Hey chochachos what it is. Been a while as always because I’m irresponsible towards this website I’m supposed to care about. Oops.

So I promised I’d talk about the FlippyDrive! Back in fuckin’ February. Oops.

Long story short: It’s a very small device that connects internally between the GameCube’s main board and its disc drive. You fill a micro SD card with GameCube roms and plug that shit in and now you can play any GameCube rom, on your stock console, without harming the console in any way or making any physical changes to it, but you can still play discs as normal as well. If you ever really wanted to you can just take the FlippyDrive straight back out again and your GameCube is entirely factory default. Completely solderless installation so even with zero modding experience you can install this thing in fifteen minutes easy, and with only a screwdriver.`

There’s really not a lot more to say but I’ll break down my experience with the install process and with using it so far.

The install process itself couldn’t really be much more straightforward. You unscrew the GameCube shell, take the top off, lift the memory card section out (leaving it plugged in because you can just lift it out and it’s out of the way), do the same with the fan, then unscrew the optical drive and lift that off, and you’re in.

Between the optical drive and the main board is a little slot where the drive and main board connect. The FlippyDrive comes with a ribbon cable which you have to bend into shape to fit into that slot, where it sits between the drive and the main board.

Once the cable is in place you carefully drop the drive back where it was (the ribbon cable is very thin and can’t take a beating so you’ve gotta be cautious not to tear it, try to get this step right first time to minimize any risk of damaging the ribbon cable through repeated attempts), fold the cable along a convenient path off to the side, where you screw in a little 3D printed rack which holds the FlippyDrive circuit board itself where the micro SD card plugs in.

At that point you can reassemble the cube and you’re just done. I will note a couple things from my personal experience:

1. The GameCube shell is extraordinarily brittle. Probably just an age thing. The plastic posts which hold the screws crumble and crack at the tiniest touch, so you don’t wanna mess around. Since I often work on older consoles and cartridge based games, when cleaning or repairing them I’ve gotten into the habit of always turning a screw backwards first until I feel the threads click into place into the existing tracks in the plastic, so at least you’re not putting any undue pressure on the plastic when you screw them back in. Even doing that, I ended up shaking a lot of crumbled, shattered little plastic pieces out of my shell after reassembling.

2. Test the device and get your SD card set up exactly how you want it before you reassemble. While disassembling the cube is easy, it’s still gonna be a pain in the ass if you have to do it multiple times because you didn’t have your SD card set up right, and like I said above the shells have become very brittle with age and you DON’T wanna unscrew and re-screw it more than you have to (though worst case scenario it’s not hard or expensive to buy a new replacement third party shell if you want.)

The roms themselves are super easy – literally just dump all your roms loose in the root of the card and you’re all set. You don’t gotta do anything fancy at all. No software, nothing. Just put the roms on the card and you’re golden. But the small caveat is if you want to change any of the default behavior of the FlippyDrive itself you’ll need to set up a txt file and also put that in the root of your SD card. Again, super easy and effortless, just gotta plan that out and set it up how you want it before you go closing up your cube.

Now, for most people the default behavior is FINE – the default FlippyDrive behavior is that when you turn on the cube it’ll load directly into FlippyDrive and the roms right away. Me though, I wanted my cube to behave like a normal stock GameCube when you turn it on, i.e. it immediately runs whatever disc is in there, if there is one. If you didn’t know it was modded, you’d never even find out. So to achieve that all I had to do was add the txt file into the SD card which changes the launch setting to “bypass” so the cube behaves like normal, and if I want to launch FlippyDrive and play roms, I just have to hold X on the controller when I power the cube on. Video example follows:

That’s all my thoughts regarding the setup. It’s easy and quick and direct. The FlippyDrive docs site gives you an excellent and easy to follow guide for the whole process with plenty of clear photos.

As for the functionality of the device itself, holy HELL I’m impressed. It uses the GameCube’s own OS menu (the spinny cube thing that you get when you hold down the A button while the logo is displaying at startup), so it feels completely seamless with the stock experience. When you start up FlippyDrive you go automatically to that main OS menu where you get the full list of roms displayed exactly like the memory card save files are displayed, a list of icons with the game logos. You just pick one and hit start and you’re playing the game exactly as if you had the disc – because for all intents and purposes the console thinks you DO have the disc in there.

I want to stress that an enormous benefit of using the FlippyDrive in your cube is the preservation of the original technology, and these games. I’ve spoken in previous posts here about how important I think it is to keep this old stuff alive for historical purposes and just for the fun of it, but I’ll say it again: These old disc based systems fail eventually. Depending on how much use they’ve gotten, and if your console was from a good batch or not, disc-based devices like the PlayStation, Dreamcast and GameCube can be very prone to failure. In fact the disc drive and lasers in particular are quite often some of the first things to go on these old machines. A lot of the time, disc drives and lasers are a relatively easy fix, but not always. In the event that my cube’s disc drive fails, I now have the fallback option to use the FlippyDrive instead and still keep playing on original hardware rather than resorting to emulating. And hey, when the original hardware fails beyond repair, at least I can still emulate. Preservation of all kinds is important.

But yeah. I’ve been enjoying some nostalgic trips through Phantasy Star Online, a game I spent hundreds of hours on in my teens until my memory card tragically corrupted and I lost everything. That was a common problem with PSO back in the day. Anyways, good shit. I’m extremely happy with it. Lemme know if you got any questions.

Future plans: FreeMCBoot on PS2 to achieve the same kinda thing? It’ll be a while, I need to get a hard drive for it and stuff. Gotta do my research.