Re: Umax Parallel

Klaus Espenlaub (espenlaub@informatik.uni-ulm.de)
Tue, 30 Nov 1999 08:39:43 +0100

Oliver Rauch wrote:
>
> Lauren Matheson wrote:
>
> > Has anyone had success getting information from Umax on their parallel
> > scanner format? I've mailed them, but no response...
>
> UMAX does not give out the parallel port protocoll.
> If you want to try again contact umax taiwan, they are
> the developers of the umax scanners/firmware.

... or you could try to get the TWAIN driver running under WINE. Open source
emulators (WINE, dosemu, ...) are a great reverse engineering tool, because
decent operating systems can control almost anything going on inside the
system/computer hardware. So WINE has some code that actually does the
printer port emulation. At least it should.

By the way: is their scanner driven by a SCSI-over-parallel protocol (which
means that there is some SCSI driver installed by the Umax software) or is
it some fully proprietary protocol? If it's SCSI then you can cut a few
corners.

<RANT>
It's very tiring always nag the large companies into releasing the specs.
Especially Taiwanese/Japanese/Korean companies usually don't document
anything. It's a shame, because they should do whatever it needs to sell
more scanners. Linux is a small, but quickly growing market for their
cheap rubbish. The Linux developers even write the drivers themselves.
No other driver developers are that cheap. Probably they don't want to have
anything on paper, because then everyone could see how badly
designed/bug-ridden their stuff is and would laugh at them.
</RANT>

Klaus

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