I've received my
Pioneer SCSI DVD-ROM drive today through
FedEx. It was in the afternoon, after my
brother from
North Carolina visited my mess of a
home office. I took my
computer to pieces with my tools to re-arrange the innards of it. Moved the hard drives to the drive cage, the
Zip drive to the top with the CD-ROM. I've even removed the scanner's connection to make things work! Anyways, I have put all of the important parts (and the DVD-ROM drive) together, restarted
Windoze a few times (I'm planning to get
RedHat Linux 6.2 soon -- promise!) and I have used a sample DVD from a sound card package to see...
The region of the inserted DVD Video title does not match that of your Creative PC-DVD hardware. You can only play DVD Video titles that have the same region code as that of your hardware.
What does that mean? That means that my DVD-ROM drive can't work the sample disc. I checked out a DVD-ROM firmware web page (www.firmware.com.bi) to figure out what can my DVD-ROM drive read. The web page shows this:
-Pioneer DVD-U03/303S (SCSI 6X/32X) 1.09, 1.10, 2.00
(Know firmware : 1.06 / 1.09 / 1.10 / 2.00)
Be carrefull! The 2.00 firmware is RPC-2 and do not allow the drive to be returned to a previous version of the firmware.
RPC-1 by default. Note : Do not remove the RPC jumper or your drive will became zone locked.
More infos here.
If your drive is RPC-2 you can make it region free again (except if you have firmware 2.00) by using the patched firmware 1.10. available at Fekete Istvan page. Don't
forget to reinsert the RPC jumper.
I checked out my firmware version in the Windoze control panel, and I have seen that my DVD-ROM drive firmware version is 2.00. I'm shit out of luck.
Tonight, I'll take down the drive and wrap it up. I'll call for a refund tomorrow. I could've used DeCSS, but don't have enough hard drive space to do so.