oldmachines · the collection
Interactive teardown · Nintendo · 2001

Inside the GameCube

Explorable, hands-on explanations of how Nintendo's little purple box actually worked — one subsystem at a time. Not a spec sheet: each guide is a playable course you can hear, drag and toggle. And once the machine is taken apart, one course hands you the keys: write and run your own homebrew.

CPU Gekko · PowerPC 750CXe GPU Flipper · 162 MHz Audio Macronix 16-bit DSP Media 1.5 GB miniDVD

Subsystems

Audio & the DSP

The 16-bit DSP, its interchangeable ucodes, ADPCM, AX mixing, Dolby Pro Logic II, and LLE vs HLE — a 16-module course with a live synthesiser.

Ready · 16 modules

Graphics & Flipper

3D rendering from zero, then the Flipper GPU: the embedded 1T-SRAM framebuffer, hardware T&L, the TEV pixel pipeline, and how Dolphin turns it all into shaders.

Ready · 16 modules

CPU & Gekko

How CPUs work from zero, then the PowerPC 750-derived Gekko: paired singles, quantised loads, the locked cache — and how Dolphin JIT-compiles it.

Ready · 15 modules

The disc drive

Optical storage from zero, then the 8 cm miniDVD: the disc layout, the DI interface, the copy protection, streaming — and disc images in Dolphin.

Ready · 13 modules

Write your own homebrew

The devkitPPC toolchain and libogc, the DOL executable format, full setup on Windows, macOS and Linux — every step from an empty folder to your own code running in Dolphin and on real hardware.

Ready · 13 modules