GC Inside an NPDP Cartridge

[MSX]

A look inside the cartridge. It has a 6GB Toshiba IDE drive to store up to 4 games. In the corners you can see 2 little capsules with black and white liquid. If you were to drop the cartridge hard, a divider inside the capsules would break which would cause the liquids to mix. Nintendo would then know to void your warranty.



CDN Archive incase imgur ever goes down:

 

[Synnett]

Can you get better pictures of those vials? Such a crazy way to set a warranty void

 

[MSX]

Hopefully this is a better look. Lots of glue, courtesy of Nintendo

 

[MSX]

Thanks for the teardown!

Is there anyway for these to be dumped without destroying them?

It should be possible, but it requires taking apart a NPDP reader. I tried it before, but Cleanrip just throws an error because the HDD is locked. I contacted emu_kidid (who made Swiss and Cleanrip and has done it), and said a special version of Cleanrip would have to be used that performs the unlock command. He stopped responding after that.

 

[kabojnk]

Only way I have heard of dumping NPDPs is to hot swap a NPDP reader drive (from red NPDP reader dev unit) into a modded GC and dump that way. Unfortunately as MSX stated, HDDs are locked so cannot simply remove and dump.

 

[emu_kidid]

I need to get back on this, it's totally possible, I've done it before. I'll re-create my setup again, there were 2 ways I'd done it:

Option 1: Unlock the drive using a IDE adaptor and dump it in a PC. You can then decrypt it very easily because of the constant 32-bit XOR and the many known 0x00000000 areas on a standard GCM file.
Option 2: Swap the NPDP GameCube top half onto a modded GameCube that can boot from a IPL replacement (the drive doesn't need to be hotswapped at all and I wouldn't recommend this!) and use a modded version of CleanRip that I need to dig up/re-create.

 

[MSX]

I need to get back on this, it's totally possible, I've done it before. I'll re-create my setup again, there were 2 ways I'd done it:

Option 1: Unlock the drive using a IDE adaptor and dump it in a PC. You can then decrypt it very easily because of the constant 32-bit XOR and the many known 0x00000000 areas on a standard GCM file.
Option 2: Swap the NPDP GameCube top half onto a modded GameCube that can boot from a IPL replacement (the drive doesn't need to be hotswapped at all and I wouldn't recommend this!) and use a modded version of CleanRip that I need to dig up/re-create.

Hi! I got a new IDE to SATA adapter thinking it might be the add-in card I tired last time giving me errors, but unfortunately I'm still getting the same issue with it as before with hdparm (pictured below). I tried on 2 different PCs.

I also have a NPDP Reader and a modded retail cube with a Viper GC extreme (IPL replacement). So if you find your modified version of CleanRip, that would work too.

 

[MASTER260]

I have a beta GBOX but no carts to use it with... I wish I did...

 

[kennypecheur]

I need to get back on this, it's totally possible, I've done it before. I'll re-create my setup again, there were 2 ways I'd done it:

Option 1: Unlock the drive using a IDE adaptor and dump it in a PC. You can then decrypt it very easily because of the constant 32-bit XOR and the many known 0x00000000 areas on a standard GCM file.
Option 2: Swap the NPDP GameCube top half onto a modded GameCube that can boot from a IPL replacement (the drive doesn't need to be hotswapped at all and I wouldn't recommend this!) and use a modded version of CleanRip that I need to dig up/re-create.

Hi Everyone,

Any news about this modded version of Cleanrip ? Still have some NPDP carts I would like to dump, as I don't want to lost the datas on them.

Thank you

 

[MSX]

Hi Everyone,

Any news about this modded version of Cleanrip ? Still have some NPDP carts I would like to dump, as I don't want to lost the datas on them.

Thank you

Yes there has. Emu_kidid was gracious enough to give me the modified version of Swiss that is needed to unlock the cart. I'll message you

 

[Kelly]

Awesome never seen one opend