Many people around the world play computer and console games. Almost an alternate reality for players, the games industry is huge. Game manufacturers can spend many months, or even years designing and creating their games. In some cases there are more copies of a game title sold than music artists sell albums. And since the average game costs around 3-4 times more than the cost of an album on audio CD, you can see that the industry is very lucrative. It is also fact that games cost different amounts in different countries, or zones. Aside from currency differences, there are market pressures, supply v. demand and local issues that influence the price of a game. Simply speaking, a title like Tomb Raider III cost way less in the USA than it did in either the UK or New Zealand. Why should this be? How is this fair? Well, it isn't. The actual product costs exactly the same to manufacture, about 25 US cents for the disk itself, around $2.00 goes to manufacturing costs and the rest is profit. Of course there are those many months (or years) of research and development to consider. But anomalies remain.

How come, when you go to your local record store, you will be paying around double the price for your favourite artist on CD than you would for the same album on cassette tape. How does that work? Considering that a cassette costs at least 5 times more to manufacture than a CD, we should be paying a lot less for the CD version. But of course we don't. Why? We have found that prices are fixed around the world for music product. You pay pretty much the same amount for a CD in most western countries after currency rates are calculated out. Price fixing is illegal in most industries, but we guess not in the music business. And considering the lions share of the profits that come from these hyper-inflated products goes not to the artist, but to the recording industry moguls just makes it a more bitter pill to swallow when we shell out for that latest album.

Anyway, back to our games. Most games these days are produced on CD media. Not only is it the most economical method to distribute on, the sheer size of game data demands mass storage solutions. Some games need multiple disks, and a four disk game is not uncommon. Licensing agreements allow us to make one 'back up' copy of our software, and when you think about it, if you have just paid out a hundred dollars for a game you don't want to be damaging the disk, so a backup is the sensible solution. The only problem is, most games on CD-Rom these days are heavily copy protected. Why? With the proliferation of home CD burners it was found that many people were simply copying games rather than shelling out and buying them. This has become a problem of epidemic proportions, so much so that the game manufacturers decided to protect themselves against this type of piracy. Fair enough too. With many commercial piracy operations existing around the world (especially those in China and Thailand) the last thing the industry needed was every home user doing the same thing! The effect has been a significant drop in game piracy, but also an increase in the number of 'crackers' who specialise in circumventing the CD protection systems.

The other side-effect of this protection is that people who legitimately want to back up their expensive software are finding it next to impossible due to these measures. Often, the only way to make a back-up copy is to find 'cracks' or 'patches' on the Internet which enable the particular game (or program) to be copied. Interestingly, most of these games are not copy- protected in the United States of America. Something about being unconstitutional and a violation of free expression or civil rights, or something like that. Unfortunately, we in the rest of the world have to bear with the protected versions of these games. So how do we go about making a back-up copy of our software? We go to sites like gamecopyworld.com and find the relevant patches for our version of the game. Different distributors around the world appear to use different types of protection depending on the country version. For example, a game in one country may be protected by Safedisk whereas in another country the game may be protected with ProtectCD. The trick is determining which protection system is being used on your disk and finding a way around it.

Sites like gamecopyworld.com have all the info you need to enable you to make a legal back-up copy of your CD-Roms. It can be an involved process, and we created a few 'UFOs' before getting a working back-up, but at the end of the day we felt a lot better knowing that if one of us broke the game disk out of frustration (probably me... Ed.) that we at least have another copy to fall back on.

