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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.
then you didn't do something right :_)
I'm glad that Microsoft is actually looking into this. From the business perspective, a lot of money could be made if Microsoft / Sony / Nintendo (are there modded Gamecubes?) would embrace the mod chips.
It's the equivalent of illegally downloaded songs several years ago. Apple was one of the first to "cash in" on it. They had managed to get people to pay for something they could get free.
If the big console manufacturers would do this, not only would it make their game systems more appealing, but it would put some more cash in their pockets...
He's shown an interest in modded XBoxes...
:rolleyes: He brought this box along to a meeting with Bill Gates. Bill saw a demo of this, was quite impressed, and asked something along the lines of "How can we engage this community?" - instead of saying something like "How can we squash this?" It's long been on the back of everyone's minds in the Xbox group - how can we get students and hobbyists involved without disrupting the console business model? The good news is that it's still on the radar, we'll see what happens in the future.
from Ars
A little over a year ago, one of the people in my group modded an Xbox, installed Avalaunch, and put all sorts of Xbox mod scene apps on the box, like XBMC, RSS readers, etc, along with some "backup" games.
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.
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.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
Importers don't care about the cost or time that goes into localization because they're playing a game without localization. None of those reasons make a lick of sense. Why should importers be affected by the costs of things they don't benefit from? And the cost of ads is beyond irrelevant to the ethicality of importing games.
This guy said it better than I did:
http://ozymandias.com/archive/2006/07/31/The-Prob
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.
Since the DMCA was passed. Since mod chips defeat copyright protection in the consoles you are in violation of the DMCA if you mod (or soft mod) your console.
Wheee!
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Do you think that's air you're breathing?
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You could have just softmoded your xbox
.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.
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.
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.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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)
Andre Vrignaud hit the 3 main reasons people mod their consoles and argued why these are bad. He says piracy is bad. I think most people can agree on principle, you shouldn't pirate, regardless of whether or not you actually partake in such practices.
What gets me is when Andre suggests that you don't have a right to do something with hardware you purchased because you got it below it's real value. If someone wants to sell you something cheap, that doesn't mean that you own it less.
Bill Gates honestly seems to have changed his outlook on life in many ways. He went from publicly saying he doesn't believe in charity to becoming Time's Man of the Year for charity work. He claims that he wants to change Microsoft's business practices to be less confrontational, perhaps forced by the EU's fines.
I'm not shocked that Gates wants to reach out to creative people who are using the XBox in innovative ways. I believe that you can encourage this market, and use it as a means to showcase the power of your console, while at the same time discouraging piracy.
Right now despite all the anti-Sony sentiment, I'm seriously considering the $500 PS3 which I believe provides more value in the end than the $400 360. (Both have HDD's, neither have HDMI, PS3 has more power, Blu-Ray and free online play). Sony is also talking about allowing Linux on the PS3 out of the box, and allowing full homebrew development. If the 360 allowed me to run stuff like XBox Media Center, perhaps I'd be more interested in the 360. But given that the XBox is largely an x86 PC that runs a gimped version of Direct X, if the PS3 does allow for proper homebrew applications, I wouldn't be totally surprised to see an XBox emulator on the PS3. Hell, I have a PS1 and N64 emulator on my XBox right now.
Can you imagine a PS3 that plays PS3/2/1 and XBox games?
I think I need a wet-nap.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The problem with mod-chips for the business model is that console makers are losing a lot of money on the hardware. This loss is then compensated for by increasing the prices of games.
This is fundamentally the same issue as in the mobile phone industry, where the phones are often sold at steep discounts - in exchange for being tied to a contract with increased costs of actually using the phone and/or a monthly charge.
At least here in Denmark, rules disallow many "deceptive" business practices, resulting in virtually all subsidized phones being sold with a contract that forces 6 months of payment (after which the monthly charge is typically reduced to zero (unless the plan includes free minutes / text messages or the like)). Additionally, stores are required to give the total (minimum) cost of the phone over the contract period. This allows consumers to easily compare prices.
Thus consumers are perfectly willing to pay for a mobile phone by laying down X dollars now and Y dollars a month for Z number of months. Maybe some are deluding themselves into thinking, that they're actually getting something for those Y dollars a month, but I'd wager most aren't.
Why shouldn't this exact same "solution" work for console makers? Especially now that consoles feature internet accounts.
Microsoft could then sell its console for the same price as before, but include a contract for 6 months of "Xbox Live Diamond" access at some monthly charge.