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 Breathing new life into old or outdated hardware is something a miraculous feat in my eyes.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 themselves if they should. 

For a lot of these mods, the complete mods in particular (I’m looking at you, clear plastic PS2 extra slim), it seems like a Theseus Paradox. For those unfamiliar with the concept of the Theseus Paradox (aka the Ship of Theseus, and if you are familiar, feel free to skip ahead) it’s a thought experiment about whether an object is the same after having all its components replaced over time. The classical example is a ship that has had all of its timbers replaced with new boards. Is it the same ship as before, or a different ship? In the same way, I propose this question, “If a console has been modified to the point where it no long performs its original functions, is it really the same console?”

Moreover, what is the point of buying a retro console in the first place if you’re just going to modify it beyond recognition? When I bought my Sega Dreamcast, I wanted a Sega Dreamcast. I wanted the sleek, retro-futuristic, speedboat shaped design controller, the mini, beeping handheld/memory card, and the sleek, sports card looking console. Not some motherboard in a wooden box with RGB lighting on the side and the ability to connect a DualSense controller. I buy a retro console FOR the retro console, not as something I can frankenstein into something else. 

I feel a lot of people in the console modding sphere, especially on YouTube, probably got their start as people who build PCs. Thus, they think of consoles as other, smaller PCs. Pet projects that they can tinker with. But if that’s the case, why not just buy a Raspberry Pi and call it a day? Many of the capabilities of Raspberry Pi are enough to emulate most consoles. Or better yet, build your own mini-PC, beef it up however you want, and get whatever emulators you want for it. That way you can sell your $200 dollar copy of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 to someone who will actually play it, instead of letting it gather dust on your shelf. 

Over the years, I’ve modded a few of my consoles here and there. I modded my Wii so I can play Virtual Console games again, being that the Wii Shop Channel shut down in 2019. I modded my fat PS2 so I can play games off of a hard drive. I’ve modded my PSVita so I can play the games that have been unlisted or unable to download off of the PSN Store. All of these mods have been soft-mods more than anything. Shaky hands run in my family and I’m afraid my genetics really rear their ugly heads when there’s a soldering iron in my hand, so I avoid hard-mods as much as possible, save for when they’re drop-in solutions (basically plug-and-play hardware.)   

The most dramatic mod I’ve probably performed was just a few months ago. Sadly, my old Sega Dreamcast, after over a decade of service, had a dead optical drive. The laser would not read games. I opened it up, turned the laser actuator a few nanometers clockwise, but it was not enough. The laser, like Marley, was as dead as a doornail. 

However, this provided an interesting opportunity for me. For years, I had been interested in optical drive replacements for my Sega Dreamcast. Obviously, I never performed any of them, given that my console could read games just fine before, and I had a well-curated collection of Dreamcast games (35 and counting) that I didn’t want to molder on my shelves. I still don’t want them to molder which is why I bought another Dreamcast with a functioning optical drive so I can still play Blue Stinger without worry. But for the other Dreamcast, I thought I’d install a GDEMU into it. 

There are a few optical drive replacements for the Sega Dreamcast. There’s the MODE, which replaces the optical drive with a port that can read games off of a hard drive (either SSD or HDD). There’s the USB-GDROM that reads games off of a USB drive. But the most popular (and at the time of writing, the cheapest) option for optical drive replacement in a Dreamcast is a GDEMU, which loads games off of an SD card. So, I bought a GDEMU kit off of eBay, a 128GB SD card, a replacement PSU (since the original PSU for the Dreamcast would cause problems with the GDEMU) and went to work putting it all together. 

But then, I ran into that question again: What is the purpose of this console? What does it serve to do that the base console cannot already? Did I do this all just because I could? I thought about it a bit, and then I started to think of all the games I couldn’t play, but that were available. There are Japanese exclusive games that have gotten fan translations, like Napple Tale: Arsia in Daydream, that I’ve been meaning to play. There are also prototype games and games that haven’t been given physical releases, like Fish Life or the Dreamcast port of Half-Life. There are even people that make their own homebrew and indie Dreamcast games and release them on itch.io, like The Eternal Sleep. So, I decided those are the games that I want on my console: the games what I would play, but couldn’t due to monetary or technical limitations. 

I take a much more pragmatic approach to console modding. I don’t need my PSVita to run Balatro when I have a Switch Lite that can do that without mods. I don’t need my PS2 to run SNES games when I have several other Nintendo consoles that do that natively. And I don’t need my Dreamcast to run PS1 games when I have a PS2 that can do it just fine. 

I think the modern view of home video game consoles as multi-purpose machines has really been detrimental to old and analog technology. I can’t deny the convenience and cost-effectiveness of having a console that can play different kinds of games, but at the same time, if you have the means, why not just get the console in question? Isn’t part of the enjoyment of having old technology is that fact that it’s old? It’s a screenshot of a bygone era. An era that you may look back on fondly. Why would you butcher that so you could slap RBG lights on it and stuff it in a 3D printed box? I don’t need my Dreamcast to be another gaming PC. I just need it to be a Dreamcast.