A 20-year-old disc changer, reverse-engineered before FireWire dies
Claude helped control a 20-year-old Sony disc changer from a Mac mini. It found an earlier reverse-engineering write-up of the serial protocol, which sped up the work.
The full story
Jackson Tomlinson had a Sony VGP-XL1B, a 200-disc FireWire CD and DVD changer from the Windows Media Center era. It had been sitting in his car boot on its way to recycling. With macOS dropping FireWire support, he decided to see whether Claude could get it working with a Mac before that became impossible.
After chaining FireWire, Thunderbolt 2 and Thunderbolt 3 adapters to reach a modern Mac, Claude found why the device wasn't showing up. It then worked out the changer's SCSI command protocol, helped by an earlier reverse-engineering write-up it found. Two repositories and an afternoon later, the changer could load each disc in turn so it could be ripped, and 30 years of optical media now sit on his NAS.
Single blog post. The author also had to install an older, deprecated Claude Code version to keep it running on Catalina.
How it was done
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From the maker's own write-up or code. We summarise what they report; we haven't tested it ourselves.
- I reverse-engineered a 20-year-old disc changer before FireWire dies forever
The full story, from the adapter chain to the SCSI protocol and the ripping set-up.