ConsoleMods.org – The Heart of the Modding Community
Howdy! I’m Derf, one of the owners of ConsoleMods.org. You may recognize me as a moderator of one of many game console sub-reddits or from the Xbox Homebrew, PlayStation Homebrew, or SegaNet Discord. I’ve been around various console modding communities and am most known for making some large wikis on reddit over the last 7 years.
What is ConsoleMods.org?
ConsoleMods.org launched at the start of this year and is focused on guides and informational pages for console modding, repair, and restoration. It’s a wiki that is open for anyone to edit and is aimed at all consoles that aren’t current gen (due to Nintendo being litigious and XSX/PS5 lacking content). Lots of information has been lost to time with forum sites — like Xbox-Scene, AssemblerGames, psx-scene, or MaxConsole — dying off and Archive.org only capturing a fraction of their information. ConsoleMods will stand the test of time as it is backed by me, CrunchBite (who has maintained XLink Kai and their site for ~15 years), and Bob from RetroRGB.
We’re hoping to spread the word and foster a positive, collaborative community to preserve information before it is lost and work on new ideas with each other for new mods or repairs on both the site and our Discord.
MrMario2011 covered ConsoleMods.org in his recent ModChat podcast with a great summary/walkthrough:
Why make a wiki? Why not use forums?
Forums are a great place for discussion, both in the long-term and short-term. The wiki is not meant to replace forums, but rather be a place to universally collect the amazing information and guides that come out of places like forums, reddit, or Discords into one place that isn’t cluttered by a million other forum posts. The wiki is laid out in a way that you can find the information you’re looking for visually so that you don’t have to spend a ton of time digging through forums to find useful information. The site also includes a search tool plus features like dark mode and the ability to check off steps in a tutorial as you go.
What happened to the old reddit wikis?
You may have been familiar with the /r/ps3homebrew, /r/360Hacks, or /r/OriginalXbox wikis. ConsoleMods is the evolution of these wikis, as they are now open for everyone to contribute and out on full display instead of tucked behind a sub-reddit. The reddit wiki system was not ideal as the wiki tools were lacking and the experience was not consistent across different devices or apps.
How can I help?
- Make some edits! Editing the wiki is very simple, and I have created a short crash course on how to edit the wiki. You may notice a lot of crossed out links on the site – these are placeholders for guides to be created by someone like yourself. If you see any that interest you, take some time to do some research on it and verify steps or information and make a page. All edits go into a moderation queue to be checked over by our moderation team before they go live, so no need to worry about perfection as we can polish up the formatting or wording.
- Join our Discord and chat with others! You can always lend or receive help and come up with new ideas to put on the site to make a lasting impact on the scenes.
- Spread the word! A handful of dedicated people are currently contributing to the site, and the more people we have to help out the better the site will become.
Where can I report issues with the site?
If you see something that is incorrect on the site, feel free to edit it. If you see an issue with the site itself, such as dark mode issues or broken features, feel free to message me on Discord (@Derf#9561 or on the site discord ), Twitter, or leave a comment here.
In Conclusion
If you or anyone else you know has knowledge to share, please do. This is a great way to give back to the community — for free! Even the smallest edits to fix things like typos are greatly appreciated.
Feel free to ask me questions here, I’ll try my best to respond to them all.
Not going by your word entirely, as I don’t know. I’ve not delved into the history thereof, but if so Thabks so much for all your work and efforts, Fred.
You’re invaluable work will live on to help countless future knowledge seekers to understand and unlock the secrets of consoles far more than any generation beforehand.
Thanks for the kind words! 🙂
Kriky, I can’t spell in my appreciation comment. Definitely going to be looking up and keeping a future eye out.
Once more, THANKS for your hard work and efforts in keeping information free and not erased from history!
Looking forward to seeing this thrive. seen a lot of various wikis. I would love to see a good go to resource for repair myself.
Cheers! Most out there are development / research / emulation focused. To my knowledge, this is the first all-console wiki for general modding.
how does user contribution work?
Famicom deserves a separate section, I mean… there is hardly if any overlap of mods done with FC and NES evven though they are the same platform.
You’re probably right – NES/Famicom difference is more significant than other consoles’ NTSC/PAL differences. I’ll talk that over with the team.
