PlayStation ripping mods origins | dstill.ai shared chat

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Who was behind PlayStation ripping mods and chips?

There were several individuals and groups behind the development of mods and chips for PlayStation systems. One notable figure is Paul Owen, who created the Messiah mod chip for the PlayStation 2 and later developed the Enigma mod chip for the Xbox . Another group involved in modding and hacking consoles is Team Xecutor, known for their SX Pro mod chip for the Nintendo Switch .

It's also worth mentioning that video game makers have taken legal action against modders and chip makers, such as Sony's lawsuit against Max, the founder of Team Xecutor, for selling mods for the PlayStation . These legal battles have involved claims of intellectual property infringement and the circumvention of anti-piracy controls .

The motivations behind modding and chip development can vary. Some modders aim to enhance gaming systems or add new features, while others are driven by the desire to enable piracy by bypassing anti-copy protections . However, it's important to note that modding and using mod chips for unlawful purposes, such as playing pirated games, can have legal consequences and negatively impact the gaming industry .

It's worth mentioning that legal perspectives on modding have evolved over time. In the past, courts ruled in favor of modders, recognizing the rights of consumers to modify games for personal use . However, with the introduction of legislation like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which criminalizes circumventing access controls, legal battles between modders and game makers have become more complex .

Please note that modding and using mod chips may violate copyright laws and the terms of service for gaming consoles. It's always important to consider the legal and ethical implications before engaging in such activities.

1

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): The idea is that it enabled you to copy games that you already had, or play any pirated games that you had. The design was clean and super simple. People who had no experience modding systems could easily get this working and were giving it great reviews. So they had this thing all developed and manufactured and then they wanted to announce it on the forum that Gary was the mod for and this is where Gary was obligated to promote this device since that was the deal that he made with Maximilian. Now, when you're a mod maker, you've got some potential things that can go wrong with your whole business. See, sometimes Team Executor would sell their products for, let's say, $30, but then see the exact same product being sold directly out of Asia for $2. It was pirate versus pirate. Because the factory that was making the chips for Team Executor would just sometimes make some extra and sell them directly to the consumer. Totally undercutting Team Executor. So Max didn't want that happening with SX Pro. So he decided he was going to add his own software into the thing. So instead of loading the Switch's native operating system, the SX Pro would load up SX OS. which was basically just an open source emulator. But Max took it a step further. He didn't want someone pirating SxOS. So he decided that he was going to require everyone to have a license key before using the SxOS. So you had to pay like $25 just for the license to use this mod. And this angered quite a few people. First of all, paying a license for pirated software? That's unusual.

2

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): We don't want you to. No, they didn't. Do you think they cared?

(someone): I think so. They were actively monitoring the forums even back then and watching the information.

(someone): Yeah, the game makers were absolutely watching the video game modding forums. And they wanted to know what cheats and mods were out there for their systems and games. And when Paul Owen made these two chips, that's when Sony came in and threatened him with legal action. This forced Paul to stop importing Messiah chips for the PS2. But it didn't stop people from buying them directly from Taiwan. And it didn't stop Paul Owen from making more chips for the Xbox. And in my opinion, it's really cool that someone is able to make a microchip to enhance the gaming system. Because I hate it when these things are just so proprietary and secret and locked down that you can't even repair the game system if it breaks. In fact, I don't even want to call these things modchips. They're just accessories for your gaming system. Like the other day, I wanted to put an M.2 hard drive in my computer, but my motherboard didn't have a slot for it. So I had to go buy a PCIe card that enabled me to use the M.2 drives. This is not against any rules. This is a perfectly fine accessory to buy for your computer. The Xbox is a little computer and it didn't let you add a hard drive. And so it was Paul Owen's release of the Enigma chip that allowed you to add an extra hard drive.

3

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): I mean, the original stuff that was done, like on the PS1 and the original Xbox, there was no pushback whatsoever. They looked at it as just a percentage of loss in business. And they would take more protection on their disks if a piracy started happening, like in the PlayStation 1 when the first ships started to come out. that bypassed their boot up system, they added more checks on the game itself to look and shut it down. Electronic Arts, the publishers themselves were the ones that were more into locking out system. Electronic Arts was one of the first ones that started adding anti-piracy stuff on the PS1.

(someone): Okay, so yeah, people in the gaming scene were taking these systems apart and trying to modify it. Making the game systems do new things that they didn't originally do. And the game makers hated this. They wanted desperately to keep their systems from being tampered with and started making games that wouldn't work if you did tamper with it.

