Got your PlayStation chipped? Think that's something to do with potatoes cut into strips and fried in oil? Allow us to enlighten you.

Chipping means adding a 'mod' (for modification) chip to the PlayStation to enable it to play gold CDs (pirated copies of games) or imported games that wouldn’t normally run on the machine produced for your territory. These chips are relatively inexpensive and open up the whole world of PlayStation games to the keen player – after all, not all Japanese games are released in Europe.

Unfortunately there are a couple of drawbacks – the first being as soon as you start opening up your PlayStation to fiddle around with the insides you're going to invalidate your warranty and if the thing blows up at any point in the future you're probably going to have to bin in.

The second drawback is that Sony are aware of the chipping process (they started it so that developers could test early versions of the code they were developing) and have recently re-designed the insides of the PlayStation to make it physically extremely difficult to add the 'mod' chip. Boo!