The History of Game Console Mod Chips

Since the advent of home video game consoles there have always been ‘tinkerers’ intent on making the consoles do more than the manufacturer intended. Ironically, it was the earliest game consoles that were the best protected from users attempting to make modifications, with the first dozen or so home consoles having a limited number of unchangeable games built in. In 1976 the Channel F was the first programmable video game system, having plug-in cartridges containing ROM and microprocessor code rather than dedicated circuits. The blocky plastic cartridge with it’s unre-writable ROM chip would be the game console manufacturers number one defense against game copying and home modification for the next 20 years.

It was not until 1994, when Sony launched the PlayStation, (which it had originally begun to design by the request of Nintendo, who later rejected it – forever to their chagrin) that the concept of true home modification became a reality. Early PlayStation consoles had a parallel port on the back of the console and it was by using this port a method was discovered to use a Game Enhancer to swap an original disc with a copied disc. The first modification had been performed!

Soon after an unnamed software developer working in Hong Kong developed the first installable mod chip for the PlayStation which he sold for around $50. The code used by this developer was reverse engineered in 1997, and the code made public. This reduced the overall price of PlayStation mod chips to around $10.

Sony was not oblivious to the potential revenue being lost to console owners using modified consoles so increased the protection against copied and ‘homebrewed’ software that was built into the PlayStation2 which was launched in 2000. The PS2 console has a protection system based on original discs containing unreadable sectors. This part of the disc cannot be burned onto a copied disc. The PS2 console performs a disc integrity check on every disc when loading a game. If the unreadable sectors are not found, the game does not pass the check and consequently will not load. Fortunately for PS2 owners a mod chip was developed allowing the loading of copied and homebrewed games only a few months after the launch of the popular console.

The Nintendo corporation is one of the most active companies in the effort to deter game copying with it’s most notable attempt being the unique design of the optical disc system used with 2001’s Game Cube system. A proprietary format based on Matsushita's optical-disc technology; the discs are approximately 8 centimeters (3 1/8 inches) in diameter (considerably smaller than the 12cm CDs or DVDs used in competitors' consoles), and the discs have a capacity of approximately 1.5 gigabytes. The disc is also read from the outer-most edge going inward, the opposite of a standard DVD.

The Microsoft Xbox gaming console also went to lengths to protect against user modification but it too proved susceptible to the cunning of Modchip designers. Modchips for the Xbox usually take advantage of a 16-pin LPC debugging port that is included on the Xbox motherboard. The console can use this port to load an alternative BIOS. A pin header must be soldered to this port and connected to the modchip and a single solder point outside of the LPC header (D0) must be attached to the modchip also. This leads to the onboard BIOS being bypassed and the loading of the BIOS from the LPC port. A common practice in the modding scene is to use an alternative BIOS (that contains no copyrighted code whatsoever) that can load a Linux Operating System either from DVD or from the Xbox HDD.

The most recent Nintendo gaming console , the exciting and innovative Wii seems to have also inspired the greatest number of mod chip designs, with nearly a dozen on the market currently. Among the easiest mod chip installations available the Wii is capable of being ‘chipped’ via a solder-less mount which makes it one of the quickest and simplest machines to modify.

No one is quite sure what the next generation of game consoles will look like, or what manufacturers will do to try and secure them against modification, but mod chips seem to be as adaptable to change as the consoles they are built for.