About a year ago...or maybe a little more...I posted about wanting to run a GameCube and a Wii from Solar Power! Without using an inverter ofcourse because that would be to easy! hahahah Originally I had planned to use a DC-DC converter to output a stable 12V that could be used by the GameCube. I did already buy a few to experiment with and they can take a voltage from 9-36 and output a nice stable voltage while the input can fluctuate all it wants. This is important as batteries never output 12.0V all the time. Or ever!! The rated 12V batteries actually are more like 12.5 to 14.5 and depending on the chemistry 12.0V is actually really bad for the battery. For a lead-acid it can even permanently damage the internal cells if it gets below 12V.
Unfortunately because of some personal events last year I never got around to actually do any real testing on the power usage of the Wii or GameCube. Since I got back into playing the GameBoy Advance I also connected my modded GameCube back up and attached the GameBoy Player to it. Took me a while to gather all the cables and parts but I tested it last night and it's working! To complete the modded GameCube I also got a GC Video HDMI interface that can plug into the back so I don't have to worry about using analog cables anymore.
So how much power does the GameCube really use? I have no clue..as I still did not measure a thing!
The original Nintendo power brick lists the output as 12V 3.25A as it's maximum rating. But in nearly every single thing I have learned from solar power experiments you have to use a power supply that can deliver more than what you expect to use. So if 3.25 is the maximum I am expecting the actual usage to be around 2A for the basic system. Not sure how much the mods and GameBoy player will affect power usage but it most likely will still not exceed 2.5A. I think
My new take on how to run a GameCube from solar power is to actually use USB Power Delivery! It makes a lot more sense and with my expected maximum of 2.5A at 12V it should be around 30 watts. This in turn should be in spec with any USB PD charger that can deliver more than 30 watts! There are USB PD triggers that can negotiate 12V at 5A using USB C PD giving me DOUBLE the power I expect to need. Ofcourse this is a MAX upper limit and it will depend entirely on the charger if it can deliver that.
In my solar power system I charge my main battery at 12V nominal from the solar panels (or grid charger on cloudy days). Since my "office" is more than 20 meters away from the batteries I use a DC-DC converter to go from 12V -> 24V to allow me double that watts to go through the same cable at the cost of some voltage drop. And since most car chargers can accept up to 32 volts they work perfectly on this 24.5V power line I have got here!
Most of my regular chargers are genuine samsung car chargers but they only do 15 watts at 9 volt so they can't be used for the GameCube at all. I also have a 25W and 45W samsung charger and they do support 12V but the 25W charger might be a little light to use as well. But I think it makes more sense to use more powerfull chargers to have a little more headroom. Therefore I am going to use a Baseus USB C PD car charger that can deliver up to 100W (5A at 20V). But since I need 12V it can actually only output 3A which is 36W but it should be enough to meet the expected 2.5A
I am definitely not the first to come up with the idea of a USB C powered gamecube as I have found a handful of examples online. Some of them are really nice...others....ehm...not so much. I have seen one or two where they use 15V USB PD triggers claiming 12V is "not common enough" on most chargers. That might be true....but it could also mean those chargers are not capable of delivering enough power safely for the GameCube! As I said above I did not do any actual testing yet so I have no hard evidence of how much is really needed. But I do know that 12V 3A have to be enough to be close to the 3.25A that the official power brick delivers.
My only concern of using 12V USB PD is that it might not be a "clean 12V rail" and I do not know how much filtering is done in the GameCube's internal power circuit. I do know most of the system actually uses 1.8V, 3.3V and maybe 5V. The lower voltages are generated from the regulators on the power board so I have no worries about that. I have no idea if the incoming 12V is used directly for anything that requires a precise voltage. I tried looking for schematics and the many portable GameCube projects for any details but so far did not find anything detailed enough yet. I guess it will take a few experiments to see how stable the voltage is and if the GameCube is stable enough while running from it. I could also try running it from a bench power supply first and set the voltage manually to see how low it can go before funny things happen.
