Medical Info

Throughout the history of gaming, individuals have been compelled to tweak and hack the game code and also the systems they’re run on. Be it clever assembler code tweaks on microcomputers like the Spectrum and BBC to give you infinite lives on computer games way back in the 1980s, to XBox 360 flashing allowing you to store backups of their games on the XBox in 2009.

Games developers and console developers have had a tricky relationship with the soldering and hacking crowd. In a sense, modders/hackers bring more worth to the games and systems - for instance chips that have been modified give great convenience to gamers who can download non-sanctioned games from the internet. Similarly, game hacks brings extra value to very challenging games, and in the modern gaming era it’s even de rigeur for games developers to secretly plant “easter egg” cheats for games players to find.

But to counter that, software manufacturers opine that this type of chip modification hurts their profits, as chipmods can also be utilized to circumvent piracy measures, and circumventing hardware that restricts discs to work just in certain locations. These are strong grounds for hardware and software manufacturers to continually develop progressive steps to make modding more and more tricky.

Still, no matter how powerful the arguments are against chipmods, modding is a burgeoning industry that isn’t going to disappear anytime soon.