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How I Flashed my Sony DDU1621 DVD ROM to be Region free
In the end I decided to take the risk. My DVD player had for many months been fixed at Region 1. Then I got a Region 2 DVD that I wanted to capture some still images from for use on my home page. Since I couldn't do that on my stand alone, TV connected, Pioneer player, I had no choice but to do something. I decided to do some more research first and soon discovered that there is a utility called "Region Free", which I downloaded and tried. It made my DVD ROM Region free without flashing the firmware. It worked great, but it was clear that the trial version had limitations including a 30 day expiry. Had it been priced at $9.95, I would have certainly bought it and forgot about doing any flashing. At $19.95, I might have bought it. But they wanted $39.95, enough to buy a new drive should my flashing dismally fail. So I continued on my quest.
It was clear people were still getting mixed results. There is a great guy called Etna who seems to provide most of the free firmware flashes. He writes great software, but seems to be lousy at explaining how to use it. He also offers multiple versions with few clues as to which one is best.
So I went to his site http://etna.rpc1.org/ and downloaded http://etna.rpc1.org/mt/mtkflash_162.zip and http://etna.rpc1.org/mt/1621s1e7.zip The first download is of MKTFLASH 1.62 DOS (i.e. the program that does the flashing), the second is of Etna's RPC1 Region Free firmware version S1E7, for the DDU1621 (this is the code that gets burned into the firmware). He has many other versions, but gives no rationale as to which you should use. I used this one and it worked fine for me. If by the time you read this, you find these links are not working, try to track down other sites with the same downloads. I found this one by searching www.google.com for DDU1621 Region Flash.
I also downloaded something that was supposed to make me a boot disk, but after struggling unsuccessfully with it, I made one by putting in an empty floppy, and in Windows XP Explorer, right clicked on the floppy drive and selected 'format'. From the format panel I selected 'Create an MS-DOS startup disk'. So then I had a boot disk. I then unzipped the two files above onto the same floppy disk (i.e. selected the floppy as the destination for the unzipped files to go).
I then made sure that my Sony DDU1621 was set up as the secondary slave (it had been the secondary master, so I opened up the machine, changed it's jumper from master to slave and disconnected my other CD drive, which had previously been set up as the slave).
I then rebooted having made sure that my bios booted from my floppy drive first (i.e. pressed 'del' just after powering up so I could go into the Bios manager). It booted from the floppy and I found myself with a DOS A: prompt.
I typed the word 'upgrade' and pressed enter.
I got some text warning that it was my responsibility if everything got screwed up, and then was presented with some options. Since my DDU1621 was set up as the secondary slave, Option 4 was the right one for me (a bit more on this later).
There was a bit of whirring and a number counter incrementing rapidly, and then a message appeared which seemed to indicate that the flash had been successful and I should reboot. However I didn't do that, I waited and some more whirring and numbers counting went on, and I got a message again, saying all was well and I should reboot, I continued to ignore this I think it was 3 times it told me all was well and to reboot, before it automatically stopped what it was doing and returned to the A: prompt.
I reset the jumper on the DDU1621 to make it my secondary master again and reconnected my other secondary slave.
I powered up (having removed the floppy) and waited for Windows XP to launch, which it did and believe it or not, my DDU1621 was now region free. I then had some problems using DVD Genie to set my region codes for the movies I wanted to try. To make things clean, I uninstalled DVD Genie and also the software called "Region Free" (which incidentally was still working fine). It then took me a long time to find a download site which was working, which had software called DVD "Region Killer" version 2.7 (I had read there were problems with earlier versions with it not working on Win XP or Win 2000. also there were lots of download sites, but they all seemed to have bad links, but eventually I found one which was OK).
I installed DVD Region Killer 2.7 (which is free) I have now successively alternated discs from regions 1, 2 & 3 over 10 times and all is working fine. I thought I'd better write this page before I forgot it all.
Just one more thing I would like to mention before finishing off. The MktFlash.exe program, which was the first download above, offered me the chance to flash my drive as a secondary master, by choosing option 3 instead of 4. I actually tried this before eventually opening up my machine and playing with the jumpers. But it didn't work. Having said that the reason it didn't work, may have been because the flash program seemed to work OK, but I rebooted as soon as it said I could first time. When I did my DDU1621 was still region locked. So I don't know if the cause was because MktFlash.exe only works for the secondary slave, or if it worked the second time because I allowed the flash program to keep on running until it returned to the A: prompt.
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