I'm interesting in doing some GC programming, but I have some questions. Does anybody know how developers debug on the GC? I've done GBA programming before, and whenever you make a change, you have to recompile the entire image. It isn't so bad because you have emulators, but when you don't have an emulator, each time you make a change, you have to recompile the entire image, and load the image into the flash via an debug card, which is a painful process. Is it the same on the GC? Thanks.

I've never had to deal with GC, but I believe the dev kit must have either a way to stream the executable or store it on an internal drive.

Unless you have a dev kit, I doubt it's feseable to develop for the gamecube. At least, not legally... but I might be wrong.

As part of our dev kit, we use a program called odemsrv that emulates the gamecube disk file, based on a load of parameters specified by a disk layout file. Basically this means it can emualate a disk for you without having you to create the image, so any code / content changes are pretty painless.

As for debugging, we use ProDG, so you won't be able to compile / debug any new code unless you've got a valid license from SN systems.

So short answer, no, we don't have to recompile the entire image, but the code itself still takes bloody ages to compile compared to other platforms.

devkitpro.org

Get devkitppc. That will allow you to compile gamecube code. To boot it, you either need a modded system or Phantasy Star online, as well as a broadband adapter. Additionally, you could get an SD adapter, and use SDload.

Usually when console debugging, the hardware is connected to the PC allowing to execute images from the PC and debug via something like GDB. In the case of the gamecube, we used ProDB which came with SN systems SDK.