Hello! This is my first article for a very long time, and I must apologise for my protracted absence. I've been locked into a 6-month roller coaster ride of doing my university finals, graduating, moving house � twice � and starting a new job � my dream start in the games industry. The first title with my name in the credits (Pop / American idol) is nearing completion, and its allowing me some breathing time to write for this site again.

Interestingly, the period of time I've been essentially absent from cube-europe has seen a very strange time for the GameCube. Its almost as if early on this year, after the euphoria of Metroid and Zelda's arrivals, both Nintendo and 3rd party publishers couldn't really see a way to get anything out of the GameCube. The big-hitters have sold well, but not in the millions and millions of copies managed by Zelda and Mario titles on the N64. The market has fundamentally changed, and Nintendo are at a loss as to how to compete. It seems as if, during this time, Nintendo have been taking stock of their situation, and perhaps formulating a new strategy, following the appointment of Iwata-san as president, and are now starting to take some action to salvage what they can from the GameCube. Certainly the recent price cut, in plenty of time for Christmas, and on the eve of arguably the most impressive software release schedule the Cube has seen so far, demonstrates some market sense that I think many people had despaired of ever seeing from Nintendo. The fact that several UK retailers that had previously stopped selling the Cube are now stocking it again, with lots of window space given over to the price cut, is extremely promising.

Whilst the retail side of things has been pretty quiet up until recently for the GameCube, behind the scenes people looking to run their own programs on the GameCube hardware have been very hard at work. Its already possible to run your own code on both the PS2 and the Xbox. The PS2 requires quite a lot of work if you are going to achieve this on a retail machine, the Xbox much less so. In addition, there is a Linux kit (http://www.playstation2-linux.com), made by Sony themselves, which comes with a keyboard, mouse, 40gig hard-drive, network adapter and a monitor adapter, and allows you to turn your PS2 into a Linux development kit of sorts. This kit comes with all the manuals developers would get with the full Playstation2 development kit, minus the DVD-Rom specification, and allows you to essentially make games for your console.

The goal of amateur programmers and homebrew developers is always to try and work out a system where by they can run their own projects on a console but still leave the door closed to mainstream, easy piracy. The latest batch of consoles have improved their anti-piracy measures greatly when compared to consoles even as recent as the Dreamcast, with Mod chips � small pieces of circuitry which must be soldered onto your console's hardware - pretty much a given if you wish to run imported games. This does not prevent people from finding work arounds though, and in the case of the Xbox it is possible to exploit bugs and loopholes in MechAssault and Agent Under Fire to allow you to run code on the Xbox without ever opening the case, and potentially opens to the door to hacking solutions allowing you to run copied DVDs in the Xbox. Similarly, recent progress by amateur programmers working on the GameCube has exploited a loophole in Phantasy Star Online allowing code to be uploaded and executed on the GameCube via networking the broadband adapter to your PC. When the announcement was first made that this method worked, and that code could be compiled for the console using the open source compiler gcc set to compile for the PowerPC-type processor, which is almost identical to the GameCube's main CPU, it seemed like an ideal solution � the GameCube's disk format has not been circumvented. Indeed, at the time of writing, it is still impossible to get the GameCube to boot and read from mini-DVDs burned on a home PC � the non-standard format of the DVD serves to make the creation of perfect copies that the GameCube can recognise a pretty large technical feat, and has bought the console more time compared to the PS2 and Xbox, which use fairly standard discs and layouts.

Needless to say, this will not deter the ever-growing piracy community, and already there are solutions which attempt to stream games over the broadband adapter rather than from the disk drive. This will not provide game performance approaching the quality of streaming data from the disk drive, due to the physical limitations of the speed of the networking hardware, but it does open up some interesting questions, in particular: "Can piracy be good for a console?".

If you take a straw poll of opinion on most gaming forums, the majority of people will ring the praises of the Dreamcast. The well-documented last roll of the dice by SEGA in the hardware market will always be part of gaming lore � a desperate attempt against the odds to capture a significant portion of the games market in time to save SEGA from having to pull out of the hardware business. There was no money for advertising, there was the looming shadow of Sony's PR, and there was also piracy. Lots of piracy.