(someone): So the original PS1 ships wouldn't shut down. They would just keep injecting the signal. So Electronics Arts, they added code in their game itself to check to see if that signal was still being injected. Then they realized, well, that must be, it must be modified because we're not sending a signal anymore from the disc. Why is the signal still there? So then newer ships had to come out. They were called stealth ships that would shut down after a little while. And that bypassed the original checks that EA did.

(someone): Let's back up a second. As I'm learning about all this, I'm getting super fascinated with the history of video game systems.

4

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): There is money lost due to piracy, sure. But I think all these anti-copying measures hurt the regular consumer and stifles technological growth. What do you mean I can't add anything to my computer that I bought and own? It's mine. I should be able to modify it any way I like. But the truth is, the major driver for most of these mods was to enable piracy. To let you download games off the internet for free and play them on your console. And video game makers thought this was drastically hurting their revenue, and that's why they went to war in this way. I just wonder if there were better ways to deal with it. I mean, listen to this talk by Tony Chen, the head of security for Xbox.

(someone): When I first joined Xbox, a lot of people throughout Microsoft, I have to explain to them why the problem we're facing is fundamentally different than the problem that Windows needs to solve for its security. So on a Windows PC system, the PC owner is a good guy. He's working with us to prevent his PC from being attacked. The bad guys are the guys out on the Internet trying to compromise his PC. So Microsoft as an operating system vendor is working with the PC owner to fight the bad guys out on the Internet. Okay, on the Xbox, the owner is the attacker. Although the majority of our customers are good, but you have to treat them as the attacker in terms of designing your hardware.

(someone): Do you hear it the way I hear it? Video game system owners are the bad guys? It just sounds weird to me. Like that's just being too aggressive towards your customers.

5

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): First of all, paying a license for pirated software? That's unusual. The whole method to do this hack was posted right there on the forums. You could just use a paperclip and a USB cable and your phone and get the switch to boot into the same emulator. You didn't need the SX Pro at all. But the idea of it though was that it makes this whole process of hacking your switch easier. You just had to pay for this easier method. But it still bothered people that they were charging for pirated software. I mean, the whole point of piracy is to go around having to pay for stuff, you know? On top of that, some users were getting mad that the emulator in this thing was just a free and open source emulator. A lot of people were upset because you're taking a free and open source software and charging for it? But this is ironic because this is the same thing PlayStation did with their PS1 Mini, remember? The emulator that was on the SXOS was called Atmosphere, which was licensed under the GPL, the same as what Sony did. And people were mad at them for charging for this.

(someone): Yeah, well, that's a problem that's going on with everything, even recently with Red Hat. Oh, man, I didn't think about that.

(someone): But yeah, Red Hat is a version of Linux. And yeah, they took the free and open source Linux software and suddenly started charging for it. And there's been quite a lot of controversy over that. Like, why are you taking other people's code and charging for it? You didn't write that.

6

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): Messiah was for the PlayStation system. It was one of the first ships that allowed a DVD to boot on a PlayStation 2.

(someone): So the Messiah was a mod ship that you could solder onto a PlayStation 2, and it was created by Paul Owen. I believe it bypassed the anti-copy protections and that you play copied games. And then when the Xbox came out, Paul also made a mod chip for it called Enigma.

(someone): They came out with a BIOS that added new features, allowed you to put in bigger hard drives, unlocked the system. I hated the way they had to modify the system, I mean, with the wires and everything. My solution at the time I would actually just take the flash chip off and just reprogram it and then solder it back on. Since I was in the business before manufacturing hardware, I had the programming equipment and the soldering tools. So for me, it was quicker just to desolder the flash chip, reprogram it on my PC, and then solder it back in. I could do that whole operation within less than five minutes, which was a lot. quicker than actually opening, sitting there and soldering a bunch of wires in.

(someone): Did you ever sell that as a service? Like, Hey, I'll mod you up your Xbox for you.

(someone): I did for a while during the 2004 to about 2008. I did do some modifying of consoles for people as a service.

(someone): Did anybody ever get mad at you for that? You know, video game makers or anything like, Hey, cease and desist that you're modding our stuff. We don't want you to. No, they didn't.

