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.
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.
Luckily blurays are still somewhat cheap in Japan so I stock up when I visit. Stored properly they should outlive me.
See https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/
Hell, I'm not even sure if it's plugged in at the moment, I may have unplugged it to plug in another hard drive...
It was really slow, but it did work.