The Gamecube Optical Disc

[Readykilowatt]

Well, it has been three years since the Gamecube has been on the market and from what I know it has not yet been cracked. Obviously this has alot to do with the proprietary format (G.O.D.) that Nintendo co-developed with Matsushita. I don't really know much about the format, so could anyone answer this question:

Is the G.O.D. a mini-DVD or is it something else?

Additionally, The Dreamcast (like the GCN) also used a proprietary format (GD ROM). How did the pirates manage to crack the Dreamcast?

 

[Reznor007]

Gamecube is semi-cracked. Using the network adapter and Phantasy Star Online people have found a way to get the Gamecube to send an image of the disc to a PC and distribute it online. Using the same setup and a special program that runs on the Gamecube, you can use a game image stored on a PC as a virtual disc drive and play games that way. Not all games work, and some that do work stutter as the bandwidth the network adapter operates at is slower than the real disc drive. No one has been able to actually burn an image to a disc and use it directly in the Gamecube. The original discs have 2 barcodes inside the data area of the disc that the drive firmware uses to validate/decrypt the disc(or something). No one has found a way to copy the barcodes. And no, the disc does not spin backwards like many seem to think.

A similar method was done to get images of Dreamcast discs, but Dreamcast will read a CD-R even without a mod chip, which allowed games to be copied easily.