However, I haven't found any mention (other than google searches) of others trying to cross flash a SW-5582 to the PX-900A firmware (or vice versa). I was finally able to find a SW-5582-C for relatively cheap and maybe try to cross-flash it to PX-900A. I might try to disassemble it first and find an SPI chip or something to pull a backup of the firmware.

I also found out that some early bluray players might have the SW-5582-C inside. https://www.avsforum.com/threads/pana-dmp-bd1 … 3#post-11883153 Sometimes a used BD10 can be found for much cheaper than just the drive.

Well, I finally got a SW-5582-C drive, but it came with a firmware B110 though the vendor specific info in ImgBurn shows 12/20/06BXF1 so now I wonder if that BZC3 firmware from CDFreaks was the vendor specific info, and what firmware version that corresponds to.

https://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Firmware/Sin … px?DriveId=1351 makes reference to a B102 firmware in file "MTFOPD-01131610-UN.exe", but the link is long dead and archive.org has nothing.

Closest thing I found was https://web.archive.org/web/20080104165823/ht … -011316-10.html which unfortunately points to Sony's ftp site for downloading, which archive.org doesn't have.

If I had a need for an IDE connected BD-ROM, I would try a SATA one through a Marvell, Sunplus or JMicron based adapter. In my experience, early BD-ROM lasers were less reliable than those from the last 10ish years.

darry wrote on 2024-07-25, 02:51:

If I had a need for an IDE connected BD-ROM, I would try a SATA one through a Marvell, Sunplus or JMicron based adapter. In my experience, early BD-ROM lasers were less reliable than those from the last 10ish years.

Thing is none of the SATA drives have audio pins which makes them useless when you want to play games with CDDA soundtracks on systems where you can't run DxWnd or DaemonTools. FreeDOS is great and all, but even if someone wrote a CDDA adapter for it, it would probably have to become a protected mode TSR and thus introduce incredible stability issues for the game itself.

I’f i do connect a modern drive with a ide to sata adaptor would i be able to use the drive to play movie disks, copy the disks, or burn disk without any issue or could i run in to possible bandwidth issues that could crash the drive? Id love to use a modern Pioneer drive in my ol optiplex but it has issues detecting sata optical drives, or would i be better off buying a external drive, as these old drives are hard to come by. I know i’ll most likely have issues anyways but i’m wondering if it’s relatively possible?

xbrun1 wrote on 2025-01-06, 06:26:

I’f i do connect a modern drive with a ide to sata adaptor would i be able to use the drive to play movie disks, copy the disks, or burn disk without any issue or could i run in to possible bandwidth issues that could crash the drive? Id love to use a modern Pioneer drive in my ol optiplex but it has issues detecting sata optical drives, or would i be better off buying a external drive, as these old drives are hard to come by. I know i’ll most likely have issues anyways but i’m wondering if it’s relatively possible?

SATA vs PATA isn't really an issue - BluRay content is about 60Mbps = <8MBps, vs 33MBps and higher for UDMA versions of PATA.

But how exactly were you intending to play back h.264 (MPEG4) content? Doing it in software needs at the very least a Core2Duo and I found an early Core i3 was needed to make it work seamlessly. Of course, CPU requiremenets drop if you can use hardware acceleration, but support for that's not exactly a thing in vintage OSs.

Thanks for the clarification, and as for the hardware it’s a dell optiplex gx620 with a pentium d running at 3.4 ghtz, 3 gb of ddr2 running at 500mhz ish, a gt530 for hw acceleration, with a win 7 pro and win xp 64 bit install. The only real issues i’ve got with it is that the fan bearings need some love on the gpu and the bios not recognizing the sata optical drives i’ve tried, but i’ve gotten the internal cd drive functioning again so i know the ide bus is still working. It’s also possible to get h.264 content working smoothly on older hardware such as pIII running at 800 if the video is encoded to stereo and 480p, 720 is a bit of a stretch and dvd playback can be rough if surround is enabled.

With 2K/WinXP or Linux its easiy to hardware accelerate 1080p h264, anybody has done it with win9x or dos? I have one Geforce 6200 2xAGP, that has h264 support. Pentium III tualatin i have used with fluent 1080p h264 playback machine, i had back then ATi HD2400 AGP and later ATi HD3450 AGP, they are W2K/XP / Linux cards. With Pentium 3 smooth BluRay disk playback is easy task with real vga h264 hardware acceleration, but can it be done with even lower hardware?

The key component is newer vga cards! Older vga cards, like gf6200/gf7600 or radeon 1650/1950 have h264 acceleration, but its not that good, like ati hd2400 or geforce gf8400 or newer cards and newer cards need minimum 4xagp. Still the savior can be PCI cards, that they made newer versions, like HD4350/HD5450 PCI, later PCI cards combapility can be picky and with very old boards they probably wont work.

Also i have P4 with 7600GT and 1080p h264 works great there, so the bare minimum that we can have is Socket 370 / Socket A machines, maybe Slot1 / Slot A for Bluray.

I’m going to put a word of advice and let those know that if you change the drive in one of these old optiplex machines make sure the bios isn’t locked to a cd drive only on that bus. I put in an ide to sata adaptor and connected a newer dvd drive from another optiplex and the drive functions properly except there’s severe i/o error when trying to read a dvd in written dd mode but if the dvd is written in cd mode it works perfectly fine, and i’m able to get the drives full 40x speed when ripping cds. Its just a word of caution to check on oem computers for dumb compatibility issues.