GameCube Pi case

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 Z

The model in Onshape.

Work hasn’t been quite enough to keep myself engaged lately, so I decided to take up a personal project.

I spent many hours in high school once making a model of a GameCube based on a GameCube that I had then. It didn’t work, so I wanted to make a Raspberry Pi case out of it and run Dolphin on that.

Unfortunately, Raspberry Pis then weren’t really powerful enough to run GameCube games, and I didn’t really have a good way of printing out models that were good, reliably (I had a 3D printer, but I am not very good at operating those kinds of things. I sold it the year after).

But now, the Raspberry Pi 5 is out and it is definitely powerful enough to run GameCube games (at least, Luigi’s Mansion and Animal Crossing, which are the only two that I care about). So I decided to give it another try.

I think this came out well. The tolerances are as close to perfect as I could get. It doesn’t have a back I/O shield, but I did try to make the two micro HDMI ports look like the digital and analog I/O out ports on the back of the older-style GameCubes:

The back of the model.

And I added this little pin to the back I/O area so that there’s something securing the thing together in the back. There aren’t any room for screwholes there, the only two screwholes are in the front.

The profile of the model.

Here is the public link to the model on Onshape, where you can see and download it.

I haven’t printed out this final version of the model yet. Just a prototype to make sure the tolerances were good. But on the prototype there are a lot of defects, so I won’t give pictures of it here.

I’d probably recommend using 0.12 mm resolution (“fine”) when you export, export with units of mm, and then when you print put the inner sides of the top and bottom toward the hot base plate of the printer.

Hopefully this is cool for other people, too!

Update: I modified the model so that the pin is a separate piece. This way you can properly print the top part with its inner part facing down without having to have a thick layer of support material under the entire thing. That was a little bit of an oversight that I realized as soon as I went to get the second print.

Brady Perkins's blog

GameCube Pi case