MS Employees Debate Mod Chips

Via 1up, a post on Xbox strategy group member Andre Vrignaud's blog discusses the view of mod chips from inside Microsoft. Not surprisingly, he concludes that they're a barrier to a viable business model. Just the same, the post has some good consideration of the issue from both sides. Especially interesting is his comment that "a friend of mine at Microsoft once demonstrated a modded PSP to Bill Gates and showed off all of the interesting things that enabled. According to my friend Bill was intrigued and asked the audience what we might be able to do to encourage this sort of thing without damaging the business." Even if it's a sticky wicket, at least they're thinking along the right lines.

Comments

Re:Modchips rock!

[Svpernova09]

then you didn't do something right :_)

How to solve the problem of mod chips.

[kinglink]

Make it so the user can't find a reason to use a mod chip except piracy. Sounds like what it is now?

Except I can't play Japanese or European games with out a mod chip for the most part.

I can't play out of region DVDs.

I can't play any form of a backup of games I legally owned but was destroyed one way or another (I recently lost over 200 PSX and PS2 games because of a moving compnay, they can't find the boxes. Am I supposed to go rebuy Suikoden 1 and 2, Xenogears, Castlevania Symphony of the Night, and Disgaea all from scalpers on Ebay? )

I can't install an OS on the hard drive if I wish to.

I can't install the game on the Hard drive for performance boosts (not all games and systems get it but leave it an option, maybe even allow me to install the game and then use the game as a boot disc but the game must remain in the system)

I can't load music from my disc unless it's a music cd, I own a couple hundred cds, I use mp3s for ease of use, I have my top 200+ songs on a single cd, now the 360 wants me to insert every CD I own to rerip them to get those songs?

All this shit should at least have a way to achieve it. I can live with out backups and OSes, but region coding stuff makes the modchip necessary. Microsoft knows that they lose money on systems, so which is better? Forcing me to buy two systems to play games in two regions or buying one system and spending the other 400 dollars on games in the second region?

If I could ignore region codes on a system and install games for speed benefit, I wouldn't have a reason to get a mod chip except if my video games were destroyed or stolen from me and Microsoft or the developer didn't sell those games any more.

Import games? Homebrew?

[CharAznable]

The guy still thinks like a corporation with regards to imports and homebrew games. He says: >Sure, there are games you might want to play that are either released earlier or, quite possibly, not released at all in your region. But sometimes companies have good reasons to either not release a title into a region or release it at different dates. It may be because of the time and cost of localization, marketing plans, ad buys, cultural considerations, or perhaps even because of the impact of piracy in the region. Whatever good reasons they might have, there's no reason why their business model considerations should override the inalienable right I have to use the things I have paid money for. If I pay money for an xbox, and I pay money for some japanese game, then I have the right to use them. Marketing considerations shouldn't be more important. If I want to play homebrew games or write my own, it's my own friggin xbox that I bought with my money. That your business model is not compatible with this has, or should have no moral or legal weight whatsoever. That you lose money on every xbox sold? Not my problem. Should have sold it for a profit. I pay money for it, it is as mine as my groceries or my car. Corporations desperately want to move to a model where you don't buy hardware, you "license" it, but when that happens, that's the day I stop buying it.

Re:Import games? Homebrew?

[Qzukk]

The rights in this case are held by the copyright owner; copyright allows them to dictate how, where, and when their content is distributed, not you.

And? If he goes to Japan and buys a fully white market copy of the game in the market it is to be distributed for, is the magic fairy going to come and let him play it on his Xbox? Distribution is a completely different beast than "access control" which did not legally exist until the DMCA added it to the lawbooks, and then only by protecting the methods of access control, not stating that access control is a copy right.

Re:Import games? Homebrew?

[justchris]

Your arguments are valid to a certain extent, but they are also utterly useless.

First of all, what specific inalienable rights are you speaking of? Point them out to me specifically, because as far as I'm aware there is no inalienable right to compatibility. Yes, you have a right to own and do what you want with your property, but at no point does it say you have any right to compatibility. If any restriction, natural or artificial prevents you from getting total enjoyment out of a product, there is no recourse, legal or moral to that.

But beyond that, the simple fact of the matter is, money is the only reason any business exists. If they don't make money, they stop existing. Certainly, if a company providing a good or service ceases to exist, another company will step up to take it's place. That company will not sell their product at a loss, as that obviously did not work for the previous company. Which means your Xbox 360 would be running you about $800...and yet people balk at a $600 PS3 (also being sold at a loss). So instead they'd have to make a much weaker system that they could sell more cheaply, but no one would buy it because they wouldn't think it was good enough! The same complaint people are making about the much cheaper to produce Wii.

A company operates like any other organism, it's first priority is to its own survival. It has to make money, and it cannot violate the law. If the law changes to such an extent that it can no longer make money doing that, then it will simply stop producing that product. If no one can figure out how to make money with a similar product under the new laws, then all products in that category will simply cease to exist. It has happened to products before, and in time it's bound to happen again.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be upset when things don't work the way you want, or that you shouldn't complain. You should complain, because complaints are the only way that anyone knows improvements need to be made. But at no point should you dismiss the concerns of the other side as if they are less important or less valid than your own. The laws are not perfect. The companies are not perfect. You are not perfect. The optimal solution is one that allows those on both sides to survive and prosper.

Re:Something to think about...

