On Nintendo DSi Flashcarts and Chip Modding
Since the first video games 30 years ago, people have had a compulsion to tweak and modify games and also the systems they’re run on. Right from the game hacks on the ZX Spectrum handing you invincibility on Paperboy way back in the 1980s, to Nintendo DSi flashcarts permitting you to play a broader range of applications on their Nintendo.
Software developers and system developers have had a tricky relationship with the soldering and hacking crowd. In one way, they add extra value to the systems and games – for instance chips that have been modified give great convenience to games players who can play backups on their consoles. Likewise, software hacks brings extra value to very-hard-to-complete games, and in the modern gaming era it’s even normal for games producers to actually secretly plant “easter egg” cheats for gamers to find.
Then again, software manufacturers opine that this kind of chip modification lessens their profits, as chip modifications are also applied to circumvent measures against illegal copying, and bypassing hardware that fixes discs to play only in certain countries. These are compelling grounds for console and games manufacturers to continually add new measures to make modding more difficult to carry out.
But no matter how powerful the grounds are against chipmods, modding is now a burgeoning market that isn’t will not go away while the demand is there.
