Makeo and SilverStee1, the team behind the Pico Loader for the Nintendo Gamecube have just released a version of the kit that doesn’t require any soldering at all. That’s excellent news, as the Pico Loader allows you to boot your GameCube into Swiss to launch games (like an ODE), while also retaining the ability to use your original optical drive. Even the previous version of the kit would be considered “safe for beginners” to solder…but no soldering required at all certainly opens this up to a much larger group of people. The kit is about $30 and you’ll still need some kind of SD solution, such as the ones linked below:
Purchase Here: https://store.makstech.io/
Memory Card SD Adapter: https://amzn.to/45wfe7X
SD2SP2: https://retrorgb.link/sd2sp2
Unfortunately, due to no fault of the team (obviously), they currently can’t ship to the US. Hopefully this will get resolved soon though, as this looks like a really cool product. And sure, there’s plenty of other ways to accomplish the same thing, but not both solderless and under $30!
Also, the team plans on open sourcing this, after the current batch has sold. I think this is really commendable and I fully support them waiting to release the files – They wouldn’t want a clone company to start selling low-quality versions while this batch was still available!
…and if you want more info about the Pico Loader and would like to see it in action, Tito from Macho Nacho productions recently posted a video about the original, soldering required version:
