’s Hardware don’t condone the downloading of ROMs.
This isn’t the first modchip that lets you play games off an SD card for the GameCube. Another popular modchip in the community is the GC Loader. It works in a similar way by enabling SD card support however you have to remove the optical drive in order to use it so you won’t be able to play physical copies of GameCube games on the modded unit. The FlippyDrive solves that problem by giving us the best of both worlds.
The optical drive needs to be removed to install the modchip. A ribbon cable shares the connector port for the optical drive. You can either install the optical drive back on top of the ribbon cable or put a cap in place to give the cable a good connection. Once the ribbon cable is installed, the modchip can be connected and installed.
We have quite a few details about the new chip and what it offers for those interested in preorders. It’s expected to debut with a price of $38. The FlippyDrive is powered by an RP2040 alongside an ESP32 microcontroller. It has 16MB of internal flash and supports SD cards with capacities as big as 1TB.
Macho Nacho Productions recently uploaded a video to YouTube giving us an up close look at the new chip. In the video, there is an exclusive interview with makers Chris and Trevor who explain that the new Cube Boot interface is similar to the original GameCube menu but includes secret features such as region-free game loading. If you want to check out this Raspberry Pi project for yourself, visit the official FlippyDrive website.
