Booting homebrew

There are several methods available to successfully boot homebrew on unmodified and modified Gamecubes. These methods include using a special bootdisc and memory card device, a loophole within an official Gamecube game title, a traditional modchip or a drive replacement modchip.

Unmodified Gamecube

Game Save Exploits

These require a memory card to place the hacked save game and a boot.dol converted to .gci format. Swiss is distributed as a bootable GCI. Need the help of an already homebrew able Gamecube, or a Wii (while RVL-001 is the easiest, RVL-101 and RVL-201 can have their GameCube ports soldered back in), modded or unmodded to first put such files on memcard.

Preloaded memory cards targeting the NTSC-U and PAL versions of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door are available from CastleMania Games.

• Animal Crossing
• BMX XXX
• F-Zero GX
• Frogger Beyond
• James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
• Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
• Pokémon Colosseum
• Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness
• Robotech: Battlecry
• Super Mario Sunshine (PAL-only)
• Super Smash Bros. Melee
• Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2
• Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell
• Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow

End-of-Life Products

• SD load

Requires Action Replay 1.14b or below and an SD-Card adapter.

• Samson's bootloader

Tedious to set up and can get annoying when loading homebrew, requires for a DOL to be injected onto the memory card as it utilizes use of the SD load method alongside the older Action Replay disc.

• MaxDrive Pro

Uses a region free bootdisc to load hombrew from included memory card device.

• SD Media Launcher

Offers out of the box homebrew support - always need the disc to boot it up. Comes with a flimsy SDGecko!

• PSOload

Requires an original copy of Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II and a Broadband Adapter.

Modified Gamecube

Active Products

• PicoBoot IPL replacement

• XenoGC or DuoQ drivechip

Quick for booting backups and homebrew with a bootable disk of SDLoad or Swiss.

• GCLoader drive replacement

Very quick to boot backups and homebrew with Swiss as initial ISO.

End-of-Life Products

• Viper GC IPL replacement

Quick to boot backups and homebrew with SDLoad installed as plugin.

• Viper GC Extreme IPL replacement

Very quick to boot backups and homebrew with Swiss on flash.

• Qoob SX / Qoob Pro IPL replacement

Very quick to boot backups and homebrew with SDLoad / Swiss on flash.

• Wiikey Fusion / WASP Fusion / WODE drive replacement

Quick to boot backups and homebrew with Swiss.iso and SDGecko.

Very quick to boot backups and homebrew with Swiss as initial ISO for WiiKey Fusion / WASP Fusion or initial ISO for WODE.