fussili,
Well I'm honored but your statement is not right.
First of all, I want to make clear that I'm definitely not the only one that got involved in the hacking of the DVR drives.
It just come that I have the ability to relay the informations I got to you guys...
Now, to answer your question:
1/ The DVR-104 firmware has been patched to RPC-1, but to do that we currently depend on the drive's manufacturer to publish (or leak) a firmware upgrade.
And when Pioneer did release the 1.20 firmware upgrade, the patch was done in a matter of days.
The problem is that Apple has not released any firmware upgrade for the superdrive
2/ Now, you might ask, why not use the patched Pioneer firmware with the Mac's drive?
The problem is that Pioneer split their DVR firmwares in 2 parts:
The kernel and the normal part.
he kernel is something like 64KB big (eventhough it comes as a 1 MB file) and contains only a subset of basic operations, like how to flash the normal part or how to reflash the kernel. Usually, this firmware does not need to be updated so, when publishing a firmware upgrade, manufacturers will only give you the normal part of the firmware, which does all the rest...
This is what Pioneer did with the 1.20 firmware. We just have the normal firmware but not the kernel.
Now, eventhough the drives are physically the same, the kernel of the Pioneer DVR-104 and the one from the iMac's superdrive are different.
Thus, using the Pioneer normal part with the superdrive will most likely render the drive inoperable.
And as you don't have the original Apple firmware, you won't even be able to flash the drive back to normal if you try something like that.
With the DVR-103, because we have both the current kernel and normal part, it was possible to make an universal upgrade that will turn any DVR-103 drive in an original Pioneer drive, even the Apple one.
As we don't have the 104 kernel, the same is not possible yet.
Besides, users who tried to turn their Apple 103 drive into a Pioneer one using the universal upgrade reported some issues, so we went back to producing a specific Apple RPC-1 frimware of the 103, based on the official 1.49 upgrade published by Apple.
At the moment, we're just waiting for same with the 104.
Now, if Apple are taking too long, as there is always another way, somebody with good electronics skills, some knowledge of the chips and the proper equipment could always extract the firmware out of the 7902 processor (which has 256 KB flash embedded) and the 512 KB external flash out of an Apple DVR-104 drive.
If anybody thinks he can do that, I'd be glad to hear from him (or her. Let's not be discriminatory here)
