Scattered across the various news publications I scan everyday, I came across reports that Sony won a court battle to prevent the sale of mod chips for the PS3 console. For those of you who don’t know about “mod chips”, they are usually a small circuit board, chip or even USB stick that alters and/or enables functionality within a device that was not originally available.
For instance, the Nintendo Wii was unable to play DVD videos out of the box but with a mod chip you can use your Wii as a DVD player (not that I would recommend it). Another use of mod chips are to enable the use of discs from outside your region to be played on your device. Some people may want to do this because certain games may only be available in Japan or games can be bought cheaper overseas.
The bit where mod chips wade into grey and murky areas concerns the use of illegally obtained copyright material. Mod chips can be used to circumvent copy protection mechanisms built into devices. There are arguments on both sides of the fence about the legitimacy of such methods such as:
- if games were cheaper then people wouldn’t pirate,
- if games were easily available in all markets people wouldn’t pirate,
- content owners have the right to protect their intellectual property,
- content owners have the right to profit from their hard work.
Personally, I had a Super Nintendo mod chipped with a speed switch to play international games which were available months earlier than Australia and also to play some fantastic RPGs only available overseas. The benefit of the speed switch was that you could play USA and Japanese games at full speed (since their electricity runs at 60Hz as opposed to 50Hz here in Australia). Some games detected the speed at which your console was running and stopped you in your tracks if it didn’t match what it was expecting.
So there are positives and negatives associated with mod chips – it’s a shame that the negatives ruin it for the rest of us that want more freedom in our gaming experiences.
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