Yes, those would be known as modchips, and a good one costs about as much as a new game. And then you have to install it, which often involves soldering, and therefore you're risking smurfing up your console. You could ofcourse get some knowledgeable guy to do it for you, but those guys rarely give you a refund if they accidentially mess up. Boot disks are cheaper, but far less convenient to use. You also need a different boot disk to play PS1 games, and you can't make your DVD region-free at the same time.
All the chips do is to bypass the region (and copy) protection and alter the output for foreign games. That only proves how easy it would be for the manufacturers to let us play whatever games we wanted. However, they wish to control themselves when we are allowed to play this and that, just like the movie companies want to do with DVD regions.