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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.
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.
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?
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.