About The Nintendo GameCube Console

The Nintendo GameCube was originally released to the public back in 2001 and is in the 6th console generation. The GameCube was the first disc based system that Nintendo released. Nintendo’s first three consoles, the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Nintendo 64 all were cartridge based systems.

The GameCube’s discs are actually much smaller than regular CDs and are in a mini format. The reason for this is because Nintendo was initially concerned with the potential piracy aspect of using regular CDs and seeing how rampant piracy was for the Sony Playstation, it does make sense.

Competition

At the time, the Nintendo GameCube was a direct competitor to the Sony Playstation 2 and the Microsoft Xbox. The GameCube was relatively well received when first released, however the user of miniature discs was a bit off-putting to some. The PS2 and Xbox could play DVDs and at the time, this was revolutionary for game systems. The fact that the GameCube couldn’t even play CDs because of its unique disc size didn’t exactly sell additional units.

The GameCube didn’t sell quite as well as the Xbox or PS2 and in total sold around 22 million units in total. For reference, the Xbox was Microsoft’s first console and it sold over 2 million more units than the GameCube during this generation. The PS2 blew both out of the water, selling over 130 million units total. The GameCube would remain on store shelves until 2007, roughly one year after the release of the Nintendo Wii.

How To Emulate The Nintendo GameCube?

The Dolphin emulator is hands down the best GameCube emulator available. Dolphin runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux computers. Be sure to check out our guide on how to setup Dolphin emulator.

The Dolphin emulator can be installed standalone or using the popular emulation frontend RetroArch. You can check out this guide on how to setup the RetroArch GameCube Dolphin core to play your GameCube ROMs.

Do keep in mind that while the RetroArch emulator is convenient and the Dolphin core should work decently well, the standalone version contains the newest updates and bug fixes, whereas often the Dolphin core on RetroArch will be a bit outdated.