The Firmware Page

I am working in research an would like to use a dvd writer as a source for nanosecond (30-40 ns) light pulses. The possibility of light modulation with data and the hight power of the laser combined with it cheapness are just fine for my purposes. Recently I've disassembled my dvd burner (LG GH22NS50) and tried to disconnect the disc rotating motor from the pcb in order to take the disc out during the burning process. As soon as the disc stopped rotating, the laser turned to the weak reading mode and the burning process was interrupted. Following some documentation there is a so called running OPC (optical power control) function, whitch measures the reflectivity of the disc on the fly and adjusts the burning laser power according to it. My approach is modifying the firmware of a dvd burner in order to enable the "empty disc" burning operation. 

My aim: the burning process should go on despite a missing DVD. 

The burning initialization should occur with a disc inside or even hardcoded into the firmware (the dvd burner should think, it has an empty dvd inside). Is it realistic to disable the permanent photodiode monitoring over the firmware? How much time and effort would it take to solve this problem?  Is it all just about finding the particular jmp or jnz command and changing it to the opposite? I have some (little) experience in reverse engineering and assembler. Extracting the laserdiode is not an option, because then the new circuitry has to be developed. Are there any other approaches of using the burning laser with electronics from a dvd drive?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

P.S.: sorry for my bad english

The examples of ASM you gave are Intel based arch which is not what these drives use.

You might also want to look at this.
http://club.myce.com/f61/how-disassembl ... re-268792/

Thank you for the hint, it goes in the right direction...