Nintendo GameCube
GameCube Specifications
The Nintendo GameCube was Nintendo’s fifth home video game console and its first to use optical discs. Instead of standard full-sized discs, Nintendo chose smaller miniDVD-sized discs, so the console could not play DVDs or audio CDs. Its two competitors, the Xbox and the PlayStation 2, could both act as DVD players, which mattered to some buyers at a time when DVD players were still expensive.
The GameCube could be expanded through ports on the bottom of the console. In practice these were only used for the Broadband Adapter, which added network play, and the Game Boy Player, which let Game Boy games be played on a TV with a GameCube controller.
The GameCube was praised for its library of high-quality games but did not sell as well as its rivals. It finished its life with 21.74 million units sold, about 3 million behind Microsoft’s newcomer, the Xbox, and both fell far short of the PlayStation 2’s more than 155 million.
Despite its sales, the GameCube left a lasting legacy thanks to its games.
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Dolphin is the leading GameCube and Wii emulator. It runs almost every game from both consoles, often in HD, on Windows, macOS, Linux and Android.
Dolwin was the first GameCube emulator to be released publicly. Written in C and open source, it ran a few games and demos before development stopped in 2005.
GCEmu is an incomplete proof-of-concept GameCube emulator from 2005, built to show the console could be emulated at a reasonable speed using recompilation.