The other added bonus of having a USB C Power Delivery power source for the gamecube is that it can be used on a compatible power bank that supports 12V and USB PD of more than 30 watts. I think it should even be a minimum of 65 watts actually just to be on the safe side. Luckily I have both a 65W and 100W USB C PD capable powerbank from Baseus as well. I did not really know the brand before a couple of weeks ago but so far the quality seems good. I was just looking for a powerbank that I could use to power my Dell laptop from and that's how I found them. My laptop is not even USB C native but using specialized adapters or cables it does work perfectly fine. I even used the 100W powerbank to run the laptop for an hour or 3-4 and it displayed an expected runtime of 6 hours directly on the powerbank. These will be the main power sources for my GameCube USB C project and they will in turn be mostly charged with solar power whenever possible.
What I do already have running from USB C is a small display that requires a 12V DC input and one of the USB PD triggers I already had fitted perfectly and I had no issue running the screen from the baseus 100W charger. It's only using 6-8 watts so I can use a lower specked charger for it but for now this worked.
Stay tuned for more updates if you're interested.
UPDATE: In my update comments below I have put more details but here is the summary:
I found information about how the power supply was done for GameCube Portables back in 2010. On a forum post I found there were some nice statistics on how much power is drawn from the power rails:
To make the USB-C mod a little more universal I had sacrificed an original GameCube Power supply cord. I have three of them anyway Then I measured the pinout and did this about 15 times to make sure I did not swap the negative and positive! It's not as neat as I would like and there is no protection around the board and wire yet...but the good news is that it works!!!
The biggest surprise to me was though how little power the GameCube is actually using! This gamecube is modded with a GCLoader, external GCVideo, Gameboy Player, SD card in slot B, SD2SP2, memory card in slot A and a cheap wireless controller! All this together was drawing only 11-13 watts no matter what I tried to run on it! Both in swiss and in a game the draw was pretty much constant. None of the games I tried made any difference: mario kart, mario sunshine, zelda windwaker, zelda twilight princes, metroid 1, soul calibur 2. Even my own homebrew game BatteryCheck!
I will make a new blog post soon with pictures and maybe even a video. Happy easter!
Unfortunately because of some personal events last year I never got around to actually do any real testing on the power usage of the Wii or GameCube. Since I got back into playing the GameBoy Advance I also connected my modded GameCube back up and attached the GameBoy Player to it. Took me a while to gather all the cables and parts but I tested it last night and it's working! To complete the modded GameCube I also got a GC Video HDMI interface that can plug into the back so I don't have to worry about using analog cables anymore.
So how much power does the GameCube really use? I have no clue..as I still did not measure a thing!
The original Nintendo power brick lists the output as 12V 3.25A as it's maximum rating. But in nearly every single thing I have learned from solar power experiments you have to use a power supply that can deliver more than what you expect to use. So if 3.25 is the maximum I am expecting the actual usage to be around 2A for the basic system. Not sure how much the mods and GameBoy player will affect power usage but it most likely will still not exceed 2.5A. I think My new take on how to run a GameCube from solar power is to actually use USB Power Delivery! It makes a lot more sense and with my expected maximum of 2.5A at 12V it should be around 30 watts. This in turn should be in spec with any USB PD charger that can deliver more than 30 watts! There are USB PD triggers that can negotiate 12V at 5A using USB C PD giving me DOUBLE the power I expect to need. Ofcourse this is a MAX upper limit and it will depend entirely on the charger if it can deliver that.
In my solar power system I charge my main battery at 12V nominal from the solar panels (or grid charger on cloudy days). Since my "office" is more than 20 meters away from the batteries I use a DC-DC converter to go from 12V -> 24V to allow me double that watts to go through the same cable at the cost of some voltage drop. And since most car chargers can accept up to 32 volts they work perfectly on this 24.5V power line I have got here!
