h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Having been the proud owner of a Nintendo GameCube since the launch date, the most common comment I find it attracts (other than "Bloody hell - is that the time? I'd better go home.") is upon the size of the discs.

Presumably to avoid piracy, GameCube discs are smaller than CDs (about three inches diameter), and this has led to queries on whether they can hold as much data as a CD-sized disc.

My personal slant on the issue is that the discs have a smaller grove width, therefore allowing more reading, and the laser is consequently a shorter-wavelength blue (CDs are read by red lasers), but I don't know for sure. Can anyone set me right?

B

Three inches? *counts on fingers* I guess that's about 7,5 centimeters. It's not minidiscs?

I have absolutely no idea, but am prepared to speculate.

I know there are 3" CDs, which hold around 20 minutes of music, compared to a maximum of about 80 minutes on a normal 5" CD. Therefore, could this be the same principal applied to DVD-ROM? A 3" DVD would naturally hold less information than a standard 5" DVD, but considerably more than a 3" CD.

Or something.

Minidiscs are supposed to be able to hold as much info as a CD, but have only half the diameter. And you can flip them on your thumb like a coin.

Ah, speculation without evidence - the lifeblood of h2g2.

Coming back to the piracy question, is it possible to pirate those 3-inch CDs. Are they read on the same wavelength? *not that I'm trying to pirate GameCube discs or anything*...

Xan...depends what you mean by minidiscs. As a term, it fits the GameCube discs very well, but a minidisc to me has always been digital recording media invented by Sony (or was it Philips?) that took ten years to get a decent commercial release and is still going to be ousted by DVD-Audio.

Speaking of which , they had real problems naming DVD-Auido. They were going to call it DVDA, but then they realised this was a pornographic abbreviation, which I will not relate here for fear of getting this long post moderated.

B

Double Vaginal, Double Anal. Does somebody want to call the Moderators now?

B

Minidiscs actually hold much less data than 5" CDs, but use compression so they can store the same amount of audio (or in fact, up to four times as much audio in the relatively new long play mode, but sound quality suffers a bit). Off the top of my head I can't remember how much data minidiscs hold, but a 74 minute minidisc holds somewhere around 200-300 MB, compared to 650 MB for a 74 minute CD-R.

Gamecube discs are nothing more than a small DVD disc designed to run on a custom designed Panasonic DVD drive. The disc itself has an uncompressed capacity of 1.5Gb

Coincidently, as a return of the favour for designing the drive and media, Nintendo licenced Panasonic to produce their own Gamecubes, which unlike the Nintendo counterpart uses a full size DVD drive so it is possible to use it to watch DVD movies, etc. Unfortunately it only appears to be available in Hong Kong and Japan tho, unless you can find one through the Grey Import market.

If the GameCube discs are indeed just small DVDs, then presumably they could be copied by reading the data via a normal PC DVD-ROM drive. Of course, you'd then need a blank GameCube disc to copy the data onto. You'll find the blank GameCube discs over there, just next to the hens' teeth, behind the rocking horse poo.

As a comparison, a single sided DVD has a capacity of 4.7Gb

Ah! Now, if you had a GameCube with a full-size DVD drive, you could, presumably, copy the discs to full-size blank DVD-Rs. Except that there's probably still some other anti-piracy protection built into the system somewhere.

This is, of course, all hypothetical.

Software-based piracy protection shouldn't be a problem. I know a guy who's been code-cracking since he was fifteen.

He owes me several favours for running off with my girlfriend, but that's another story.

B

For further comparison, a normal CD holds 650-800Mb. So, yep, they hold twice as much as a normal CD.

In technological terms... er... DVD are more complicated than CDs for a variety of reasons, I don't know the specifics.

I suppose that the GameCube must have pretty good copy-protection, since it's been out for quite some time and I still haven't heard anything about games being copied. From what I understand, it uses a proprietary format that is "not quite DVD". Do mini-DVD-Rs exist? I'd think that if it were a simple DVD system, one could just use a DVD copier, or for that matter just rip it with a DVD-ROM drive.