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."

Comments

Re:I would use it, but...

[whorfin]

Perhaps the manufacturer sells a variety of drive 'packages', and they all actually use the same hardware, and are differentiated only by the firmware running them. Saves the manufacturer a lot of money on engineering/producing several different product lines...

Kinda like when you go to a restaurant and the kids meal, at 1/3 the price, is the same food as the 'adult meal'.