I am going from memory from about a week ago, and much has happened since then.

When first plugging in the player, the various motors spun up, but nothing of consequence came of it, and the player errored out. It came without a remote, and was entirely useless.

Knowing a fair bit about how these sorts of devices work, I figured it was bad drive belts. It is 23 years old, after all. I was right. One of the little black belts had fallen off the pulleys that loads the discs, and the one that spins the carousel had melted. I took the stretched belt from the loading mechanism and put it onto the larger carousel pulleys to get the carousel working again. I was still getting the "Load Error" of course. After digging through my entire apartment for materials to make a temporary belt out of, I came up with tape. I wasn't going to order new belts for a player that might have far more wrong with it. I carefully cut very thin strips of Gorilla tape and made various sizes of super sticky belts until I got one that fit and didn't slip off the pulleys.

I ran a few different versions of this super sticky belt for about a week, until today, when that finally fell off and refused to stay on.

I initially had serious problems with the discs skipping as well, so I tried cleaning the lens. I started by just taking a clean cotton swab and gently spinning it on the lens. This was better, but there was still much skipping. I then turned to a glasses lens wipe and gently scrubbed the lens with that, and let it dry. There was a significant improvement, but there were still a few skips at random. Another good scrubbing got it working well, and it hasn't skipped in about a week of near constant use.

With the lens restored, new belts on the way, a replacement remote found, a PDF copy of the manual, and much new knowledge of this obscure device gained, I've been happily shuffling almost 70 discs nonstop for days now. Considering that these players go for about $200 to $600 USD these days, I'd say I got an amazing deal on this one.