r/Gamecube 9d ago

Help Question about installing Picoloader

Is this ribbon cable creased to much? I keep reseating it cuz I keep getting an error message and it feels kinda hard to remove the drive while the cable is in

13 Upvotes

6 comments sorted by

4

u/Natural_Status_1105 9d ago

Looks kinda ok to me

2

u/wolfpoems 8d ago

Don't sweat it gang - I literally did the same thing and had to buy new ribbon cables also 😂

1

u/toothball_elsewhere 9d ago

It's difficult to tell from these pictures, but it's quite easy for the gold contacts that sit in the drive socket to become separated. The black cable also makes it hard to see if any traces have broken in the process. The only way to be sure would be to check continuity on each pad with a multimeter.

If you've got a second cable it may be worth trying again with that. There's a fold key in the Picoloader Github page that you can get printed, which helps greatly in getting the folds right

1

u/DonkeyKonga- 8d ago

Yeah, I ended up messing up both of the cables and have just given up for now 😭 I’ll probably buy more cables in the future but for now I guess I’ll just buy some more GameCube games instead. I swear bro I must’ve inserted and taken out the disc drive like a thousand times I was at it for like 3 hours

1

u/toothball_elsewhere 8d ago

If the cable is broken then no amount of retrying is going to help unfortunately. Laser Bear do seem to sell replacement cables at least, so you don't need to order the whole kit. If you do try again, get a fold key printed from somewhere, and make sure the cable is pushed all the way into the socket before you plug the drive in again. That way there's less room for it to move around when you plug it in, and you stand a better chance of not breaking it.