In context: In 2005, the presentation of a laptop called “Nintendo GameCube Advance” began to spread on the Internet. It was dismissed relatively quickly as a fake and slipped into obscurity. However, someone made an effort to create a real deal based on this nearly twenty-year-old show.
YouTuber GingerOfOz, who you may remember as the hobbyist who designed the PlayStation 2 handheld console, WiiBoy Color, and GameCube Classic Mini, has finished work on the Nintendo GameCube Advance. His inspiration for the project came from a 2005 mockup (below) created by an unknown artist as a gag to see how people would react. Come find out, the creator of the image was a student at the time and later worked for Ubisoft, Epic Games and Squanch Games.
Ginger tried to stay true to the show’s original look, but it changed a few things. First, the disc slot on the front is purely cosmetic. There was simply no way to scale the drive according to the dimensions of the small chassis, which was spit out based on the size of the GameCube disc.
A seventeen year old view of the fake machine via the Wayback Machine
The second thing that has changed is the back-flip screen. The reason is that it looks a bit like a portable MP3 player – it just didn’t sound enough for Nintendo. Also, the design of the hood came from a less widespread rendering that few people remember.
He also hacked the internals with a Wii motherboard instead of the actual GameCube mobo. This change is because shaving the Wii is much easier. Plus, Ginger has already known the process since he crammed the Wii into the Game Boy Color chassis.
The DIY GameCube Advance handheld game looks like the original board and is fully functional. Since the Wii is backward compatible with its predecessor, it plays GC games without a third-party emulator. The video in the masthead begins with Ginger offering a demo of the gameplay, but if you’re interested, watch from the beginning for a full 411 in the creative process.
