Throughout the history of computer/video games, individuals have been compelled to tweak and hack the game code and also the hardware systems they run on. Be it neat assembler code hacks on microcomputers like the Oracle and ZX Spectrum to provide you unlimited lives on computer games way back in the 80s, to XBox 360 flashing enabling one to keep backups on the XBox nowadays.

Software developers and console manufacturers have had an on/off relationship in regards to the hacking and soldering crowd. In one way, hackers add extra worth to the systems and games – e.g. modchips give great convenience to games players who can play backups on their consoles. Likewise, games hacking adds new purpose very-hard-to-complete games, and in the modern gaming era it’s a convention for games makers to actually build in cheat codes for gamers to seek out.

But to balance that out, software manufacturers state that this kind of chip modification lessens their revenue, as chip modifications can also be utilized to bypass piracy measures, and short-circuiting firmware that fixes cartridges to work only in certain countries. These are strong reasons for console and games producers to continually develop progressive steps to make chipmods more and more tricky.

However, no matter how persuasive the causes are in opposition to modifying chips, chipmodding is now a burgeoning industry that isn’t going to go away.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 4:06 am and is filed under Playing Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.