I was thinking today (oh noes). I have all three past-gen consoles, but it's annoying to:

- Switch AV input all the time
- Have 3 unstackable machines sitting there
- Make a good casemod for all three of them
- Have 12 different controllers being tangled all over the floor

Also, it wastes space to:

- Have three different power supplies
- Have three different AV wirings
- Have three different cases
- Have three different types of controllers

Many of these are also a waste of money or create other annoyances. For example, all three DVD drives suck. Only one has a harddrive, and it needs an upgrade.

I thought about the possibility of putting the three together. All are (already and) easily modded with many functions these days. The Xbox can run Linux or even two separate BIOSs, supports IDE, supports USB... The PStwo supports USB and IDE. The Gamecube however, doesn't. The Gamecube does support streaming games over IP though, streaming over USB as well, but it's buggy. There is a Proof of Concept IDE interface schematic for the GC though, so with one of these all three consoles support harddrives.

So, I thought about using one modern, quiet and fast DVD drive for all three consoles. However, because the Gamecube doesn't support some kind of IDE, this wouldn't work easily enough for me. So then I started thinking about an even better alternative: to use one harddrive for all three consoles. The Gamecube doesn't support harddrives, but it can stream ISOs from a computer in two ways. The Xbox happens to double as a computer, which in theory makes it possible for the xbox to 'feed' games from it's harddrive to the Gamecube.

So, if I were to build all three modded consoles into one, I wouldn't even want to bother with discs. I'd rather just have three harddrives to store all the games I ever play, which is possible (in theory) on all three consoles, but never really done in any decent gamecube mod.

That leaves finding a way to connect the same harddrive to the PStwo as well. This might be possible using a USB to IDE adapter and switching between the two consoles, but due to the extreme restrictions on the xbox regarding partitions I wonder if the PStwo would be able to read the same drive. That leaves streaming the ISOs to the PStwo, like the GC. I investigated this but couldn't find anything, so I suppose it's not possible then. I'll leave this open for the time being. I found out that you can eliminate the DVD drive on the PS2 using a modchip by booting from the memorycard. You can then boot a loader that will load games from the harddrive via IDE or USB. I took a look at the formatting procedure for the harddisk for the PS2, and I'm not sure if the PS2 and the Xbox could share one harddrive yet. I took a look at the formatting for the PS2 harddrive and the Xbox harddrive, and they both require some things that make it impossible for one harddrive to be formatted as both. However, if you use 2.5" harddisks it won't take up that much space in the case to have one for both, so there would be two harddrives. Additionally, it may still be possible to switch the PS2's harddrive between it and the xbox, therefore the xbox can be used to put new games on the PS2 harddrive. I'm looking into that. As far as I have seen now, it is possible to: a) Run windows on the xbox using QEMU. b) Access a harddrive connected via USB to the xbox under the emulated Windows setup (this is difficult and possibly slow though). c) Use windows and a the PS2 drive connected via USB to copy games from the harddrive to the PS2 drive. It's possible to run Winhiip (which is used to transfer games to the PS2 drive) in Wine on Linux so this means it should be possible to use Xbox Linux to transfer new games to the PS2. What remains is switching the harddrive between the PS2 and the Xbox. If the harddisk is connected to the PS2 using USB this is a whole lot easier and probably pretty straightforward, so this problem's solved. What I'll probably do is make a USB connector in the back of the case through which I can easily access all three harddrives to add new games in the future.

So now wee have three harddrives (probably 2.5"), the Xbox motherboard, the Gamecube motherboard and broadband connector, and the PStwo motherboard. Taking out all the ODDs really saves a lot of space. The things left to combine are the controller input, AV output, LAN, and PSU. Combining the LAN is easy by throwing in a 4 port switch.

As for the controllers. The Gamecube is my personal favorite, so getting 4 Gamecube controllers that would work on all three consoles would be cool. The Xbox controller connector is basicly USB. There is a way to connect a Gamecube controller to a USB port and use it on a computer but I doubt this would work on the original xbox firmware, so you wouldn't be able to play xbox games with it. I did see a PS2 controller to NGC converter, and a PS2 controller to Xbox converter, meaning it should be possible to use at least a DS2 controller on all three consoles. Another option is a third party controller that is compatible with all three consoles!

As for the AV output. Most TVs including mine use SCART which accepts both S-video and Composite video along with RCA audio. All three consoles support this so this should be easy. I would make a built in SCART output and a separate Audio output for connecting to my sound system.

The PSU should be built in as wee're making a custom case and saving space anyway so theres plenty of room. Because of the limitations, the Xbox and another console might have to be powered on at the same time, so the PSU should have plenty of capacity to power this. Also to reduce the amount of poo poo the LAN switch used should be powered by the same PSU. As far is I know all four devices use either 5 or 12 volt or both so any standard PC PSU will do, but those are huge. Another used PSU can be found somewhere that is suitable.

Well, it seems the plan for the hardware part is mostly complete. Wee now have three consoles and harddrives all hooked together. The only thing lacking is a DVD drive. Even though wee don't really need one, there may be a time when wee want one anyway. Because wee're using the Xbox as a main console anyway wee might as well connect it to that, then wee can watch DVDs, play music, some games, and copy new data from the disc onto the harddrive. I don't think replacing the DVD drive with a new one that is fast, quiet and efficient will be a problem on the xbox apart from the power supply, and wee can always just hook it up to the psu to power it.

The case for this machine should imho be built from scratch because wee want minimal size and poo poo and problems fitting everything into a fixed space. If I had more experience and skill, and time, I might have attempted this project. However I don't so this is all just a big theoretical idea. Most of the problems can be tested without actually doing much hardware-wise, so I might do some work there. As for easily switching the selected console some minor microchip/remote control work might have to be done which I could attempt with help, if I ever really want to do this.

In the mean time it'd be cool if people who are interested in any way could help collect as much information as possible so that someone might once build this for real!

(This post was last modified: 21/11/2007 03:56 AM by Ge64.)

Dude, if you pull this off, I will hail you as god. No joke.

Lol thanks :D I found some more info on PS2 so edited the post.

Awright its final, there has to be two seperate harddisks for the PS2 and Xbox. Not that much of a problem though, is it...

Don't know yet. Depends on the money I have at the time if i ever make this (which is if all of it works out in the planning and testing phases). I'll use 2.5" drives though because they use less power, are cooler in both ways and save space. The total will be well over 100 or 200 GB probably.

I researched some more on the PS2 and Xbox harddrive stuff and although it would be very difficult and might not work, it seems possible to put games on the PS2 using the xbox. I might just reroute a USB connector to the back though so I can access the drives from a laptop if I need to.

New find: What do you think this is?



Yay! IDE on Gamecube!