Someone has built a GameCube small enough to put on your keychain; it runs on genuine Nintendo silicon, and the design files are up on GitHub for anyone who wants to try replicating it.
The project is called Kawaii, and it is the work of modders YveltalGriffin, Wesk, and Ding. The finished unit measures just 60 x 60 x 15.8mm and is machined in blue anodized CNC aluminum, which gives it a level of finish that most modding projects don’t come close to. It’s a striking little object.
The key technical decision here is that the Kawaii doesn’t rely on a Raspberry Pi or any other general-purpose SBC. It runs actual Nintendo hardware. The Wii, as longtime modders will know, retained GameCube backward compatibility and has a long history of aggressive trimming in the modding community. The Kawaii uses an Omega Trim Wii motherboard as its foundation, which is how you end up with genuine Nintendo processors and ICs running GameCube titles inside something the size of a large matchbox.
To make that work in such a confined space, the build also uses NAND Flex mods to stack certain components, and the Thundervolt mod to undervolt the CPU enough to keep heat manageable. Reportedly, it can still overheat after around 20 minutes without active cooling pointed at it, so thermal headroom is tight.
Games are loaded via microSD card, though one acknowledged downside of the current design is that the card becomes inaccessible once the case is fully assembled. Something to address in a future revision, presumably.
The Kawaii isn’t a standalone device. It uses pogo pins to connect to a dock, which is itself larger than the console. From there, you’ll also need a GameCube controller, a USB power supply, the associated dongles, and a TV. So the “fits on a keychain” framing is doing some work, but the hardware inside the tiny case is the real story.
MCAD, ECAD, and BOM files are available on the Kawaii GitHub page, though build instructions haven’t been written yet. The BitBuilt forums have a thread documenting the assembly of two units for anyone ready to take the plunge.
Source: Macho Nacho Productions via Tom’s Hardware
