Console Modding: The Ship of Theseus and a Pragmatic Approach
I find the modding scene of retro consoles fascinating. Breathing new life into old or outdated hardware is something a miraculous feat in my eyes. From giving a Gameboy a new, colorful shell and bright LED screen to restoring the ability to play online on the Sega Dreamcast, there is no shortage of interesting things that people can do when they mod their console. However, I find a lot of console modders really going overboard. Hinge-less mods for the Gameboy Advance SP with aluminum shells, removing the disc drive from a PlayStation 2 Slim and cutting the motherboard in half to fit it into a clear shell, dumping entire gaming libraries onto drives of various kinds and putting it in your console, and overclocking their machines. It seems like there is nothing that these modders won’t do to their retro hardware. It seems like, to paraphrase the words of Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, they get so preoccupied with the question of if they could that they didn’t stop to ask themselve...
