Pioneer 105 reading + media

[Azrael]

I was recently reading a thread on the Doom9 Forum's about how the Pioneer 105/A05 can read + media even though it's not in the official specs.

What are the chances that flashing a 105 with 106 firmware would allow it to burn + media as well? Has this been tried before?

It's a common practice to impletement new features in hardware and to simply activate them in later releases of the product ie Intel with HyperThreding in their P4's.

Is there any hardware difference in a DVD-R burner compared to a DVD+R burner ???

[Noua]

Well I can tell you one thing, you are not the first to think on that!! Right know it can't be done... Trust me... But I know that there are people trying to... According to them, the hardware is pretty similar... Not like the NEC 1100 and 1300, that are practically the same, only some transistors differ (same board, same head,...) The A06 and A05 are similar... This doesn't mean, of course, that you'll be able to do a virtual drive upgrade from A05 to A06... There are firmware encodings and procedures that are different and must be understood in order to achieve the upgrade... There are people trying, but if you look carefully you can see that there isn't a RPC 1 firmware yet... Neither one that removes the rip speed limited... These only appear after you understand how the firmware works...

Expect first a RPC 1 firmware for this drive and then the rest will appear gradually and naturally... With some luck maybe the first thing that may appear is a downgrade from A06 to A05...

The reason why it can read +r is obvious. Marketing and operational strategy. Pioneer (any brand in fact) simply cannot afford to lose clients just because it won’t read +r... There are other factors but this seems to me the most obvious one...