The GameCube is relatively small and as you can tell from the name, cube shaped. It was released in purple, black and special edition colours. The GameCubes is also Nintendo’s first system to use optical discs instead of the cartridge format. The discs used in the GameCube are very small compared to CDs and DVDs and can hold a total of 1.5GB. Thats much more than cartridges but not as much as DVDs used by other consoles. Nintendo worked very hard to give the GameCube the ability to read discs at fast speeds for faster loading times than other competing consoles.
The GameCubes main and co-processors were developed by IBM and the graphics chip was designed in conjunction with ATI. This has given the GameCube the ability to offer gamers brilliant quality games and eye watering visuals. The GameCubes controller is designed to be as easy to use as possible and has 8 buttons, a D-pad and 2 control sticks. The GameCube is also compatible with certain GBA titles and can play GBA games through the use of the Game Boy Player. The Game Cube can also be used online through the use of either the Modem Adapter or Broadband Adapter. Games like Mario Kart: Double Dash!! Can use the broadband adapter to create a LAN for Multi-GameCube multiplayer matches. The GameCube also has a huge Games Library including games from Nintendo franchises like Mario, Zelda, Metroid and Donkey Kong.
The official memory cards can offer 59 or 251 blocks of space for your save games.
The Game Boy Advance Cable allows connectivity with selected GBA titles only. It can also be used to connect a GBA/SP for use as a controller with the Game Boy Player.
The WaveBird is a wireless controller for the GameCube which uses RF instead of Infrared to prevent objects interfering with the controllers connection.
The Game Boy Player allows the use of GBA carts on the GameCube so you can play Game Boy games through your TV.
The Modem/Broadband adapter allows your GameCube to connect to the internet for Online Gaming. Few games used these adapters.
The DK Bongos are a special controller for use in Donkey Konga, Donkey Konga 2 and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. The Bongos work like a real pair of Bongos and a built in Microphone can pick up clapping sounds.
The Action Pad is a Dance Mat for the GameCube and came in the original packaging of Dancing Stage: Mario Mix.
The Microphone came in the original packaging of Mario Party 6 and can only be used with specially designed games.
MPU ("Microprocessor Unit") - Custom IBM Power PC "Gekko"
Manufacturing Process - 0.18 micron IBM Copper Wire Technology
Clock Frequency - 485 MHz
CPU Capacity - 1125 Dmips (Dhrystone 2.1)
Internal Data Precision - 32-bit Integer & 64-bit Floating-point
External Bus - 1.3GB/second peak bandwidth (32-bit address space, 64-bit data bus 162 MHz clock)
Internal Cache - L1: Instruction 32KB, Data 32KB (8 way}, L2: 256KB (2 way)
System LSI - Custom ATI/Nintendo "Flipper"
Manudacturing Process - 0.18 micron NEC Embedded DRAM Process
Clock Frequency - 162MHz
Embedded Frame Buffer - Approx. 2MB, Sustainable Latency : 6.2ns (1T-SRAM)
Embedded Texture Cache - Approx. 1MB, Sustainable Latency : 6.2ns (1T-SRAM)
Texture Read Bandwidth - 10.4GB/second (Peak)
Main Memory Bandwidth - 2.6GB/second (Peak)
Pixel Depth - 24-bit Colour, 24-bit Z Buffer
Image Processing Functions - Fog, Subpixel Anti-aliasing, 8 Hardware Lights, Alpha Blending, Virtual Texture Design, Multi-texturing, Bump Mapping, Environment Mapping, MIP Mapping, Bilinear Filtering, Trilinear Filtering, Anisotropic Filtering, Real-time Hardware Texture Decompression (S3TC), Real-time Decompression of Display List, HW 3-line Deflickering filter
Sound Processor - Custom Macronix 16-bit DSP
Instruction Memory - 8KB RAM + 8KB ROM
Data Memory - 8KB RAM + 4KB ROM
Clock Frequency - 81 MHz
Performance - 64 simultaneous channels, ADPCM encoding
Sampling Frequency - 48KHz
System Floating-point Arithmetic Capability - 10.5 GFLOPS (Peak) (MPU, Geometry Engine, HW Lighting Total)
Real-world polygon - 6 million to 12 million polygons/second (Peak) (Assuming actual game conditions with complex models, fully textured, fully lit, etc.)
System Memory - 40MB
Main Memory - 24 MB MoSys 1T-SRAM, Approx 10ns Sustainable Latency
A-Memory - 16MB (81MHz DRAM)
Disc Drive - CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) System
Average Access Time - 128ms
Data Transfer Speed - 16Mbps to 25Mbps
Media - 3 inch Nintendo GameCube Disc based on Matsushita's Optical Disc Technology, approx 1.5GB Capacity
Input/Output - Controller Port x4, Memory Card Slot x2, Analogue AV Output x1, Digital AV Output x1, High-Speed Serial Port x2, High-speed Parallel Port x1
Power Supply - AC Adapter DC12V x 3.25A
Main Unit Dimensions - 11.4cm (Height) x 15cm (Width) x 16cm (Depth)