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Living in Australia it is generally pretty hard to get chips installed or obtain mini dvd's so I skipped on the Viper when I first read about it a few months back. However I recently managed to find a guy in Perth who installed a Qoob Pro chip complete with USB cable and a modified case for $AU119.
After reading alot of complicated posts regarding media compatability, burning issues, laser adjustment and various mod chips and bios's I was quite apprehensive about getting my cube modded. In my case however it was very simple and was pretty much burn and play without any laser adjustment. I am not yet sure whether I am part of a lucky minority or perhaps just a silent majority. Using the 1.3C bios I simply burnt with Nero (remembering to select the Finalize DVD box) and booted Mario Party 6 straight away with no issues. I have since encountered some slight problems with other games and eventually realised it was the media. What I experienced was skipping and temporary freezing in FMV playback as well as longer loading times which was annoying although the games were still playable. So far I have sucessfully backed up Mario Party 6, Super Smash Brothers Melee, Pokemon Stadium, Super Mario Sunshine and Tales of Symphonia.
For anyone living outside of the US who is unable to obtain Ritek media (the newer ritek media sucks anyway so you aren't really missing out) I advise getting TDK, Fujifilm or Maxell which are widely available and quite cheap. I found the best media to use was anything with the Ricoh Japan manufacturer ID although pretty much anything made in Japan is generally quite safe. In Australia specifically TDK DVD+R 1-8x is common although I had some skipping with the newer 16x media with the inferior TTH02 ID. Also I have heard some bad things about LG burners however I am the proud owner of both a LG 4040 and 4120B, between them they have backed up over 50 PS2 games flawlessly. They might be a little picky with some media but with the latest firmware and Ricoh Japan dvd's they can burn perfect Gamecube backups.
I am not really sure if this post was necessary but I just wanted to encourage anyone who like myself has been put off by many of these threads. As long as you know a few key things then you have a reasonable chance of being able to simply burn and play games using the Qoob without too many issues.
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