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PowerBook G4 SuperDrive Speed Bump Hack

Posted by pudge on from the do-not-try-this-at-home dept.

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."

2 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I did it by FueledByRamen · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I'll be honest with you (moderators and potential moderators): How does this come even close to being informative? It's supposed to be funny, or just stupid, depending on how you look at it.

    --
    Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
  2. Re:They should fix OSX first by GeorgeWright · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    1) Mach-O isn't specific to Apple. It's the binary format used by the Mach microkernel, which DOES NOT belong to Apple.
    2) X11 is not an emulation. It's natively compiled on and runs natively on Mac OS X. Nothing is emulated. Nothing is slow.
    3) KDE and GNOME aren't as enterprise ready as Aqua. Noooooo waaaay.
    4) I'm not sure why NetInfo is used, but I hazard a guess it's to try to retain source compatibility with legacy applications from Mac OS Classic whose source base assume there is something like that?

    --
    George Wright