7

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): The mini PlayStation used the PCSX emulator, which, yes, is open source. And it's also under the new public license, the GPL. Now, even though the PCSX emulator is free and open source, Sony took it and put it on the PS1 mini and charged for it. But the GPL clearly states, that's OK. You can put this software on some commercial product and charge for it. And there's a few things that are interesting about that. The spirit of free and open source software that's licensed under the GPL is that you shouldn't charge for this. It's free. It's developed by a community of volunteers. And here Sony is lifting it off GitHub and slapping it on their little console. But there is nothing wrong with that according to the letter of the license. It just contradicts the spirit of the GPL license. And it's so strange to me that a video game console maker such as Sony would use an open source emulator on their latest console. Well, the modding community did manage to get into this little PS1 mini and they loaded up their own emulator on it, which unlocked the system to be able to play any and all PS1 games on it, not just the 20 that came with it. Now when Maximilian saw how the community was able to bypass this whole thing, he started manufacturing a little USB drive that you could plug into the PlayStation. It would bypass the protections on it and allow you to play any pirated games you had. In fact, it came with a hundred games on it! This was called the True Blue Mini. And for Nintendo, there was one called the Classic 2 Magic.

8

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): The Xbox is a little computer and it didn't let you add a hard drive. And so it was Paul Owen's release of the Enigma chip that allowed you to add an extra hard drive. Can you imagine if your PC was so locked down that you could not add a second hard drive if you wanted? Not even an external USB one? Paul made another mod for the Xbox, this time calling it the Executor. And he liked that name so much that he started calling his little group Team Executor, which is an important part of the story. I mean, it's the title of the episode, right? So even though he was threatened with legal action to stop producing the PS2 mod chips, it didn't stop him from making new Xbox mod chips and publishing them under the name Team Executor. Now, the courts didn't think all this modding was cool, like I do. In 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, DMCA, was established, creating a whole new set of rules for copyright infringement in the digital age. And specifically, there were clauses that talked about circumvention. The DMCA criminalized the act of circumventing access controls. which is what video game makers were pointing out when trying to take down these mod chip makers. They were saying, look, you're going through great lengths to circumvent our anti-piracy controls. That's a DMCA violation. And video game makers were taking their cases to court and winning them.

(someone): The video game companies, they wanted to protect the quality of the system. And that's where Attendle actually started that, and would put labels on their boxes that they sold, being quality assured, certified.

9

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): Nintendo was trying to sue Gary for intellectual property infringement and wanted him to pay them $10 million in damages.

(someone): Well, how that comes up with that figure is going back to Nintendo, their experts testified that they estimated around 500,000 licenses were sold. And their experts testified that their studies show that when a system is hacked, that people buy 2.41 less games. So there's, let's say the top 10 games, Zelda, Mario Kart, Super Mario, stuff like that. All of those top 10 games, 2.41 less sales. So when a system is hacked, someone will buy maybe only seven games or eight games, not the full 10 games. So they take the 500,000 times the 2.41 times the value of the game, $59.99, comes to around $72 million. There is then three people on the indictment, me, the guy in China, and Max. So my share of it being approximately one third, that's just rounded off to $10 million, which is usually the max that you can get in Washington state, anyway, for a civic lawsuit.

(someone): Did you try to fight that and say, actually, I think that's disproportional of what I was actually involved with?

(someone): And yes, I looked at it about fighting it. I discussed that with my lawyer. It's like, well, let's fight their studies. Let's fight their estimates. And basically the reply back would be, well, we're only giving you a bare minimum of 500,000. There's probably more licenses sold. And we're just talking about the Switch. We're not talking about the Gateway 3DS. We're not talking about the Classic 2 Magic.

10

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): First of all, paying a license for pirated software? That's unusual. The whole method to do this hack was posted right there on the forums. You could just use a paperclip and a USB cable and your phone and get the switch to boot into the same emulator. You didn't need the SX Pro at all. But the idea of it though was that it makes this whole process of hacking your switch easier. You just had to pay for this easier method. But it still bothered people that they were charging for pirated software. I mean, the whole point of piracy is to go around having to pay for stuff, you know? On top of that, some users were getting mad that the emulator in this thing was just a free and open source emulator. A lot of people were upset because you're taking a free and open source software and charging for it? But this is ironic because this is the same thing PlayStation did with their PS1 Mini, remember? The emulator that was on the SXOS was called Atmosphere, which was licensed under the GPL, the same as what Sony did. And people were mad at them for charging for this.

(someone): Yeah, well, that's a problem that's going on with everything, even recently with Red Hat. Oh, man, I didn't think about that.

(someone): But yeah, Red Hat is a version of Linux. And yeah, they took the free and open source Linux software and suddenly started charging for it. And there's been quite a lot of controversy over that. Like, why are you taking other people's code and charging for it? You didn't write that.

