A Modder Turned a Fake GameCube Portable Design into a Real Handheld
Back in 2007, a fake portable GameCube design circulated on the Internet. In 2022, someone really made this a reality.
YouTube user GingerOfOz 3D printed, plugged in and modified the laptop to look exactly like the original mockup, and it actually works.
There were, of course, several obstacles. The original design has a disc slot, but the GameCube and Wii disc drives are larger than the new PDA itself.
Do you know that fake GameCube handheld that’s been circulating the Internet for 15 years? Well, I’m tired of it being fake. It’s real now. pic.twitter.com/Ihox29CoP0
— GingerOfOz (@GingerOfMods) March 12, 2022
As such, the slot on the front of the controller is for display purposes only, as GingerOfOz opted to run the entire game digitally using the Wii’s motherboard instead.
He acknowledged that this would be a point of contention since the machine would not have a home screen and GameCube menu, so he modified the software to make them work as expected.
The video shows GingerOfOz putting it all together, from the very beginning when he reconstructed (read: smashed with a hammer) the Nintendo DS Lite to gluing the body parts together to mark the finished product.
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He even tracks down the designer who drove the internet crazy in 2007who explains that he did it just for fun and that he has since become a game developer for companies like Ubisoft and Epic Games.
Official support for GameCube handheld games is, unfortunately, less real. While GameCube controllers work on the Switch, we still haven’t seen any sign of GameCube Virtual Console gaming on Nintendo’s hybrid handhelds, despite multiple reports that they’ll arrive as early as 2016.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally tweets @thelastdinsdale.
