If you buy a product its supid that they can tell you what you cannot do with it, its pathetic. I can understand them saying you can't use a pirated disc but to say you can't add something to the circuitry of your own possesion just because it COULD be used to play coprighted discs is bordering on a frigging dicatorship complex in my mind.
With the Xbox, mod-chips are not illegal. You can buy/sell/advertise them freely. They're only little circuit boards. However, if you sell them pre-flashed with a hacked bios (it's the bios that does all the work, not the chip), the chip becomes illegal because most of the code in the bios belongs to Microsoft. Nearly all mod-chips for the Xbox ship un-flashed (the user has to search for a bios in the 'usual places') but there still are some greedy retailers who sell and ship the mod-chip flashed with a bios in order to attract the 'newbie' market who don't know how to flash a mod-chip. That's when lawsuits happen. I'm not sure how the PS2 system works though.
the PS2 version is just a chip i think, but it's soldered onto the motherboard in rather careful places so i don't know exactly what it does, never heard of flashing the actual mod chip yourself...
I've heard of some that are USB... I couldn't see how those could be illegal... nothing changed inside, only software
Doesn't matter about the "insides". Look at the Xbox mod-chips, fairly simple hardware that would be nothing the *illegal* software (bios).
Microsoft can kiss my big, fat, white, hairy arse. I bought my XBox, I'll do thatever I dang well please with it. I didn't lease it from them, I didn't rent it - I purchased it. There was no paperwork that I needed to sign before I bought it telling me what I could or couldn't do with the hardware, there were no signs telling me that I couldn't modify or otherwise change anything on the unit. Sooner or later people will realize that companies and governments are methodically destroying our basic rights and making at least the American government "By the corporation, for the corporation". They want to make it illegal to own mod chips? Well, they better make the IC's, resistors and other discreet components illegal too or someone may take them to make the mod chip! I've been real tired of mega-corporations dictating to me what I can and can not do with what I buy. I can understand software and music piracy, but what's next? Are AMD and Intel going to say that it's illegal to overclock your CPU? Is General Motors going to say that it's illegal to drop an after market engine into your car? Okay, I need to find my happy place... /me rubs temples -- Infinite calm.... Infinite calm....
Those PS2 USB chips would only allow backed up PS1 games to be played - if you wanted to play backup PS2 games, you still had to solder 1 cable to get that to work. And even then, it was a lot more expensive than most of the other chips available, and it didn't have even half the features.
There is an XBox modchip bios going around atm that is completely leagal. It wasn't built with Microsoft tools, it includes no code from any other Microsoft product, and infringes no copywrites. The bios is called the Cromwell bios, and was designed to boot linux- beyond that its pretty useless. It's possible to use it to install Linux, then use Linux to flash the modchip with a more dubious bios; and doing so doesn't mean you need to create any flashing equipment- you can do it with the chip just soldered into your box.
