I used to buy external drives when they went on sale, and I’d shuck the case off of them. In my opinion the quality of the drives in those externals went downhill sometime in the last several years. You might get lucky and get a drive meant for a data center, but I’ve stopped playing that lottery.

These days I just buy retired but warrantied data center drives from sellers on eBay. They’re big, tested, reasonably priced and the seller will replace them within their warranty period if they do die (I usually see 3-5 year as the warranty time). So far I haven’t had any of these die in the last couple of years. Seagates used to fail me constantly thought. I’m now down to only one Seagate still working.

Open Media Vault is another good choice that has a web management interface

I’m happy iPhone owners are getting some control over their devices!

Sure. I don’t believe the source is going to disappear altogether, though I do believe it’s going to get harder to find as time goes on.

Parts of that repo are already 404ing unfortunately

The opening level of Batman Returns on the SNES is set around Christmas time with Christmas trees visible in the background. Not exactly what you were asking for, but it’s a good Beat 'em Up game.

Thank you for helping to preserve video game history!

I didn’t open the link, so yes that’s why I asked. NBD

I like emulation a lot even just as a user, but not only because we get to play games. I’m interested in the research and design phases too. I own a MiSTer, and I look forward to Patreon posts describing technical discoveries during the authoring of cores (Robert Peip’s posts in particular). So given that and the fact that you’ve stated your primary aim is research, I hope you don’t mind the following question as it’s not meant to question the purpose of your project: what do you hope to accomplish in your research since the GameCube is fairly well understood already?