The famous firmware repository RPC1.org is showing a message stating the site is going to shut down. The administrators write they've decided to no longer keep the site up as activity declined. RPC1.org will close on the 1st of June 2016. The site is named after RPC-1, a state in which an optical drive is not locked to a specific reason, was famous for distributing firmwares that removed the region code from many optical drives.
Region codes were a method of content distributors to restrict access to their movies and games to a specific region. Discs that were only for the American market could not be played in Europe and vice versa. By removing the region code from the optical drive, this restriction was removed. This allowed e.g. anime fans in the United States to watch movies that were normally restricted to the Japanese market.
RPC1.org site became a major repository and discussion forum on all kinds of firmwares of a variety of optical drives. The domain and likely the site too, originate from December 2002 and its end, 14 year later, marks the end of an era. With the declining use of optical drives and the rise of Netflix demand for removal of region codes also went down.
The message from the administrators thanks an array of people of which some have been active on CDFreaks (Myce) now too. We can only add that we thank them too for all their hard work over the years!
Thanks for the heads up Liggy.
