Best way is to look up in google known supported cd burner drives by apple. I know my yamaha worked without drivers, but it was scsi on a blue and white. Lots of drives are supported. Just have to look it up. IDE drives should be pretty cheap just look up the cheapest and oldest new drive off new egg so you get a returnable warrenty, look that drive up to see if its mac supported.
I have quite a few stocked up :-D I'll just have to find one to do the job. I was hoping this black teac 48x could do it, but osx doesn't even see it other than a cd rom.
I used PatchBurn on the CD-RW I put in my Blue & White G3 (though that was ages ago). I believe it does exactly what you're looking for... it lets you create a new profile for an unsupported internal CD/DVD burner.
I was able to use one of these in a G4 Gigabit that I pulled from my stock of old PC burners. It burned discs without modification in OS 9 and in Tiger. DVDs also played fine in OS 9 and Tiger. I've heard other Sony models work, but I have only got multiples of this same model so I cannot confirm.
Patchburn is the way to go... I've used it and burned without a problem using DVD and CD burners from Imation, Sony, Pioneer, BenQ, and Lite-On on 10.3 on my B+W G3 and my Yikes G4 as internal IDE drives, and also on iMacs as Firewire external devices.