Internal GC-Adapters from Aliexpress - differences and similarities to laserbear's adapter

[zeus86]

Hey all,

out of curiosity I recently bought an internal GC-Adapter from aliexpress.

I am pretty sure they are very very similar to the adapter from laserbear, and even if the vendor claims the opposite: they are very certainly based on blueretro. the main difference (that I can tell) is, that they used the webconfig-tool to build a local windows-webapp as single executable (presumeably an electron-app together with a bundled stripped-down chromium-browser, as most of those apps are) and stripped out every occurrence of the word blueretro and replaced it with iBlueControlMod. They downright claim that the hardware is getting damaged when flashed with BlueRetro.

However, I think shenzhen-megacorps should understand, that people are buying their stuff because it is cheap, not because they are particulary good in building software (let alone maintaining it). And in the end, no one wants to rely on ages old, unmaintained beta-builds with random wierd changes , so I bet many (like me) would rather run this hardware with offical BR-builds. On aliexpress there are floating around several internal mods (e.G. also for a dreamcast iirc, all by the same company as it seems), and the claim that you should not install blueretro on these is mentioned on each and every one of these, so I assume this claim is just BS:

Just to make this clear: I don't want to turn away people from the adapters made by laserbear-industries, but you really can't blame people for ordering on aliexpress, because it's cheaper, less hassle (especially with taxes when you live in europe), usually faster, and you often have better payment-options. Beside that it is not just a clone, but an own PCB-design (as far as i can tell), and some people just can't afford a hundred bucks for such one adapter. However, there can't be alot of functional difference, if any. However, in my world, you should at least mention it, when your own archievement is just putting hardware together, and using other peoples open-source-software (which is totally fine so far), but to suggest this is all based on own work without even mentioning the original project (blueretro in this case) is just shitty behaviour, even if the license does not require that explicitly.

So, to help out those, who own (or are going to own) an aliexpress-adapter (and myself of course), my goal is to run stock blueretro on this adapter, so that one can be certain to have this upgrade path when buying an adapter off of aliexpress. I haven't tried flashing blueretro onto the adapter yet, but i first wanted to share some detail pictures of the board to let other people have a look also, if someone spots something, that might be a reason to prevent any cross-flashing-attempts. I have also removed some components in some of the pictures for a better view on the PCB. As far as i can tell, noone really has taken a deeper look into those aliexpress-internal-adapters, so we should fill this gap.

To prevent images to be scaled down in the comments, I've put them in a seperate repo here along with raw-DNG-images as they fell out of my phone. I also included some of the docs that came with the adapter on the included sd-card. some stuff like the mentioned app itself is too large for github, but I can provide this also if needed.

Please share your thoughts.

cheers,
zeus

[lininjim2]

I have one of these and it works well. I haven't tried to flash blueretro to it, to be honest I'd be gutted if I did actually damage it. I wish you the best of luck.

[zeus86]

one (presumably mayor) difference i already spottet: the port-shielding seems not to be isolated from the port-ground, and the port ground seems to be common ground as well. in the implementation of @nostalgic-indulgences the port-detection for wired controllers on the GC works by sensing the shield and if the controller bridges the shield and controller-ground. This would obviously be not possible here in this way. however, the product-page does claim for compatibility with wired and wireless controllers, but i assume not with autoswitching to another port. This would be different to a regular hw2-implementation. In contrast to an original gc-controller-daughterboard, this ports only have one solderjoint per controller-shield, because the structual rigidity here comes from the plastic parts surrounding the port, and not the shielding. so if this would be the only difference, this would be an easy fix.

[zeus86]

@lininjim2 I haven't installed the kit myself yet. maybe you can test, what happens, if a bt-controller is paired to port 1 and you plug in a wired controller. does the bt-controller switch to port2 (and - depending on the controller - switches it's colors), or are they just competing for port1's input?

[zeus86]

another wierd decision is tha cable-coloring: the 2-pin-connector labeled IN (so the 12V-rail coming from the powersupply) has a red/black cable, but at least in my version red is used as GND and black as VCC. If you would manually extend the cables, you would most certainly fry the board if you don't double-check.