NOTE: DO NOT skip that step! If you mess things up you can render your drive unusable!!! You basically have to ensure that nothing interrupts the firmware update process (i.e. The same firmware is also available at the RPC-1 firmware forum website along with information.ģ) Having downloaded the region-free RPC-1 "FAAG" firmware (a zip file) which I the unzipped, I carefully read the instructions that came with it. Since my System profiler told me that I had an "FAAG" revision drive I downloaded the RPC-1 version of the "FAAG" firmware. I found my "UJ-846" drive there with RPC-1 (region-free) firmware!!! (I had prepared some nice screenshots to follow my posting, but unfortunately I couldn't find any way of inserting them inside the message itself, so I'm enclosing them as attachements below).Ģ) Knowing which drive I had I then visited this PowerBook page, and scrolled down to the list of firmware almost at the bottom of the page. Think of it as a "maintenance" or "utility" tool -)ġ) First, I checked the exact model of my drive by going to Apple's System profiler ("Apple menu" - "About this Mac" - "More info" -"Hardware" -"Disc burning"). But fear not, with the help of a simple application you can reset this whenever you need. To put it simply after changing the firmware, the drive will become an RPC-1 (region-free) drive, but the software and MacOS will still keep track of any region-changes. Apple's DVD player will still ask you to confirm a region-change whenever you insert a DVD with a different region than the drive is currently set to, and it will still count down the number of times this is possible, but. What we're going to do is "unlock" the region locking mechanism of the drive. After that you're stuck with the region you last used. You actually get to change regions with a region-locked (RPC-2) drive, but only for a limited number of times (5 I think). When you first got your Mac and inserted a DVD, Apple's "DVD player" asked you to confirm that the drive be set to the DVD's region.
I'm just putting it together here in an easy-to-understand wayįirst, a short explanation of how it all works:
Frozen mac powerbook g4 how to#
This is the first time I've made a DVD-drive region free, and I've picked up information on how to do this by reading bits here and there. I also have to add that I'm no authority on this issue. I assume the following instructions apply for other Macs as well, but I really can't confirm this (perhaps someone else can). I'm on a 15" PowerBook G4 with a 1.67GHz processor and a Matshita UJ-846 Super-drive. My Christmas gift apparently arrived a few days late this year, because after endless searching on the web, reading that my particular DVD-RW drive can't be made region free I finally stumbled across a firmware download today which proved the opposite!
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