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What
Are MOD Chips?
A Mod Chip is a hardwired circuit chip that basically fools your PlayStation into
believing there is a boot sector available on the CD as well as feeding the PlayStation
all country codes <PAL, NTSC J, and NTSC U/C> instead of one or the other.
Also called a territorial boot sector, what a PlayStation does is check this area and
allows you to boot the game. The Mod Chip has these codes hardwired right onto the chip,
so when you boot the PlayStation, it thinks your CD is from the correct country, even if
it isn’t. A Mod chip will allow you to play all PSX game formats. US, Euro, Japanese,
etc. The “swap trick” is not necessary when using a MOD Chip. You can play
import games by loading and playing them, regardless of the game's country of origin, and
regardless if the game is made for your version PlayStation, PAL or NTSC. The chip lets
you load and play every game you own for your PlayStation. You can also play CD-R
backups of PlayStation games you own. When you “backup” one of your PlayStation
games via CD-R, you cannot replicate the Territorial Boot Sector. Thus, if you were to try
to play a game without the MOD Chip, the game would not boot. The Territorial Boot Sector
is analogous to a Boot Sector on a hard drive. Without a boot sector, the computer does
not know what to do or where to boot. The Mod Chip is the Boot PROM for your
PlayStation.
Q) Can the chip damage my PlayStation?
A) In a word: No. The chip or the programming in the chip can not cause your PlayStation
to be harmed provided it has been installed correctly. All the chip contains is the
Territorial Boot Sector <or the bypass for it depending on the brand of chip>,
nothing more.
Q) The MOD Chip seems almost to good to be true, what are the
drawbacks?
A) There are only a couple of drawbacks to the MOD Chip and they are these.
#1. You instantly void the Sony warranty by opening the PlayStation case.
#2. If you make a mistake in putting it in, you can fry your PlayStation.
#3. Certain games have code written in them that look for MOD chips. These
games (such as Dino Crisis) will not boot with a MOD chip installed in your system.
However, as is always the case, there's always a way around this - either by putting a
switch on your MOD chip, entering certain codes in a GameEnhancer, or running a crack on
the program, it will disable this anti-MOD protection.
That’s really about the only drawbacks there are.
Q) Ok, so what's a
"stealth" chip?
A) Stealth chips are chips that attempt to turn
themselves off before a game 'looks' for them. The early models of these chips were
very buggy, but ever since Steve from ModChipsUK
came out with his Muti-Mode chip, I have full confidence in these chips (as a matter of
fact, I have one in my PSX.) He's also done neat stuff like use one of the pinouts
for an LED so you can see when it's working, and made a special mode for games like Dino
Crisis so they get around the anti-mod protection easily. I highly recommend that if
you're in the market for a MOD chip, get a Muti-Mode chip!
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