Back in the day, there was a Yamaha burner with a feature called "DiscT@2". It could burn images and text onto the unused area of a CD-ROM. I just had to get it and did so, and I had a bit of fun with it.
I still have mine (in a firewire enclosure)! Last tested the DiscT@2 feature about four years ago, at the time qpxtool had a utility for burning the imagery under Linux.
I still have that particular Yamaha burner (CRW-F1). Besides DiscT@2, which I used to burn all types of useful information, it had really good burn quality. Given I used a good brand, none of the discs had rotted or lost data even after a decade.
I was going to say, I still have a 5 pack of Lightscribe DVDs unopened in a box specifically to save something "special" but obviously nothing has ever been special enough to warrant using them. And now that they aren't made anymore it would feel downright sacrilegious to use them, not to mention 4.7GB of capacity is just not enough for anything nowadays really.
4.7GB is quite enough for a standalone Linux DVD (for devices that still have DVD drives). Plus some cool art.
Might be a good idea to preserve a known-working distro for some old PC, especially for discontinued or less-used architectures. Just saw a discussion the other day about finding 32-bit Debian for an old laptop.
Yeah! I have had that exact same feeling! The one I remember burning the most was a collection of photos and movies of my family. I printed across the disc a photo of everyone. It was just so cool, even in black and white, but I always held back because they were a little expensive, and I wanted to save them for something really special! Had they been the same price as other discs.. I think I would have used them more.
I gave this a go about 3 years ago when the hackday project[1] first got published, it turns out choosing the parameters is _very_ disc dependent, since every disc is a little bit different (possibly even between lots of the same type, not published anywhere, and quite sensitive. I got it working for the CD-R's I got, but it took ~50 experiments to get ok parameters (the image was pretty good, but still wobbly in some areas of the disc).
That said, the end result is pretty cool, if hard to photograph.
Congrats to the author - a few decades ago I attempted the same, with very little success (using data tracks, not audio, which might have been my mistake).
The challenge (as I saw it) was that the drive has the option to toggle the state of the laser every sector, effectively letting it invert all your data if it wants to. To have control of the laser state, you need to be able to do perfect predictions if the drive will toggle or not.
Any unpredicted bit leads to the laser state toggling and the image being ruined.
Assuming control of the decision to toggle, could that be used to draw something even while burning useful data? Of course you would have very low precision, but still. Maybe an outline or something.
Readit News
It was also cool because the activity would blink purple (orange + blue) during writing. This set it apart when blue LEDs were all the rage.
some sort of feedback for rotation angle maybe?
Might be a good idea to preserve a known-working distro for some old PC, especially for discontinued or less-used architectures. Just saw a discussion the other day about finding 32-bit Debian for an old laptop.
That said, the end result is pretty cool, if hard to photograph.
[1] https://hackaday.io/project/186303-burning-pictures-on-a-com...
https://debugmo.de/2022/05/fjita-the-project-that-wasnt-mean...
I assume this isn't possible with a DVD/bluray due to the much much smaller pits.
Or, you know, higher resolution images.
But I can't actually imagine what it would look like. Sounds amazing though!
The challenge (as I saw it) was that the drive has the option to toggle the state of the laser every sector, effectively letting it invert all your data if it wants to. To have control of the laser state, you need to be able to do perfect predictions if the drive will toggle or not.
Any unpredicted bit leads to the laser state toggling and the image being ruined.