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PowerBook G4 SuperDrive Speed Bump Hack
George Wright writes "A guy called cynikal has managed to hack the firmware on the PowerBook G4's "Superdrive" (the Panasonic UJ-815A slimline slot loading DVD-R/RW burner) to enable DVD-R burning at 2x (instead of 1x), DVD-RW burning at 1x (instead of it being disabled), CD-R burning at 16x (instead of 8x) and CD-RW burning at 8x (instead of 4x). Thanks a lot cynikal! The drive now reports as a UJ-815A instead of a UJ-815, and has a firmware revision of D101 instead of the DOC4, DOCB or DWDB the PowerBooks came with. A firmware downgrader can be obtained from the same place to downgrade back to DOCB if you want to, and there is a discussion thread."
Well, I installed the firmware hack on my 17" Powerbook. Looks to me like it's working fine; still reads CDs at least. I'm too poor to buy DVD-R discs (spent all my money on the Powerbook), so I can't say if there are any improvements in that department. At least nothing's burst into flames yet.
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
I don't see how it would. If you read the page, it would say the real reason (it appears) they included the current firmware was due to heat related issues. I can't see Apple really caring except that they probably won't cover any damage you due to your computer or drive due to this new firmware.
This is brilliant, but unfortunately it's now found speed increases the temperature, and not only burns the disk, but me under ^_^. Never-the-less, brilliant!
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
I installed this on my 12" PowerBook. ;) ). Pitty that it doesn't enable a region free player or enable the DVD-Ram.
This is great! Now I can finaly burn to DVD-RW and the speed increases are also pretty cool. I haven't noticed any side effects as of yet (i don't think it would be a good idea to burn a DVD-R faster if your laptop is on the blanket
It is possible to also downgrade the drive back to its original DOCB. You are however not able to do this on a 17" PowerBook. There is no real increase for the 17" PB except now I think you can burn 2x DVD-R. Therefore I would not really recomend people with 17" PBs to do this.
"You win again Gravity!" -Futurama (Zapp)
aye so I read in the forum, of course that is just a random guess based on some problems that were known to exist with the drive, not hard fact as to why they did it.
My Other responder is just as likely to be right, apple downgraded the drive firmware in their cheaper product lines to give more motive to purchase the 17" instead.
Personally I suspect it's a case of both, the system runs a little hotter with the drive rev'd up, and they know the average idiot doesn't properly operate a laptop so that heat is controlled. They also know this would be a little less a factor in their 17". So as a combination of both, they figure they'll tweak down the lower models (which have a slight problem that would result in support calls but not affect the average user) and gain a secondary incentive to purchase the more beefy model.
I've worked for fortune 500 computer manufacturers though, and I assure you, whether it's the case here or not. They most definately DO clock down hardware on cheaper models and sometimes the only difference between the more expensive and less expensive model is the firmware (one example being the sony clie, which is a notorious line for this).
Apple cripple it's hardware all the time... They do this on the iBooks. They've crippled the graphics cards so you can't desktop span with a second screen -- this is to try to lure the sales over to those who need it on to the Powebooks. Sad but true, yes.
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
i just installed it on a 12" PowerBook G4 with superdrive.
just burned 4.2 gigs of DiVX DVD rips onto Apple 2x media in thin jewel cases with Toast 5.1.2 at 2x. Burned in 30 minutes flat. No errors. Formerly could only burn at 1x.
just burned mandrake ix86 9.2b iso onto Memorex black CD-R 700 meg media with Toast 5.1.2 at 16x Burned in 4 minutes and 15 seconds. formerly could only burn at 8x.
it works for me. Of course, I installed a PowerMax ata-33 ide card, Intrega USB for Windows only PCI card, a SonnetTech G4/450 CPU card, and Firewire PCI card in a PowerMac 7500 running Mac OS X 10.2 and used it as my primary email server until 6 months ago..... so i'm not exactly the conservative computer user...
ymmv and if your powerbook blows up, don't blame me.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Alas, there's NO region free firmware for this drive yet.
Matsushita took some steps to prevent this: the firmware is encrypted, etc...
More and more drives are protected against patching (Pioneer, etc...). Smells like some kind of pressure from the movie industry here...
The documentation that came with my 12 inch PowerBook recommends that you only burn DVDs while on AC power, it obviously uses a lot of power.
Man and Goat
Heh. My PowerBook is already at 1GHz. Try again troll.
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
No matter how off topic this is, I must correct some things in the above...