11

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): The idea is that it enabled you to copy games that you already had, or play any pirated games that you had. The design was clean and super simple. People who had no experience modding systems could easily get this working and were giving it great reviews. So they had this thing all developed and manufactured and then they wanted to announce it on the forum that Gary was the mod for and this is where Gary was obligated to promote this device since that was the deal that he made with Maximilian. Now, when you're a mod maker, you've got some potential things that can go wrong with your whole business. See, sometimes Team Executor would sell their products for, let's say, $30, but then see the exact same product being sold directly out of Asia for $2. It was pirate versus pirate. Because the factory that was making the chips for Team Executor would just sometimes make some extra and sell them directly to the consumer. Totally undercutting Team Executor. So Max didn't want that happening with SX Pro. So he decided he was going to add his own software into the thing. So instead of loading the Switch's native operating system, the SX Pro would load up SX OS. which was basically just an open source emulator. But Max took it a step further. He didn't want someone pirating SxOS. So he decided that he was going to require everyone to have a license key before using the SxOS. So you had to pay like $25 just for the license to use this mod. And this angered quite a few people. First of all, paying a license for pirated software? That's unusual.

12

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): And ESA also... representing some of the other smaller software developers that may have got affected. They were the only two victims left.

(someone): This is interesting. So the FBI went to Sony and said, hey, we caught the guy who was selling pirated video games. You want to be part of this lawsuit? And they said, no, we don't want anything to do with it. That's really crazy.

(someone): But they weren't interested. And the PS1 was a failure on their part anyway. I mean, it was being sold for $19.99. It was a disaster. The PS1 Mini? Yeah, the PS1 Mini. So they were not really interested in flying lawyers down and presenting evidence. The only people that were interested in the end was Nintendo and the ESA. They were the only two people that showed up in February for my testimony to give victim impact statements.

(someone): Okay, so the DMCA laws were on your plate.

(someone): Yeah, that was the only thing I couldn't get rid of. If I hadn't collected any money at all, I might have been able to get away with that. But it still was the hard part of getting around, nothing I could do about it. And I was already spent a couple years in jail by now anyway. What can I do? I couldn't get that time back.

(someone): So you pleaded guilty to those charges?

(someone): Those charges, because I knew the maximum that the judge could give me was five years.

13

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): We don't want you to. No, they didn't. Do you think they cared?

(someone): I think so. They were actively monitoring the forums even back then and watching the information.

(someone): Yeah, the game makers were absolutely watching the video game modding forums. And they wanted to know what cheats and mods were out there for their systems and games. And when Paul Owen made these two chips, that's when Sony came in and threatened him with legal action. This forced Paul to stop importing Messiah chips for the PS2. But it didn't stop people from buying them directly from Taiwan. And it didn't stop Paul Owen from making more chips for the Xbox. And in my opinion, it's really cool that someone is able to make a microchip to enhance the gaming system. Because I hate it when these things are just so proprietary and secret and locked down that you can't even repair the game system if it breaks. In fact, I don't even want to call these things modchips. They're just accessories for your gaming system. Like the other day, I wanted to put an M.2 hard drive in my computer, but my motherboard didn't have a slot for it. So I had to go buy a PCIe card that enabled me to use the M.2 drives. This is not against any rules. This is a perfectly fine accessory to buy for your computer. The Xbox is a little computer and it didn't let you add a hard drive. And so it was Paul Owen's release of the Enigma chip that allowed you to add an extra hard drive.

14

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): I mean, the original stuff that was done, like on the PS1 and the original Xbox, there was no pushback whatsoever. They looked at it as just a percentage of loss in business. And they would take more protection on their disks if a piracy started happening, like in the PlayStation 1 when the first ships started to come out. that bypassed their boot up system, they added more checks on the game itself to look and shut it down. Electronic Arts, the publishers themselves were the ones that were more into locking out system. Electronic Arts was one of the first ones that started adding anti-piracy stuff on the PS1.

(someone): Okay, so yeah, people in the gaming scene were taking these systems apart and trying to modify it. Making the game systems do new things that they didn't originally do. And the game makers hated this. They wanted desperately to keep their systems from being tampered with and started making games that wouldn't work if you did tamper with it.

(someone): So the original PS1 ships wouldn't shut down. They would just keep injecting the signal. So Electronics Arts, they added code in their game itself to check to see if that signal was still being injected. Then they realized, well, that must be, it must be modified because we're not sending a signal anymore from the disc. Why is the signal still there? So then newer ships had to come out. They were called stealth ships that would shut down after a little while. And that bypassed the original checks that EA did.

