With my recent fooling around with the zumiDrive diag program, it led me down a rabbit hole for the past week.
In short, with help from Crediar, we were able to dump the firmware from the Wii’s optical drive using the SPI GPIO’s on a Raspberry Pi 3B+.
Expect a full write up soon enough, but we are still working on this project. My end goal is to get the firmware from the RVT-R drives and write them to retail drive, converting them to RVT-R drives, and seeing if we can unlock DVD capabilities on newer drives, and region free drives if possible. Many of these things were only possible with certain drives or with the use of modchips. No promises.