Hi everyone

One of my Chummers come up with the question, if it would be possible for him (a Dwarf-Rigger)
to make his own BTL-Chips. At first I thought "It must be difficult", but then ... why ?
Take a SimSin-Chip, deactivate the Security to make it Hot-Sim, and congrat, comrade:
You have your own ticket to the Sky !

Or not ?

Comments ?

The Sim Chips are harder to do. The Sim Players are easier, you just need some technical skill and tools to work on the small units.

Sim Chips, however, have to be BURNED with the unrestricted limiters on them! That requires burning system like you'd find at a CD Factory, and the feed itself, which uses monitoring equipment that's highly monitored, and outright illegal for non-government/corporate possession.

Can you imagine what it would be like if Simchips came with BTL Potential hidden away underneath the peak limiters? It would be a scandal. It would be just like when they found out that Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had a sex mini-game that was disabled, but still within the code.

To make a proper BTL, you'd need to download the original wet-record, or another pre-distribution recording that you could crank the ASIST and burn to a non-limited chip.

But this is 2070, and you don't even need a chip. Just get a hacker to grab you a hot recording, load it to your commlink and run it through your hot sim module or modified sim-deck.

It depends on your preferred kind of poison, generally. Though professional level editing of your BTLs may be preferred, or not, depending on your market. I'm not sure that the chips really have security to prevent them being used hot.


There are probably two layers of strength-filtering in play for normal Sim; one at the production level, where the tracks are filtered prior to being sent out to the chip burning plant, and another at the sim module. That second limiter is more like a volume control than a real filter on the strength.

I assume that Sim formats apportion their range sensibly to provide maximum clarity within the legal strength boundaries, so the biggest impact of the pre-burning filter is to avoid a relatively strong sense track muting the other tracks because the highest strength in the recording is restricted to mapping to a certain value. One could argue that the formats may include the capacity to define the strength range of the data stored to allow additional resolution on the strength. I say that it's easier to specify the format to prevent the distinction between the levels represented by adjacent strength values being easily perceptible. Compare to the colour capacity of computer screens.

The chips themselves, being mass-produced in huge quantities, won't include a filter for reasons of production cost. The chips are just data storage. All chips can potentially carry BTL recordings because Sim is digitised, it's simply a matter of the how you map the range of values available.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that the existence of BTL recordings is purely to cater to the specialist markets that arise from the facets of sensory induction at the stronger levels; the rest is pretty much just increasing the gain in any logical format. By that I mean that the increased induction strength preferences different patterns of fluctuations in the strength of the recording. Normal sim fed into hot sim without proper filtering feels permanently cranked up, leading to rapid normalisation and losing the BTL edge without mitigating the risks.

I expect specialist filters and electronics would be available to do a reasonable job of modifying any normal Sim chip to operate reasonably at BTL strength on the fly, though nothing in 2070 can truly match a sentient artist at the production controls.

The only weakness in my reasoning is that the game wasn't originally created in the era of widespread digital video. It may be a core assumption that sim formats operate in a manner similar to magnetic tape storage, which is analogue and doesn't have a restricted range of values. In which case, screw all my logic based on digital formats. This interpretation allows some facets of the setting actually make sense, but it's discordant for me to accept such things when I know how things would work in a sensible world.


Most reasonable people blame the content and the producer, not the carrier. Boxes can contain drugs, but people don't demand anti-drug devices installed in them as a matter of course. Those who are not reasonable have far better things to cry foul of than the fact that chips can potentially contain BTL recordings, like the fact that they can still contain child porn, rape movies, snuff, extreme BDSM, and other such things.

Now, you could try to claim that Sim chips obey different popular understandings of culpability to video tapes, DVDs, and boxes or plastic bags (hey, FASA made the BTL = drugs claim, not I).