(someone): Let's back up a second. As I'm learning about all this, I'm getting super fascinated with the history of video game systems.

15

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): So Nintendo took a bad blow there. I think they tried to appeal that case, but I couldn't find any articles that followed up with it.

(someone): There was this craze of bringing back the older systems, the Super Nintendo, the Nintendo, the PlayStation, the Sega, many versions of those original consoles that people loved, but those systems were locked down again and that they only had a certain selection of games, like the PlayStation 1 Mini only had like 20 games on it.

(someone): Yeah, so Sony came out with this little PlayStation Mini. It had no option to put any game in it, of any kind. It had no game disc reader, or cartridge reader, and it wasn't online so you could download anything more. It only came with these 20 games that were built into it, and that was it. You could never play anything more. Which is kind of weird, isn't it? If you release a mini version of your system that clearly can play PS1 games, why restrict it to just those 20 games? So, of course, the gaming community was like, we need to figure out a way to get this thing to play any PS1 game we want.

(someone): The PlayStation 1 actually used an open source emulator and just added their own little skin to it and to select the game. So they were just taking someone else's work that they had made, an emulator that they could find on GitHub, assemble it themselves, add their own skin, and use an Android board from China to mount the battery or the screen.

(someone): to run the emulator. OK, I had to look this up and research it deeper because this is going to become important later. The mini PlayStation used the PCSX emulator, which, yes, is open source. And it's also under the new public license, the GPL.

16

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): They found that Divinio had been getting their chips from Hong Kong. So Nintendo went to Hong Kong and opened up a court case against Divinio, claiming it's an infringement on their intellectual property. The Hong Kong Supreme Court ruled in favor of Nintendo, which immediately froze all of Divinio's operations in Hong Kong. And the ruling demanded that Max pay Nintendo 44 million euros in damage. 44 million euros. That's a huge fine. But I believe Maximilian just found a different country to get his chips from and kept on doing business without paying any of the fines put on him. So Nintendo went to his home country, France, to take legal action on him there. They took him to court, and they told the courts, look, we already found this guy guilty in Hong Kong, he's supposed to be paying us 44 million euros in damages, he hasn't paid a cent of it yet, and he keeps violating our intellectual property, can you please do something? But the French courts ruled in favor of Maximillian. Max's defense was that Nintendo was locking out developers from being able to develop on the system, and his modchip allowed anyone to develop on it and play homebrew games on it. And the courts liked that. They said, yeah, Nintendo, what's up with you putting all these locks on your game system so people can't build on it? Seems rude. Leave Max alone. So Nintendo took a bad blow there. I think they tried to appeal that case, but I couldn't find any articles that followed up with it.

17

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): A lot of times I was over the loop too. I didn't even know about it.

(someone): So surprisingly, while sitting here researching things, I'm currently seeing a true blue mini clone right there on Amazon for $43. And it says it has 15,000 games on it. This is an illegal product being sold right there on Amazon. And it just makes me think because video game system makers are actively taking websites to court who sell mod chips. And this Amazon listing has 1500 games bundled into the modchip, which means you can buy pirated games on Amazon. Now, of course, Amazon themselves isn't selling it. Someone listed it there on the Amazon marketplace. But still, they're facilitating the sale of it, fostering the whole deal, bringing this modchip and pirated games to the masses. Why isn't Sony suing Amazon over this, or trying to take down their website? Because in 2005, Sony did get mad at Maximillian for selling these same mods for the Playstation. And they took him to court. And Sony won that case, which resulted in Max having to pay 5 million dollars in damages. And that's, what, the fourth time he's been to court now? And he now owes over $50 million in fines to these game system makers at this point. The guy seemed to be unfazed by any of this, though. He had a rebellious mindset. While he felt like an enemy to the game makers, he felt like a hero to the players of the world. And yeah, a lot of people did really like the stuff he was releasing.

18

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): There is money lost due to piracy, sure. But I think all these anti-copying measures hurt the regular consumer and stifles technological growth. What do you mean I can't add anything to my computer that I bought and own? It's mine. I should be able to modify it any way I like. But the truth is, the major driver for most of these mods was to enable piracy. To let you download games off the internet for free and play them on your console. And video game makers thought this was drastically hurting their revenue, and that's why they went to war in this way. I just wonder if there were better ways to deal with it. I mean, listen to this talk by Tony Chen, the head of security for Xbox.

