The Man On The Street did something this month which, unusually, could make him unpopular with all his beloved retailing chums.

Your reporter got his Xbox chipped. Now, rest assured that your correspondent’s bags are already packed and the removal men called, so there’s no point in you getting together an angry mob and a gross of Molotov cocktails and heading for The Man On The Street’s house, okay? But listen: you should be happy. And what’s more, you should be chipping Xboxes in your shop, before some other clueless idiot of a judge finally makes the whole thing illegal once and for all. Because in all the stupid kneejerk hysteria that usually springs up whenever anyone raises the subject of console chipping, there’s one moderately important thing that tends to get forgotten. A console that’s covered in dust and forgotten makes nobody any money.

The Man On The Street should make a confession at this point. Until he got his Xbox modchipped, it’s extremely difficult to remember the last time it was switched on. The space under your correspondent’s living-room telly is crowded and cluttered, and you don’t even want to think about the cabling. PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, Dreamcast, DVD player, Sky digibox, VCR, old Saturn and N64 - the list goes on, and it’s not that unique a list. The sort of person who you’re selling videogames to these days is exactly the sort of late-20s/early-30s bloke who’s also likely to own all that other stuff.

And so, it doesn’t take a great deal of not playing with any particular device before you simply get right out of the habit. Your reporter is genuinely unsure whether his Gamecube’s power light has seen any action at all in 2003, which is a pretty desperate state of affairs if you think about it. But with practically every major game nowadays coming out cross-format, and The Man On The Street having no personal taste for either Zelda or Metroid, it’s so much easier just to stick everything in the PS2.

The Man On The Street’s Xbox, however, is glowing practically white-hot, and it damn sure isn’t as a result of all the fantastic and exclusive new Xbox software that’s been flooding into the charts lately. It’s because your intrepid reporter has been having the time of his life playing some of the many superb emulators available for the machine, and which Microsoft are doing their level best to smash out of existence because they’re so amazingly stupid. (Emulation, you see, is all very well and good on the PC, but when you want to revisit your old SNES and Mega Drive games, there’s simply no replacement for playing them on the floor in front of the telly just like you used to, rather than sat upright in front of a soulless PC monitor.)

“So what?”, I can already hear the cry going up from a thousand retailers’ back rooms. “You playing Sonic 2 on your Xbox doesn’t feed our children, does it?” And you’re right, it doesn’t. But for Heaven’s sake, retail chums, won’t you try to see the bigger picture for once? Because the hours and hours I’ve spent playing these emulators hasn’t come at the expense of time playing “real” Xbox games. Those weren’t getting played anyway.

The emulators and all the other fun stuff that a chipped Xbox opens up have reacquainted this reporter with the fat lines and chunky joypad of his Xbox in a way that no run-of-the-mill ordinary game could ever have tempted. And having done that, your correspondent finds himself interested in the machine and its “real” games again in a way that seemed impossible to imagine a couple of weeks ago.

The Man On The Street has been handing over real cash to good old-fashioned British import retailers in order to play exciting new titles opened up by the newly-region-liberated machine, and suddenly taking an interest in the Xbox sections of ordinary boring PAL game shops too. Because nothing generates sales like a gamer having a working relationship with his console, and ANYTHING that gets hands on joypads to that eventual end is good news for anyone with games to sell. Stop hopelessly trying to stuff the modchip genie back into the bottle, and concentrate on trying to get it to grant you a few wishes.