Dal, Thanks for your question.

It was a Christmas 2000 thing. No UK PS2s available and plenty (I mean plenty) of PS2 games in Hong Kong. There are outlets in the UK that supply Jap original games (slightly cheaper than UK games) and modchip.com was available sooner than NEO2 to a standard upon which I could rely. Indeed, I've stuck with the first release modchip that boots off the Utility Disk. NTSC games pass through a NTSC-PAL convertor to achieve colour; the patches don't always work and are a pain. We have no trouble playing the majority of UK/PAL backups (we take the convertor out for PAL games); EA games are a problem at the moment as the swap tricks are geared to NEO2 solutions. So we have to live with Jap originals as for DVDs. They are not a problem to obtain and most of them are out early. For example, I'll get FF X soon. So I'm very pleased with the Jap solution.

As for dear SimonBradley, we've all been there haven't we? By the time he reaches his 50 he might actually have cracked it! Of course he'll think he's reached 50 when he's actually reached 40!

Cheers