While a head-on collision threatens to break over the Spring Update's cross-border Marketplace restrictions, another head-to-head is brewing up on the horizon. Gameswank snagged a Q&A with Commodore4Eva about his views on the Spring Update - but not about cross-border DL - and Xtreme Firmware 5.3.

It all begins, Commodore4Eva tells Gameswank, when a little mouse whispered into his ear that the Spring Update might contain an ability to detect backup games and not make it boot (Commodore4Eva emphasizes this detection method isn't about modded disk drives). Hence Xtreme FW v5.3 Patch, which Commodore4Eva hopes to release before Microsoft releases the Spring Update.

v5.2, he notes, "already has many FEATURES that prevent detection, 5.3 just adds another," although it seems that the patch is a stopgap based on Commodore's uncertainty whether Microsoft will really implement the detection capability.

The plan is to do an emergency patch if required after the update if the detection is put in by MS, otherwise a full update for Hitachi to bring it up to V5.3 from V2 will come in the next several weeks...