Good news everyone :P

It should be known by now that I messed around with RVT-R discs; hacked a drive to dump them and made them run on a retail Wii.

So I thought what's next? Let's kick it up a notch!

Burn RVT-R discs, but as a poor student :crying: I can't just buy an RVT-R Writer ...

As there are basically no DVD-ROMs that burn RAW and finding a drive that could be easily RE'D seemed to much effort I tried a different way I've found the drive name of the RVT-R Writer in some RVL SDK docs

so I thought that just maybe they were sold normally aswell but nope no SW-9585S in the wild but I found a SW-9585C ebay.com, so I asked someone to buy it for me and do some tests.

First try running the RVT-R Writer firmware updater no luck "no compatible device found" after some RE'ing of the tool I just patched it to accept anydrive and it happly flashed the firmware to the SW-9585C and big surprise not only did the drive still work (puuh) it turned into a real SW-9585S!

Trying to run the sdk tools on it didn't work, at this point I let the drive be sent to me and today it arrived...

After some RE'ing it turned out that the tool was looking for a certain VID and PID of the USB2IDE device ( vid 0409 (NEC) pid 0193 ).

A quick patch resolved that issue but another one was still there it checked some kind of ID aswell and with my USB2IDE device that part was always 00000000000 I just patched that check out aswell and run the rvtwr tool and ...

SUCCESS!! :dance:

long story short I can now burn RVT-R discs and I also got 10 empty ones
(the drive I got was a "MATSHITA DVD-RAM SW-9585B10008/03/05BZQ2A.2007" <-- inquiry)

how much did I spent? with two times shipping (within USA and to Germany) $70.


edit:
Played a bit more with it, did one successfull write and verify and found out that you can simply read burned RVT-Rs with it, currently dumping one with 5-12mB/s via ImgBurn

edit2:
tmb helped me to make a RAM dump, he's messing with it now .

If anyone needs anything burned(or dumped) just ask me (from looking into the FW and all it seems to be possible to burn NR discs aswell!)
I do have some empty RVT-R discs, but no empty NR discs.

Note: It is not possible to burn RVT-R(/retail Wii) dumps via the nintendo tools only .rvm/.gcm images.

 

wow good work

 

Congratulations!

 

Outstanding.

 

I m a bit confused. The NR writers were standard Matsushita drives with a special firmware (The Wii uses the same drive with a different firmware as well I think), which I happen to have come across a lot on the internet. How is this different?

 

Amazing!
How did you find the OEM of the drives? Who was willing to tear apart their Rvt-R?

 

He found the info in the SDK docs.

 

nice!

 

you sure you couldn't use the custom firmware? I can send it to you

 

I used the flash tool that comes with the RVL_SDK to update an RVT-R Writer to a newer firmware, I highly doubt it will work with uhm a "super drive" ??

 

amazing! good job

 

I've got the same drive, in a macbook. It was £30 on ebay (the one that came with it was dead, though I still have it in a box, doesn't read discs) so I could attempt to flash to that if anyone wants to test this.

 

amazing work!

 

Congratulations! Kudos for the curiosity and hard work!

 

Super Drives were often OEM drives with an Apple modified firmware to disable such worthless features as DVD+R support. Not sure why but Apple only really wanted DVD-R burning capabilities with a lot of their Macs. Usually could flash the drive with the retail firmware and regain all functionality though.

 

Some technical details:

- The firmware handles all the NR/RVTR-Disc specialities. It knows about the sector offset, the scrambling and how to detect an NR/RVTR-disc based on the DMI.
- As it's based on DVD-R (minus, not +), the PFI/DMI come pre-written on the disc. The DMI is what differentiates a recordable disc from an NR/RVT-R disc. If someone finds totally empty DVD-R, we can produce compatible NR-discs (by writing the leadin).
- There is no special stuff happening when burning, it just burns the image 1:1. In theory, you might even be able to use a tool like imgburn. The drive firmware does all the work.
- Since there are many specific details in the firmware, porting that to an incompatible drive is probably difficult. But looking at the firmware carefully might allow a mn103 hacker to apply similar changes, maybe not as sophisticated, to other panasonic-based drives.