All console manufacturers lose money on consoles as a general rule of thumb, with perhaps the exception of expensive "special" units, such as the GameBoy Advance SP. The idea is that the hardware is sold at a substantial loss, which is recouped by taking royalties on each game sold for the console. This requires a big outlay initially, but as time goes on and hardware costs reduce, provides very good profit margins... provided you can survive long enough to stomach that initial outlay, of course. Whilst it would have taken a miracle for SEGA to survive in the hardware business, they did give themselves a huge fighting chance with the Dreamcast. The console was head and shoulders ahead of the competition when launched, and stood up well in terms of initial visual impressions next to the newly-launched PS2, which suffered from shipment problems and a rather lackluster launch line up. SEGA on the other hand were offering up games of the quality of Virtua Tennis and Shenmue, as well as breaking new ground with games like Phantasy Star Online. But they could not continue to take expensive gambles on groundbreaking software without the gravy-train of software sales that were offsetting its spiraling debts. And then someone "cracked" the disc format.

Now, I don't want to over-state how much of an impact piracy had. It was not solely responsible for the Dreamcast's demise, with SEGA out-maneuvered on all fronts by Sony in the Corporate playing field that was 21st century games industry. But it definitely didn't help a jot. Think how many copies of games languish in people's software collections and multiply that up by the royalty amounts SEGA would have gained. Its a lot of money, and even if many of the people who own a copied version of a game wouldn't have actually paid money for it at retail, it must have made a bearing on SEGAs eventual announcement that they could no longer compete in the hardware field, and became a multi-format publisher.

On the other hand though, how many people got to play Dreamcast games that they would never have bought, or had the chance to own through being able to download and run Japanese versions of Ikaruga? How many more people now regard the Dreamcast as a classic console, arguably the most loved of this generation of hardware, as opposed to believing it to be a fringe console that was SEGA's last, failed, attempt at salvation from bankruptcy. Then there are scores of wannabe console programmers, who got the unique opportunity to play with a powerful, current piece of hardware to learn about the various eccentrciities of developing on console. How many of them will now go on into the games industry, better equipped to develop 3D console games?

The hard facts are that... well... there are no hard facts. There are no figures to back up just how bad piracy is in financial terms for a hardware manufacturer, leaving a lot of room for arguement and debate over whether piracy and system "hacking" actually do as much good as they do financial harm. In SEGA's situation, with no money left for advertising, the underground word-of-mouth recommendation of the console and software did wonders for its reputation, even if didn't help fill its wallet.

Should we then advocate piracy in some form? Seeing as not that many people do it, surely its ok if just a few get away with it? Well, no, that's not what I'm suggesting. But perhaps its time for console manufacturers to realise that there are legions of people out there that want to be able to pull apart their console and run their own software on it. That doesn't have to be current, money-earning titles, or software that makes full use of the console's hardware. But taking the prompt from playstation2-linux, surely there could be some kind of compromise made by the console manufacturers? What harm could it do Nintendo to allow some kind of limited home development system for their next console, perhaps which allowed the running of old N64 classic games (which are distributed free on GameCube bonus disks as it is) as well as allowing would-be developers work with some of the hardware. It doesn't necessarily reap rewards financially for the manufacturer, but it would do wonders for brand-loyalty, community building and respect for the manufacturer. In addition, it may provide the console with a longer period of grace where pirates don't crack the console's disc or hardware layout, because those wanting to play around with the console still can in a way that is controlled by the manufacturer, as opposed to one generated by methods that pose legal questions. There's also the long-term benefit of allowing a new generation of coders to work with a mainstream console, the very people who will go on to develop games for the console itself.

What harm would it do to allow people to make their own games, which can be distributed freely, for a games console? The gaming art of modding PC games, with its crown jewel Counterstrike as a shining example, demonstrates what allowing home developers the freedom to play with your existing gaming assets can do for the longevity of a games title � why can this ideal not be applied to a games console?

I'm afraid this article doesn't go very far to answer the questions it raises, but its clear that piracy and homebrew development, which so often go hand-in-hand, are not going to go away. Whether they offer advantages or potential problems for the GameCube is open to debate. Financially Nintnedo can ill-afford any kind of drop-off in games sales, which have been the only saving grace in light of the GameCube's poor hardware sales. However, it seems unlikely that the GameCube will go down as one of the all-time classic consoles as it stands. It needs something in the intervening period between its "middle-age" and the release of new hardware to ingrain it upon the gaming psyche, and maybe opening the console's architecture up provides the key to achieving that, as well as a continuation of respect for the Nintendo brand name?

by Schpickles
aka James Nicholls