Just realised that the reason my 5 year old DVD-ROM is not working could be cos the firmware needed updating. But before hunting down such legacy firmware I had to repair the Live Update on my brother’s comp first. I’m still amazed how people can get their computers to such state. (Maybe it would make an interesting HYP)

Found out my Creative DVD-8400E drive is acutally a Panasonic/Matshita 8585 OEM and it’s still RPC-2 and no region selected. Remembered I used a software to get around the region code in the past but now it seems that flashing it with the lastest Matshita 8585 1×32 firmware would make the drive RPC-1 and thus region free! Had to image a Win-ME bootdisk to flash the firmware think due to some ultra low level system calls.

And viola, when rebooted, “New hardware detected: Matshita 8585 DVD-ROM” and yadda yadda but then still cannot recognise my DVD and after download Nero Infotool to probe my drive, discover that it only supports DVD-R, not DVD+R. Bleah. So much for legacy equipment. I still need a DVD decoder to watch DVD movies so any lite ones to recommend?