There is a technique I have used for some time to get CD Architect to work with fairly recent drives; I suspect it is confined to MMC compliant drives and will undoubtedly attract sneers of derision from the official support folks but the bottom line it that it works - and is simple to implement!
In the CDA main directory you will find a large number of files with the .CDD extension. These contain a lot of tables and quite probably executable code peculiar to individual drives. The files of interest in this case are ATAPIMMC.CDD and SCSIMMC.CDD. Open the file of interest with a hex editor and search for, say, PLEXTOR. Very soon you will come across some table entries for the Plextor drives supported by that module. Simply modify the drive identification code to that of your modern drive; job done!
Using this method I have achieved 100% success in getting CDA to support a Yamaha 8424, and Plextor models 1210A and 8220. It is only with my most recent acquisition (Plextor 2410A) that I've encountered a problem. As I said, up to now my other drives have all worked 100% including the selection of available burn speeds - I guess these are read from the target drive. But my newest drive only allows a speed of 'max' and it gets the 'time remaining' calculations all wrong. However, the resultant burn is fine, given sufficiently good media. I assume that CDA in its quaint old way doesn't believe that a drive could possibly report '24' as a burning speed :-)
In the CDA main directory you will find a large number of files with the .CDD extension. These contain a lot of tables and quite probably executable code peculiar to individual drives. The files of interest in this case are ATAPIMMC.CDD and SCSIMMC.CDD. Open the file of interest with a hex editor and search for, say, PLEXTOR. Very soon you will come across some table entries for the Plextor drives supported by that module. Simply modify the drive identification code to that of your modern drive; job done!
Using this method I have achieved 100% success in getting CDA to support a Yamaha 8424, and Plextor models 1210A and 8220. It is only with my most recent acquisition (Plextor 2410A) that I've encountered a problem. As I said, up to now my other drives have all worked 100% including the selection of available burn speeds - I guess these are read from the target drive. But my newest drive only allows a speed of 'max' and it gets the 'time remaining' calculations all wrong. However, the resultant burn is fine, given sufficiently good media. I assume that CDA in its quaint old way doesn't believe that a drive could possibly report '24' as a burning speed :-)