Most of my regular chargers are genuine samsung car chargers but they only do 15 watts at 9 volt so they can't be used for the GameCube at all. I also have a 25W and 45W samsung charger and they do support 12V but the 25W charger might be a little light to use as well. But I think it makes more sense to use more powerfull chargers to have a little more headroom. Therefore I am going to use a Baseus USB C PD car charger that can deliver up to 100W (5A at 20V). But since I need 12V it can actually only output 3A which is 36W but it should be enough to meet the expected 2.5A
I am definitely not the first to come up with the idea of a USB C powered gamecube as I have found a handful of examples online. Some of them are really nice...others....ehm...not so much. I have seen one or two where they use 15V USB PD triggers claiming 12V is "not common enough" on most chargers. That might be true....but it could also mean those chargers are not capable of delivering enough power safely for the GameCube! As I said above I did not do any actual testing yet so I have no hard evidence of how much is really needed. But I do know that 12V 3A have to be enough to be close to the 3.25A that the official power brick delivers.
My only concern of using 12V USB PD is that it might not be a "clean 12V rail" and I do not know how much filtering is done in the GameCube's internal power circuit. I do know most of the system actually uses 1.8V, 3.3V and maybe 5V. The lower voltages are generated from the regulators on the power board so I have no worries about that. I have no idea if the incoming 12V is used directly for anything that requires a precise voltage. I tried looking for schematics and the many portable GameCube projects for any details but so far did not find anything detailed enough yet. I guess it will take a few experiments to see how stable the voltage is and if the GameCube is stable enough while running from it. I could also try running it from a bench power supply first and set the voltage manually to see how low it can go before funny things happen.
The other added bonus of having a USB C Power Delivery power source for the gamecube is that it can be used on a compatible power bank that supports 12V and USB PD of more than 30 watts. I think it should even be a minimum of 65 watts actually just to be on the safe side. Luckily I have both a 65W and 100W USB C PD capable powerbank from Baseus as well. I did not really know the brand before a couple of weeks ago but so far the quality seems good. I was just looking for a powerbank that I could use to power my Dell laptop from and that's how I found them. My laptop is not even USB C native but using specialized adapters or cables it does work perfectly fine. I even used the 100W powerbank to run the laptop for an hour or 3-4 and it displayed an expected runtime of 6 hours directly on the powerbank. These will be the main power sources for my GameCube USB C project and they will in turn be mostly charged with solar power whenever possible.
What I do already have running from USB C is a small display that requires a 12V DC input and one of the USB PD triggers I already had fitted perfectly and I had no issue running the screen from the baseus 100W charger. It's only using 6-8 watts so I can use a lower specked charger for it but for now this worked.
Stay tuned for more updates if you're interested.
UPDATE: In my update comments below I have put more details but here is the summary:
I found information about how the power supply was done for GameCube Portables back in 2010. On a forum post I found there were some nice statistics on how much power is drawn from the power rails:
And from the 12V input they measured about 1.5A drawn by the system. This is great news as this means the GameCube only uses 18 Watts of power and my idea of the 100W USB C PD charger should be no problem at all. I did some quick-and-dirty testing by holding the USB C trigger board against the power pins and the system did turn on and booted into swiss! But for any real tests I had to solder the Trigger board somewhere.
To make the USB-C mod a little more universal I had sacrificed an original GameCube Power supply cord. I have three of them anyway
Then I measured the pinout and did this about 15 times to make sure I did not swap the negative and positive! It's not as neat as I would like and there is no protection around the board and wire yet...but the good news is that it works!!!The biggest surprise to me was though how little power the GameCube is actually using! This gamecube is modded with a GCLoader, external GCVideo, Gameboy Player, SD card in slot B, SD2SP2, memory card in slot A and a cheap wireless controller! All this together was drawing only 11-13 watts no matter what I tried to run on it! Both in swiss and in a game the draw was pretty much constant. None of the games I tried made any difference: mario kart, mario sunshine, zelda windwaker, zelda twilight princes, metroid 1, soul calibur 2. Even my own homebrew game BatteryCheck!
I will make a new blog post soon with pictures and maybe even a video. Happy easter!
