After getting a bit tired of the death-countdown of region changes when watching American and European DVD’s, I have now successfully managed to avoid the issue altogether by re-flashing the firmware for the built-in UJDA745 DVD combo drive.. yaaay!

The process is not exactly straighforward, as the available tools assume you can use a bootable floppy (when I don’t even have a such an archane bit-reading device in my TR of course), but after a bit of fiddling and trickery I managed to get it to work by burning the image as a floppy disk emulation to CD with Nero (which I assume y’all have).

These are the steps, if anyone else is interested:

- Go to http://flashman.rpc1.org/Firmware/Matshita_UJDA745/

- Grab the “Fixed and patched firmware.zip” file

- Unpack it

- Take the mpatch.exe file found inside and instead of running
  it, open with something like WinRAR and extract the floppy
  disk image (MPATCH.IMA) found inside

- Fire up Nero and create a CD-ROM (Boot)

- Use MPATCH.IMA as the image file and create 1.44 MB floppy
  disk emulation

- Important: now add BMX102M.745 to the actual CD itself
  (this is the actual firmware and you’ll need this later)

- Burn the CD

- Boot from the CD

- Select the first option from the menu, and hit Ctrl-C after
  the MSCDEX driver loads to abort the autoexec.bat

- Run EXTRACT MPATCH.CAB *.* C:\ to extract tools to
  ramdisk

- run C:MSCDEX /D:MSCD001 to gain access to your CD

- copy D:\BMX102M.745 C:\

- now from C:\ run DRVLOADC /O /U /M BMX102M.745

- answer yes

- after you are returned to the C:\> prompt, turn your TR OFF
  and ON

- Remove the CD and boot XP

- Now when you start Nero Infotool you will see you have a

  Region Control: RPC I
  Region Code: All

  on your drive. Congratulations, and get out the Manga DVD’s! )

Hope this helps somebody, it took me a bit of fiddling to get it
to work…

  - stefan