Went to Vita, everything has a line throught it . I guess I didn’t read
See the blue message on the front page
Imagine being named Fred LMAO.
So what’s the difference between this Wiki and PSDevWiki and the *brew wikis? Not that all info is duplicated
Well, the devwikis are exactly that – a wiki for developers. Most of the information is irrelevant and overwhelming for the typical modder and they generally don’t have easy to understand walkthroughs. The *brew wikis are better with that, but they also omit any information that can be possibly used for piracy reasons (even though they have legitimate use cases). We don’t endorse piracy but it’s a shame people can’t find info on USBloaderGX – more or less the most heavily used “dashboard” for Wii.
This is awesome, I always thought it would be great if there was one site that contained all info about console mods instead of having 100 bookmarks and searching for archived stuff. I hope the site will grow to be the #1 source!
The tricky thing with Archive and forum searches is that you have to know what you’re looking for. Hoping CM helps people learn all the possible things they can do with their consoles with one glance at a page. Thanks for the sentiments 🙂
I used to be a very active member of TheIsoZone.com (RIP). That site was a goldmine chuck full of tutorials on pretty much everything. It is gone now, but I think the Waybackmachine should allow you to find many of its tutorials and preserve them 🙂
In addition, blog.pricecharting.com has some pretty good guides that were posted back in the day, like this one:
https://blog.pricecharting.com/2016/01/definitive-guide-to-game-cartridge.html
This is a pretty great Idea btw, thanks for implementing it :). I do think you should add a forum section to the site though.
Even worse TheIsoZone went down with a ton of downloads that weren’t captured by Archive. Been on a few wild goose chases to track down programs where everyone just had linked TheIsoZone’s download. It would be great for some people to divide and conquer the Archive backups of the TiZ forums to try and sort it.
Wow, didn’t know PriceCharting had guides. I’ll have to take a look!
Regarding a supplemental forum, I think it’s definitely a significant amount of work to have a smoothly-running forum and a moderation team on top of the moderation teams we have for Discord and the site itself. Having both a forum and Discord kind of dilutes both as well, instead of focusing all the collaboration in one place. But, always open to potentially changing things in the future, especially if the discord’s size gets unwieldy in the future.
This is great to see! The entire gaming/CRT/retro PC communities are all intertwined and it’s about time we finally all have one central place to call home and for an amazing free source of information!!
Thanks so much for all of your hard work, Derf!
Don’t forget xboxhacker & project free60
So many forums that went down… If only there was a way to really get them now.
Actually, a short while ago I saw a version of Xbox-scene that was assembled from archive.Org backups and a leaked dB.
Nonetheless.. You need xboxhacker. I was very young that I couldn’t appreciate it. But someone saw my potential and walked a15yo through jtagging their xbox the hard way(Parallel Port). But I remember the discussions were extremely technical and had many dead ends that I’m sure we can look at with a fresh perspective today with better tools and knowledge we lacked dearly then.
OMG the formatting
Every site like that goes down is like a punch right in the nostalgia. I totally remember being the super noob on the block 🙂
Hoping having the wiki format will make things more available instead of having to delve deep in page 53 of a forum to find useful info and be able to have extremely technical talks in the Discord transformed into easy-to-approach guides.
Awesome site. Just used it today to flash my 360 with a raspberry pi pico. Will be using it as well in the future. Thank you for sharing.
Good to hear! That was a brand new page. Thanks for the kind words
Not the heart of console modding, most people interested on this subject have never even heard of consolemods.org.
The ConsoleMods name is brand new, but the Xbox / Xbox 360 / PS3 wikis have definitely been the go-to place for this kind of information over the last ~7 years.
Speaking straight FACTS!
Thats pretty cool, should add gameboy and more retro consoles because that’s where most of the attention is at atm.
Game Boy is in the “Handhelds” section at the bottom – the tables were a bit too big and odd sized putting them in the other tables. What retro consoles would you want to see?
Where is the Switch section??? o.O
Not doing current gen because Nintendo is DMCA happy and XSX/PS5 don’t really have anything yet. This will change in the future.
Nice website!
Some useful tips, but also alot of outdated information
What are you finding to be outdated? Completely obsolete guides get moved to an “obsolete pages” section. There are some old homebrews (such as dashboards or lesser used apps) that are listed there that can still be used today and given as options, but I don’t think there’s really anything super outdated.