In short:
If your Sim is digitised the only thing separating BTL from normal sim is the strength mappings performed at the user end. If your Sim is analogue then the chips can still contain BTL content because it's still a fact that adding in the filters to every chip is an unnecessary expense when your end-users have filters in their sim-modules anyway. People will treat Sim chips like video tapes and DVDs because it's just a media carrier, the potential to contain BTL doesn't matter to most because making a chip containing BTL is a choice of the producer, who is much more culpable in the public eye.

BTLs mostly require specialist editing to be good, but just cranking the strength up on the recording might suffice if you don't want to make something that'll sell well to the hardcore BTL fans.

Off topic, but I love RockStar's rebuttal to the incident, making Mrs. Clinton the Statue of Happiness, holding a Bean Machine Cup of Coffee.

In the queen euphoria adventure, there was a sequence where a runner could slot a "Wet" Simsense feed that hadn't been edited properly. Apparently the experience was intense enough to require a willpower roll. Not sure if that matches the intensity of BTLs, but if you could get your hands on the recording equipment, at the very least there is the option of selling wet feeds.

According to Unwired, there's only a few hardcore simlovers who want unedited wet feeds. There's a lot of junk sensation that they cut out.

For instance, if you're taping a Neil The Ork Barbarian sim, and he's fighting an ogre with a sword, you want to get the actor's towering rage and single-minded masculine power as you swing the sword, maybe the taste of meat on his lips. If the actor needed to go for a toilet-break, you don't want that sensation. Also, maybe he had a mouth ulcer, or an itchy outbreak of Herpes-III, so they cut that shit out of a wet-record, and then to make that btl hot they just crank the ASIST levels.

I think the problem with amplifying a legally bought sim-chip to BTL levels would be quality loss. They used to have a problem with old analogue radios, because as you turned the volume knob, you were basically looping the signal through itself over and over again to make it louder, and this corrupted the sound a little. They've largely fixed the problem with modern radios and speakers, but if we convert that problem to sensation recording, you could take a legal sim, and then strengthen the feedback loop a dozen times to make it BTL, but it would just be the same sensation, just cranked VERY INTENSE. I imagine that wouldn't be as much of a thrill as getting some-one like a syndicate who pump out some high-quality BTL chips to actually get a wet-record, and then leave the sense levels cranked to BTL when they actually burn the chip.

I suppose it's really up to gm discretion.

Making chips for hisself probably isn't that hard...
...But single units of anything isn't.

It's the mass production that's the thing...
...And the distribution, of course.

speaking personally, i am a total sensate: that is to say, i love experiencing new things, which has led me to try ingesting or injecting or smoking or snorting anything that i can possibly find. i've always figured that BTL's kinda originated as a sort of pandora's box, where people started taking regular simstims and "cranking the EQ" on them essentially (i'm also a musician, natch, and i know it's WAY more complicated than that).

if you know anything about audio engineering, you know that you can only bump the level on something before it starts to distort. low quality BTL's probably use something similar, just boosting certain signals. i figure the real quality stuff requires a special lossless type of recording which wouldn't be legal.

in other words, i see it as sort of analogous to the cd/mp3 dichotomy - most people don't know this, but standard cd players actually limit the volume level so as to protect people from hearing loss, whereas mp3 players don't provide such a limiter; so, you can mess up your hearing with your ipod much more easily than you can with the discman you had in high school.

these things being said, i can easily see a bigger market in some sort of "pseudostim" that, instead of bumping your regular senses up, instead just makes you feel *new things,* or perhaps "synestims" which replicate synesthesia

I can imagine there would be a market for otherwise legal simsense chips that just so happened to be the final few moments in the life a bunch of roaches (wired to record) as they were stomped by a giant female troll wearing spiky heels.

But you could easily give people new experiences by wiring animals to record. The only issue would be whether or not the human brain could even decipher the signals being sent into it.

I'd probably let them play animal dreamchips, but if you wanted to restrict that, you could make their commlink/sim module require a cryptosense module.