Patchburn just made my day

I recently acquired a lowend powermac Blue and White G3 desktop at the rock-bottom price of free-99.  It came with a 350Mhz cpu, 128Mb of RAM, CD-ROM, and a 10gb hard disk running Mac OS 9.  Very old but still very pretty and in perfect working condition.  It was intended to be used for my kids to watch DVD movies and play educational games on.  Even it it’s current state I knew I could make a few upgrades from parts I had from old systems so here’s what I did.

• Added PC 2100 memory DIMMs bumping up the memory to 768Mb of RAM
• Installed Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) w/ OS 9.2.2 “Classic”
• Upgraded the CD-ROM to a Pioneer DVR-A08 drive (Superdrive by Apple is a Pioneer DVR-A03)

Everything worked as expected except for one thing.  The DVD drive could only playback DVD and Audio but was unable to burn to disc.  I looked up the Apple system profile and noticed that the Drive was identified properly as a Pioneer AVR-A08 drive but had a flag of “Burning Unsupported.”  I googled around and found a great website called xlr8yourmac.com which had all the hardware that was compatible for upgrading these older systems.  I found that in order to get the burn functionality on your powermac G3 you had to patch the hardware profile for this drive.

So here’s what made my day.  A guy by the name of Christian Holler has written a very cool and very free patch, called PatchBurn.  He realized that this is a common problem for many who have tried to upgrade their Mac’s DVD/CD-rom drives so he wrote a RealBasic app that will automatically patch your stock drivers to work with virtually any DVD/CD-rom drive.  I didn’t know the RealBasic offered low-level APIs to manage device drivers. I have a feeling all he did was set a few flags that prevented OS X from enabling burn functionality on drives it did not recognize.  Nevertheless, his patchburn made my day and I figured the least I could do was give him some link-love.

[Update] In my frustration, I tried installing Ubuntu Linux to see if it would allow playback of DVDs and burn capability — both of which failed miserably.  However, Ubuntu Linux for the PPC architecture is by far the prettiest UI and uses the Gnome window manager of all things!