XenoGC

The XenoGC is a drive chip for the Nintendo GameCube, the first of its type to read imported or backup game discs that didn't require soldering to the IPL chip. It leverages this by tapping into the DVD drive's on-board debug footprint to execute a set of debug commands to the DVD controller to unlock the drive and allow the reading of DVD-R/+R/+RW-type optical media; this same technique was used by the WiiKey on early Wii console models from the DMS to D2B drive chipsets; however, the methods to do so were patched by Nintendo following subsequent changes of the drive hardware starting from the D2C chipset. 'Qoob Lite' was the codename given to the XenoGC, as to what was found in the publically released source code in 2011.

Versions

Two variants of the XenoGC were released: version 2.0 includes support for multi-game discs; this allowed for multiple games as a compilation to be burned onto a DVD, whereas version 1.0 lacks this ability and requires a firmware update. The indicator LED on version 1.0 will idle on green if the drive patch was successful, but version 2.0 will light up orange.

Source Code

In February 2011, the source code for the XenoGC was publicly released as open-source on GC-Forever, meaning that anyone can build their own for cheap, and it wasn't long until clones started to flood the market. Clones that label themselves as "Xen8GC," "Xen0GC," or similar have issues with aligning the chip over the debug port, and so a wired install is highly recommended.