[himurabattousai]

This fits in with the author's comments on the "attach rate"--accessories sold per console sold. The biggest problem with mod chips is that they void the warranty of the console. Allowing them as an add-on option (and possibly certifying XYZ, co. to manufacture the chips) means that the upgrade can be done without voiding the warranty, should console design permit this. A system that would never be purchased is now desirable because its usefulness is increased, and maybe MS sells more consoles. They would certainly sell more add-ons and they'd also sell more games. More sales means more money, and everyone goes home happy.

For those who say such a model can't work, look at the success of the factory-tuner divisions of major automakers. Mod chips for consoles are not too dissimilar.

Functionality Extension - No CD Swappign

[happyemoticon]

I'd mod a console if only for the ability to install a bigger drive and an alternate dashboard. The killer feature in my mind is without a doubt the ability to switch between different games without fumbling with the physical media. Kids destroy physical media at an astonishing rate, CDs get lost, they're hard to find, and they're a pain to organize.

Yes, I realize this facilitates piracy, and that this is something that many modded console owners do. I don't care. I have a good enough job that I could buy enough old console games to keep my busy for a good while. I'm not going to let weak copy protection and the letter of a EULA stand between me and something I see as a reasonable extension of console functionality, especially on a console which comes with a hard drive.

As for #3, which the author "cannot condone," I'm not eating into their profits by extending the functionality in this manner. I'd still be buying all of the whizbang accessories and games that they use to put themselves in the black. They don't provide a product (so far as I know) that allows the user to load a game which they own without the CD, so I'm not eating into their profits as long as I don't violate my own mores and pirate a game.

I'm not asking that they condone mod chips, I'm just asking them to explore the ability to do something that a console with an upgradable hard drive is just BEGGING to do. It's like they're shipping cars with 4 disc brakes and the rear brakes are disconnected, and connecting them is illegal. It's just stupid.

Re:Something to think about...

[Keeper]

MS doesn't care about selling more consoles. They care about the attach rate. If they sell 2 million consoles and each person only purchases an extra controller and a mod-chip, they're going to loose boatloads of cash. If they believed that a mod-chip would result in more games and accessories being sold than without, they'd release one in a heartbeat.

Softmodding

[HTH NE1]

You could have just softmoded your xbox

As someone who has done that, I can tell you it isn't that easy to do, mainly because sites with the information seem to want you to sign up for membership to their forums before they'll let you access the instructions. (I just wanted to get the info and go; I don't want to have to subscribe to a forum and bother veteran modders with newbie questions.)

It is also getting harder and harder to find compatible USB thumbdrives with which to perform a softmod. The only drive that I could find that would work completely with the XBOX would cause my PC to hang until it was removed and available instructions to store the image to the drive with a Mac just didn't work. Luckily some newer thumbdrives with acknowledged issues could be used on the PC to put the gamesaves on and copy to the XBOX, but could not be used to transfer data from an XBOX (failed writes).

Many tutorials' links to essential resources now lead to sites that have become ad farms or pointed to the wrong TLD (e.g. .com instead of .org). The access requirements to forums make one have to use Google to search for information, so sticky threads don't help. Errors and omissions don't get corrected or filled in.

Older methods which work with MechWarrior provide images to store on the drives, but newer methods that work with SID4 require another application to move bare gamesaves to the device, and further require you to download another program to get thumbdrive make and model code numbers and alter the application to recognize a USB thumbdrive as its proprietary storage device. Even the free version apparently only wants to work with the proprietary devices.

And then, once you get the mod in, you can't find any of the hacks in precompiled form. I have still to find where I can get a cross compiler to build my own binaries for emulators and applications, and still haven't found any public information on where to store them on the box's filesystem. Even with telnet enabled, the only command I can find that works is DIR; no CD command.

BTW, be careful with SID4. It doesn't seem to like it when you use a component video display instead of a composite and if you try hitting buttons blindly you may wipe out your EEPROM and/or drive backups. (I couldn't find SID4.5 or anything newer so I don't know if this issue has been fixed.) SID4 also apparently doesn't support component video (black screen and failure to exploit), so keep your original composite harness handy.

And if you can't get the maps to load in Halo 2, check to make sure your cable is firmly connected to the hub or switch before opting to revert your mod.

Re:Why?

[Lehk228]

it could probably be enabled without allowing much piracy by allowing binaries to run unchecked if they only allocate a certain amount of memory, say 1/4 of the system ram, half of the allowed ram could be paged out among the disallowed memory but with a significant time delay, perhapse one tenth of a second.
this would be plenty useful for media players and other legitimate homebrew stuff but would make converting a pirated binary all but impossible without the source code and data files to modify for use in the unusual memory system (this memory system would be fairly familiar to TI-86 assembly programmers who were able to take advantage of more memory than the Z80 can normally address by using a rather slow paging system.

How microsoft can allow homebrew without piracy

[jonwil]

Microsoft sells a devkit (either as an addon to an existing 360 or a special 360).
With this devkit, you can build and compile XBOX 360 code. But, the code would only be signed for (and run on) the specific devkit.
If you want others to be able to use it, you can post the code and other devkit users can compile it and sign with their devkit key.
The libraries would provide access to the DirectX stuff and other features of the console with the following differences:
No access to run code from or read data from any disks in the optical drive. Everything would be loaded onto the hard disk only
Changes to the library to prevent pirate copies of normal 360 games from being made and run with this devkit and also to make it useless for real shops doing game development (licence aggrement would also prevent real shops from doing anything with this cheap kit)
Limits would be placed on network access

Then, there would be a way where people with something worth selling could approach microsoft and if its good enough, microsoft would allow it to be sold on XBOX live marketplace with microsoft getting $$$ from the sale.

They could even allow things like 360MC (to let you play all your media files on the 360) or the like. (as long as they get their cut)