Playstation (PSX for short) CD's are a different kettle of fish. The console game differs in the way that most games are coded with their specific country code. This divides the world up into 'zones', similar to DVD distribution codes. The zone idea also makes it possible for companies to charge more for the same disk in different countries, very much like computer games. The difference is, that computer CD-Rom games will play on any computer you put them in to, yet PSX games will only play on the console that the country code specifies it will play on. The disk itself is similar to a CD-Rom, but with one feature. It has the country code embedded into it, and it is this code that the Playstation looks for when you fire up your console. If you put a disk into the console and it is from the wrong 'zone' the disk will simply not play, and you will get that annoying 'Please insert your disk' message. This can be a real bummer if you have just come back from Thailand or Bali with 100 cheap games and none will play on your console. The only way of playing these disks on your console is to have it 'chipped' or 'modded', which means adding a small integrated circuit to the Playstation. This bypasses the country code seek at the moment the console boots up and allows disks from different zones to play on your console. Interestingly, the country code on the disk does not copy to a new CD-Rom if you do a disk-to-disk copy. This has been a bonus to Playstation game developers as it has effectively prevented piracy. Then it all changed. There are special Playstations around that developers use, and these were designed to bypass the country code issue so that the developer could burn his game to a 'normal' disk and try it out on the console. Someone found the way to 'chip' existing 'retail' consoles, essentially turning them into 'developers' models, thus allowing them to play a copied PSX game. This has resulted in a world-wide explosion of Playstation 'mod-chip' installers, web-sites and associated businesses. Many sites exist on the Internet detailing how one goes about 'chipping' their console, so we wont be going into it in detail here. If you would like more info then simply visit one of the sites listed on our opportunities page, they contain everything you need to know about this subject.

 Opportunities Page

One of the big bonuses is that once chipped, your console will play a copied game. This concerns the game developers, and steps are being taken within that industry to make it more difficult to a) copy the games, and b) to modify the console. There are now games out there (Final Fantasy 8 is one) that detect the 'old' style mod-chips and these games will not run, even an original game (not copied). Of course, this is throwing down the gauntlet to the crackers and electronics gurus out there. Now we have 'stealth' mod-chips and 'cracked' Playstation games. It seems that no matter what the industry comes up with to protect their games and products, there will always be someone around to circumvent these measures. Is it legal to do so? Yes and no. It's not illegal to 'chip' your console. Doing so does, however, void any warranty you have with Sony. If your console is over a year old you have no warranty anyway, so it doesn't really matter. It is not illegal to copy Playstation games, unless you are doing it to resell or redistribute the game. That is, you are allowed to make one back-up copy for yourself, with the understanding that if you sell or give away the original you destroy the copy. For those of us with thousands of dollars worth of PSX games, this is sensible thinking. There is also a huge industry in Asian countries producing copied PSX games. They sell on the streets of Thailand, Bali, Singapore for prices ranging from $1.00 to $5.00 per game. Considering a 'real' PSX game can go for $90.00, this represents a considerable saving to the consumer, and a considerable loss to game industry moguls. Is this ethical? Not at all, though it could be argued that charging more money for the same product in another country just because they can is hardly ethical either. Someone, somewhere, is always getting ripped off. Some of the time it is the consumer. Some of the time it is the industry moguls. It is purely an individual decision whether to use pirated or illegally copied software or games.

Whether you buy this merchandise is up to you. As always, it is buyer beware. We have seen game disks that have nothing on them, or different games than what was on the cover. In most cases these games are NTSC, which will only play on a PAL console only with modification. (NTSC and PAL being different TV formats). It is relatively easy to convert a PAL console to play both formats of game, and very difficult to convert an NTSC console to play PAL games.

Regardless of which type of console you have, or which model (all of which are chipped differently) you can do some real damage if you choose to modify it yourself. You should only attempt this if you are very good with a soldering iron and adept at reassembling complicated devices. A check of your local papers, or asking at the local game shack will often lead you to someone who does the modification. Prices range from $30.00, for the basic 'chip', to $60.00 for the full NTSC/PAL conversion (including chip). Be aware that often these modifications are carried out at your risk, so even if the guy ruins your console you will wear the cost of replacing it. Check all these things out before you decide to take the plunge. If you would like further info then please contact us stating what you would like to know.

Disclaimer: The  SYSK Team neither endorse nor encourage software piracy. This page is intended for educational purposes only. 

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