Toshiba's
RPC2 scheme is finally disabled! Thanks
to NoJ (who finalized the job of converting RPC2 firmwares to RPC1), TheDoctor
(who created a region-free, but still RPC2 solution) and many other people
who joined our efforts to fight the illegal and annoying region protection.
Thanks to everyone for their support! During the first week the counter
on my site was above 10000 and I received tons of e-mails with support
and help offers. I tried to answer to everyone, sorry if I missed some
messages.
Our
fight with RPC2 on Toshiba's DVD-ROMs is over for now. But we should not
underestimate our enemies - they will make every effort to protect their
dirty money given to them by US movie monopoloes. Be on alert! This is
only the beginning...
Some
history: I joined the efforts to fight RPC2 protection in DVD drives
in early 2000. My first step was to disable or reset region change counters
in Toshiba's DVD drives. And I succeeded in that. I 'fixed' the Toshiba's
flashing utility and that resets your DVD drive region counters to their
default values thus allowing you to change regions 5 times more before
the drive gets locked again. It can be used on all Toshiba's RPC2 DVD-ROM
drives (see an important note below) that have the following string in
their firmware HEX image files:
:20BF8000FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFC1
This
string is a firmware data area where the drive's region setting and counters
are stored. According to Toshiba you can change region settings 5 times,
then the drive gets locked and you have to send it back to Toshiba so they
could reset your counter back to 5. This will decrease another counter
that is called 'manufacturer's reset counter' and its initial value is
4. So actually you have 20 changes of regions available BUT with the time
loss, pain and lots of expences to send the drive to Toshiba's service
centers.
|
the
Toshiba
SD-M1302 DVD drive is a very reliable DVD drive. It reads CD's at 40x
speed and DVD's at 8x speed
the
only thing BAD about it, is it's region lock!
but
now it is disabled!
click
on images for the big pictures |
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But
don't beleive Toshiba's bullsh*t when they are asking you to send your
locked DVD drive to their service center to reset its counters! These counters
can be reset as many times as the Flash Bios chip in the drive can be re-programmed.
Unfortunately I don't know the exact amount of re-programming attempts
that Toshiba's Flash Bios chip allows. On some DVD drives it is about 100
times, but for Toshiba it is unknown, most likely it is the same. I read
specifications for many Flash Bios chips and most of them can be re-programmed
hundreds if not thousands of times. So basically you can reset your DVD
drive as many times as you want. But there can be certain limitations for
certain types of Flash Bios chips used in certain models of DVD players. |