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The Long Afterlife Of The Console Modchip
For a late-1990s engineer with good soldering skills, many a free pint of beer could be earned by installing modchips on the game consoles of the day. Modchips were usually …read more
The Long Afterlife Of The Console Modchip
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For a late-1990s engineer with good soldering skills, many a free pint of beer could be earned by installing modchips on the game consoles of the day. Modchips were usually a small microcontroller connected with a few wires to selected pins on the chips or pads on the board that masked or overrode the copy protection and region locking. This scene was brought back for us by a recent Modern vintage gamer] video [looking at the history of console hardware mods, and it’s worth a watch (see the video, below).
The story starts in 1996 with the original PlayStation, largely the source of those free pints for a nascent Hackaday scribe back in the day. Along the way, as he expands the story, we find other memories, for example, the LPC bus-based hijacks of the first XBox console, and the huge modding scenes on both that machine and Sony’s PS2. The conclusion is that this community left its mark on today’s consoles even though the easy hardware hacks may be a thing of the past on the latest hardware, and as past Hackaday articles can attest, jailbreaking older consoles still has a way to go.
In the early days, our recollection is that the PlayStation modchips were driven by the region locking rather than piracy, for the simple reason that Sony used 80-minute ISOs which wouldn’t fit on the then-available consumer 74-minute CD-R. We also remember them being used by people who couldn’t afford a blue debuugging PlayStation,. or the rare black developer model.