[londons_explore]

Congrats to the author - a few decades ago I attempted the same, with very little success (using data tracks, not audio, which might have been my mistake).

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.

[lucianbr]

Assuming control of the decision to toggle, could that be used to draw something even while burning useful data? Of course you would have very low precision, but still. Maybe an outline or something.

[londons_explore]

Yes. You get the option to toggle the laser every 33 bytes, which is a lot of controllable toggles to make cool patterns.