Hugo told me when i was visiting the guys in Cambridge some weeks ago that the serial connector is a "standard 3 V serial interface". You just need a buffer and check the wiring to connect to a Terminal. Output should be like on the empeg serial port.

About the change of the CD-drive he mentioned, that the drivers were especially written for that model to get the best ripping results. There are some workarounds for firmware-bugs of the drive included. But just for testing purposes it should work with any CD-drive, i think...