” Bought this some years ago (2021) as a project. Turns out it’s a steeper learning curve than I was cut-out for; lost interest in it pretty quickly after fixing its most glaring issues. It’s sat around for a while, but fired right up again and played a CD after some coaxing (jiggled the ribbon cables to/within the CD mechanism). Priced to move to a new home.
CD does appear to work, technically, but it seems to need a few attempts to detect the CD. Maybe it’s because I really only have CD-Rs to work with, few pre-recorded/stamped/silver discs. Equipment of this era seemed a little iffy on whether they’d read CD-Rs properly. So I’m not really sure, thus, “iffy CD”.
I never was able to really confirm if the SCSI worked, because SCSI is a dark magic with far too many variations in the early years, and I never had the proper setup & software to make it work. I believe I was able to detect it as a device once with my Macintosh Classic (though software never ran), but with a PC and a Wide SCSI card, it just hung the bus whenever it was connected. Of course, it almost seems like the CD-ROM drive in the machine is *itself* a SCSI device, so… maybe?… it must be working. Akai had some weird magic of their own to have the machine work as either a host (to connect an external HDD, I think?) or a device (to connect to a computer). That’s wonky.
Instead of sitting around tediously grinding away at trying to fix every possible problem with this thing (my unfortunate affliction is an obsession with fixing every defect before selling it), I figure it’s better to list it here, sell it, and move on. There’s a great chance it’ll live a happier life in someone else’s hands, being fixed or not even noticed, than on my shelf gathering dust.” Click here to visit listing on eBay