Little-known features of the GameCube
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The sixth generation of consoles was really impressive, it brought us many surprises which defined many players. Consoles like Playstation 2 or Xbox were part of that great gameplay, however, the company Nintendo would not be left behind, decided to do something different by releasing one of the most powerful consoles of that time, the GameCube.
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Although it was a very robust video game console with the ability to display games at 60 FPS at a maximum resolution of 480p did not have the success of its competitors, this led to not selling the units that Nintendo expected, resulting in many people were unaware of certain features that the GameCube has.
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In this post you'll learn some little-known features of the GameCube, some of which may be a little obvious to you, but there are others that I'm sure will surprise you.
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Playing Game Boy games
There is the possibility of loading cartridges from Nintendo's most famous portable video game console, both Game Boy and Game Boy Color and Advence, this was done through a special port located at the bottom of the GameCube, here was inserted a peripheral called Game Boy Player.
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When you purchased the Game Boy Player came included a boot disk, this allowed the connection between the console and the peripheral, showing any video game inserted into the slot for GB cartridges, GBC or GBA.
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In addition, it gave you some additional options for customizing the game, such as changing the color palette, placing a background wallpaper, and more. It was also noticeable that the resolution improved considerably, considering that the GB screen was quite small compared to that of a TV.
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Play Online Games
In this generation of consoles the online gameplay was just becoming popular, companies were interested in publicizing the possibilities of playing online with their consoles, so Nintendo did not dismiss this idea and placed it optionally through a network adapter.
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This peripheral was connected in one of the hidden ports at the bottom of the GameCube, making the console had all the ability to play games online, however, the catalog of games with this feature was really limited, for this reason was not so popular.
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Not only did it give you the ability to play online, it also allowed you to play with two CameCubes through the famous interconnection, making games like Mario Kart a 8-player game centre.
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Multimedia Center
One of the defects that the GameCube had was the impossibility of watching movies, watching images, listening to music, among other multimedia functions, this was something that had its main competitors like Microsoft's Xbox, however, this function was possible through the memory port with a peripheral called SD Media Launcher.
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When we bought it, it included a boot disk which opened a very complete menu where it showed us the content of the SD that we inserted in the SD Media Launcher, so we could watch movies, listen to music and many other things.
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Over time this peripheral received updates making its functions increase more, having the ability to load GameCube ISOS and play any game without the need to have the disk inserted into the console, in addition to playing emulators such as NES, SNES, SEGA Genesis and many more consoles.
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Component cable port
One of the least known features of the GameCube is the ability to insert a component cable that dramatically improves the resolution of the console, however, this could be done only in the first versions, as Nintendo decided to remove this in future revisions.
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In the back of the console there is a port next to the AV/video, in it was inserted a component cable which could only be ordered upon request and arrived via mail, by placing it the resolution of the GameCube changed drastically making the game experience much more rewarding.
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Due to how little this cable was sold, it is now considered a very rare object, so its value is between 240 and 360 dollars. If you are a collector and you want to have it, you must prepare your pocket to enjoy this curious function.
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See You!!!
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I still have my GameCube and the Game Boy Player. I never used the Game Boy Player all that much though.
Heard that the Game Cube could run Game Boy games before but didn't know it was though a prephiral and didn't know what it looked like so this post was kind of informative.
It's funny how many sixth gen consoles could play online games yet it wasn't a popular feature for any of these consoles.
I never owned a GameCube... I had an NES and SNES... and then jumped up to the Switch.. I never really was much of a console gamer! Still, I'm pretty amazed by how many features they packed into this machine... it really was ahead of it's time!
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Interesting about the component cable. I will have to check if this is what I have on mine.
Been using the gameboy player happily for a long time. Much more fun to play my gameboy RPG's on a bigger screen.
Is there a Nintendo system that will let me output my DS games to a TV set like the gameboy player?
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I bought a used gamecube a few years after it came out for around $20 but by then my gaming days were waning and I never put too much time into it.
It's interesting that they discontinued the ability to display in higher resolutions right when the 480p days were coming to an end.
Those designs were so weird. I never had any of these... I went directly from PlayStation One to PlayStation 3... and now I'll probably jump to PlayStation 5.
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