Atari CDAR 504

This is a weird, questionable build, almost useless, hardly necessary unit in almost pant-wettlingly lovely Atari industrial design. I bought it for an eye-watering sum and it failed to function within about 10 seconds. What I paid didn't justify a non-working unit (regardless of how rare it is!) and so I returned it. I still question that decision.

It was an external CD player with Atari SCSI style connection and yet there were no CD-Player applications for the CDAR as it does not support those media commands.

There is this weird detachable remote on the front, which is the most plasticky thing you've ever held in your life and you use that to control four basic CD commands. You had to use the remote to do anything. It also doesn't support multisession CDROMs or data/audio hybrid discs. If you couldn't fill up half the disc with redbook audio, what was the point in having all that space? Especially when video playback couldn't compute the necessary decompression nor afford the silicon chips to do it either. Probably why nobody developed anything for it.

Apparently there was one Boeing Atari CD-ROM application, which held a comprehensive Boeing jet schematic. Atari probably only developed this to show the unit off.

It was reasonably straightforward inside, but with my amateur mind, there was nothing easily tweakable which might fix the thing (it just wouldn't fully power up).