Firmware update brings DVD-R writing to the NEC ND-3100

It's time for the smoking monkey picture again! System Administrator and firmware expert Liggy has released a new firmware that brings DVD-R(W) writing to the NEC ND-3100A. Owners of this drive, which can often be found in e.g. Dell computers, were till today only able to write DVD+R(W) discs.

Since current firmware patches didn't enable writing to DVD-R(W) discs on the 3100 drive, I played around with this myself and created a modified firmware, that is able to change one Byte (actually it's only a Bit) in the flash rom, that's not changed when updating your firmware. The patched firmware is based on MadDog's 2.f9 and for those who are interested, I'm changing the Byte at address 0x4802 and NO, it's not located at position 0x4802 in any firmware binary that's floating around here. Since I'm not 100% familiar with the assembler language used in these burners, I abused the function that resets the booktype counter to toggle this Byte. In order to not cause any corruptions, I had to disable all other booktype code, so bitsetting will not work, but if everything works as expected, you can afterwards flash any 3500 firmware to this drive to get DVD-R(W) support, but that's currently untested.

Remember that this firmware update is to be used at your own risk. However if anything goes wrong we have a community of many members to help you revive the drive. For more information, downloads and support we would kindly direct you to the 'Writing to DVD-R on your NEC ND3100A' forum thread.

Source: Club CD Freaks