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The Nintendo GameCube (ニンテンドーゲームキューブ, Nintendō GēmuKyūbu^?, GCN) is Nintendo's fourth home video game console, belonging to the sixth generation era. The GameCube itself is the most compact and least expensive of the sixth generation era consoles. The GameCube was released on September 14, 2001 in Japan; November 18, 2001 in North America; May 3, 2002 in Europe; and May 17, 2002 in Australia.

In late 2006, it was superseded by the Nintendo Wii.

Overview

The GameCube was unveiled on 24 August 2000, one day before Nintendo's SpaceWorld trade show. Shaped roughly like a cube, the console is available in a variety of colors, such as indigo, platinum, and black (also a limited edition Resident Evil 4 platinum and black game console). In Japan, the system is also available in Spice (orange), or in limited edition colors like Crystal White, Mint Green, Copper, and White with black pinstripes.

The Nintendo GameCube uses a proprietary storage medium, the Nintendo GameCube Game Disc, based on Matsushita's optical-disc technology; the discs are approximately 8 centimeters (3 1/8 inches) in diameter (considerably smaller than the 12 cm CDs or DVDs used in competitors' consoles), and have a capacity of approximately 1.5 gigabytes. Contrary to popular belief, GameCube discs are not physically read any differently from a standard DVD disc, but are encrypted with a key derived from the Burst Cutting Area, a 'bar code' unreadable by most DVD drives. This move was intended to prevent unauthorized copying of GCN titles, but was eventually cracked. By exploiting a flaw in Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II, users were able to connect their GameCubes to their PCs and run homebrew programming on the console.

The Nintendo GameCube does not have DVD or audio CD support, but Matsushita's Panasonic Q (described below), only available in Japan, does. Common reasons cited by Nintendo for using this format are to reduce copyright infringement, provide faster loading times, make the system cheaper by avoiding DVD-licensing fees, and allow smaller discs. The lack of DVD movie support was a double-edged sword; it did not appeal to the mass audience that turned to the PlayStation 2 and Xbox due to their built-in DVD support. A number of games with large amounts of audio or video were scaled down when ported to the GameCube. Despite the protection of a non-standard disc format (essentially a miniature DVD-ROM with non-standard sectors and filesystem formatting), a number of modchips such as the Qoob and ViperGC have been released that, when used in conjunction with a modified BIOS, allow the use of a standard or 8 cm DVD-R to load backed-up, homebrew, bootleg or copied software. The Panasonic Q, released by Panasonic in Japan under license from Nintendo, is manufactured as a modified GameCube unit with added DVD and audio CD playback functionality. It was never released outside of Japan; production ceased in December 2003. Differences in design make the Panasonic Q incompatible with the Game Boy Player. However, the Panasonic Q Game Boy Player was released to address the problem of the extended pegs on the bottom, allowing play of Game Boy games.

Read more at Wikipedia.org