[Not even "Weird Al" could save it...]

This is great writing.

[I hate the CD-I and my TV.]

It's your TV. The CD-I is a high quality piece of electronics. They had to be for $700 at launch. The problem is with modern TVs. Almost nobody cares about composite or s-video anymore, so the quality controls on these ports is practically non-existant.

 

Do other things display OK in composite or s-video on your TV? If so, you might be able to get the CD-I to work if you route it through a VCR. Otherwise you should just get a CRT, which is something every retro-gamer should own anyway.

[Linksys WRT54G v4 firmware confusion]

I'd try OpenWRT. You should be able to compile a version that will do guest wifi. dd-wrt is practically dead from what I hear.

[Apple II Disk Image Related Things]

How is the terminal emulation with Proterm? I did this a while back with modem mgr, but I never could get it to work right. Any curses program was pretty much garbled.