Aging Gamecubes fixes. Mostly faulty disc drives

[Nuguns]

The number 1 thing that will over time get more necessary is disc drive capacitor replacements. The symptom is "NO DISC" and usually shows up if you try to play a burned dvd. Sometimes, if you let the gc run for 10 or 20 minutes, the capacitors revive. Doing the job yourself could be difficult, chances are youd need a heat gun over a soldering iron. One day, they must be replaced somehow. With a soldering iron you could try I guess; By removing all solder and applying one connection with preplaced blob. I didnt do it myself, I bought a pcb board off ebay with the job done.

The unfortunate news: Potentiometer adjustment fix should be secondary (requires multimeter). My gamecube is set to 100ohms, but I think its quite low. Another youtuber guy said his was 120ohms; in order to read burned discs. Chances are you should consider buying donor gamecubes for parts. What if another has a better laser assembly. Maybe you could get away with better readings. Gamecube discdrives seem to be of poorer quality on the test of time.

The good news: Flippy drive is a Solderless mod that comes out sometime next year that emulates the disc drive as a digital program to read ISO's, so you could have all your games digitally with a user friendly install anyone could do, with the know how. (Youtube video opening and disassembling the gamecube)

 

[sladewatkins]

It's so unfortunate with how old these consoles get just how more fragile the parts inside get.

Flippy drive is a Solderless mod that comes out sometime next year that emulates the disc drive as a digital program to read ISO's, so you could have all your games digitally with a user friendly install anyone could do, with the know how.

That's pretty neat! I am hoping that helps some who can't do soldering and can't source pre-soldered capacitor replacements. Only time will tell, obviously.