(someone): When I first joined Xbox, a lot of people throughout Microsoft, I have to explain to them why the problem we're facing is fundamentally different than the problem that Windows needs to solve for its security. So on a Windows PC system, the PC owner is a good guy. He's working with us to prevent his PC from being attacked. The bad guys are the guys out on the Internet trying to compromise his PC. So Microsoft as an operating system vendor is working with the PC owner to fight the bad guys out on the Internet. Okay, on the Xbox, the owner is the attacker. Although the majority of our customers are good, but you have to treat them as the attacker in terms of designing your hardware.

(someone): Do you hear it the way I hear it? Video game system owners are the bad guys? It just sounds weird to me. Like that's just being too aggressive towards your customers.

19

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): The mini PlayStation used the PCSX emulator, which, yes, is open source. And it's also under the new public license, the GPL. Now, even though the PCSX emulator is free and open source, Sony took it and put it on the PS1 mini and charged for it. But the GPL clearly states, that's OK. You can put this software on some commercial product and charge for it. And there's a few things that are interesting about that. The spirit of free and open source software that's licensed under the GPL is that you shouldn't charge for this. It's free. It's developed by a community of volunteers. And here Sony is lifting it off GitHub and slapping it on their little console. But there is nothing wrong with that according to the letter of the license. It just contradicts the spirit of the GPL license. And it's so strange to me that a video game console maker such as Sony would use an open source emulator on their latest console. Well, the modding community did manage to get into this little PS1 mini and they loaded up their own emulator on it, which unlocked the system to be able to play any and all PS1 games on it, not just the 20 that came with it. Now when Maximilian saw how the community was able to bypass this whole thing, he started manufacturing a little USB drive that you could plug into the PlayStation. It would bypass the protections on it and allow you to play any pirated games you had. In fact, it came with a hundred games on it! This was called the True Blue Mini. And for Nintendo, there was one called the Classic 2 Magic.

20

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): Nintendo was saying the Game Genie was a derivative work and therefore subject to copyright infringement. This means Nintendo is saying that the Game Genie made minor modifications to the game to make it something new, but not making it unique enough to be something original and was profiting from the original creators. Kind of like if I put googly eyes on the Mona Lisa and try to sell it as my own original work. Well, it went to court and judge ruled in favor of Galoob and the Game Genie. The judge said, look, the definition of a derivative work means you have to have a separate copy of that original work. Game Genie does not create a separate copy, but instead adds to the original copy because you still need the original copy to use it. So clearly it's not taking away from the sales of the game. The judge also went on to say that consumers have the right to fair use and can modify games however they please for personal use. This was a huge win for game modders. Now they had a court case to prove that they had the right to modify their systems and games for personal use. Now, if we look across the aisle at the PC world, the software makers there had no problem with you making personal backups of the software you bought. The thing is, floppy disks and CDs were notorious for going bad and getting ruined, so it was practiced by everyone. Even my grandma knew that as soon as you buy a new game for your PC, the first thing you do always is make a copy of it as a backup. And everyone was cool with this. PC makers didn't care. Game makers didn't care. They were fine with it because it was protected under the Copyright Act.

21

136: Team Xecutor

Darknet Diaries

(someone): Messiah was for the PlayStation system. It was one of the first ships that allowed a DVD to boot on a PlayStation 2.

(someone): So the Messiah was a mod ship that you could solder onto a PlayStation 2, and it was created by Paul Owen. I believe it bypassed the anti-copy protections and that you play copied games. And then when the Xbox came out, Paul also made a mod chip for it called Enigma.

(someone): They came out with a BIOS that added new features, allowed you to put in bigger hard drives, unlocked the system. I hated the way they had to modify the system, I mean, with the wires and everything. My solution at the time I would actually just take the flash chip off and just reprogram it and then solder it back on. Since I was in the business before manufacturing hardware, I had the programming equipment and the soldering tools. So for me, it was quicker just to desolder the flash chip, reprogram it on my PC, and then solder it back in. I could do that whole operation within less than five minutes, which was a lot. quicker than actually opening, sitting there and soldering a bunch of wires in.

(someone): Did you ever sell that as a service? Like, Hey, I'll mod you up your Xbox for you.

(someone): I did for a while during the 2004 to about 2008. I did do some modifying of consoles for people as a service.

(someone): Did anybody ever get mad at you for that? You know, video game makers or anything like, Hey, cease and desist that you're modding our stuff. We don't want you to. No, they didn't.