Possible to Re-flash a Yamaha SCSI CDROM to fake an Apple CDROM ?

[Pete Lancashire]

Your going to need a CDROM that can be set for 512 byte sectors. We use to
use Plextor drives
and if money was a factor, Pioneer. In the early days Plextor drives were
quite a bit more expensive
the all the others, and where usually faster.

BTW 512 bytes came from the sector size of a hard drive



On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 11:47 AM, Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> On older Apple 68k machines, having an Apple-branded CDROM means you can
> be assured it'll boot (though it's rumored that many generic SCSI CDROMs
> work for booting) and also that it'll "just work" on most of the OSs.
>
> I'm guessing it's a simple check to see if the vendor in the firmware is
> "APPLE". Has anyone ever managed to hack the firmware of something like a
> Yamaha, Pioneer, or Plextor drive so that it lies and says it's "APPLE"
> thus being fully enabled by the OS & hardware ? Does anyone know anything
> about flashing CDROM firmware and the dynamics of such things? I wonder if
> it'd just be a matter of a simple hexedit/byte-patch on the firmware image
> then load it up... Is this a bogus idea?
>
> The reason for this is that if it's possible, I could buy a Pioneer slot
> loading SCSI CDROM drive, stuff it into my Quadra 660AV, and then hack it
> to "just work" instead of needing drivers et al. The slot cover isn't big
> enough for a normal tray-drive CDROM to work. Thus I can only use a CD300i
> caddy-based drive (or theoretically - a slot drive). My 300i is a bit of
> PoS and even after I cleaned it, the thing still has a lot of read
> problems.
>
> -Swift
>
>