Re: How to support a scanner without documentation

From: John Fremlin (vii@penguinpowered.com)
Date: Sun Jun 18 2000 - 16:03:54 PDT

  • Next message: Andrew R Reid: "Agfa Snapscan installation"

    Henning Meier-Geinitz <hmg-ml@gmx.de> writes:

    [...]

    > I have a Scanner supplied with a MS Windows driver and want to
    > support it by a SANE backend. I need to know the SCSI commands and
    > buffers the driver sends to the scanner (and the scanner's response).
    > The same goes for USB and parallel port scanners.

    Oliver Neukum and I did this for the Microtek USB scanners, but we
    were given the SCSI command set.

    There is a program called sniffusb downloadable that'll dump the USB
    transactions made by Windows drivers. I wrote a program (usb-robot) to
    let spit these transactions back at the device under linux (or other
    transactions of your choice). See
    http://altern.org/vii/programs/usb-robot/ for info and link to
    sniffusb. Note: this site is on the point of being taken down by the
    french government's heavy handed anti-annonymity legislation (see
    http://altern.org).

    [...]

    > 2) VMWARE: This doesn't work at the moment because only SCSI disks and
    > tapes are supported. According to VMWARE this may change in future.
    > I haven't checked parallel and USB devices.

    Didn't use to do USB.

    [...]

    > doesn't insist on their own winaspi.dll only (not
    > wnaspi32.dll). If somebody is interested I can email the dll and
    > source code.

    Don't hide your light under a bushel! Release it, even if it doesn't
    work very well! There's bound to be someone wanting to reverse
    engineer something who doesn't have this expertise.

    > 5) Disassembling the Windows driver: I have never done this, other
    > people on this list may talk about this. I think it's a lot of
    > work and needs good understatement of assembler and the windows
    > API.

    The assembly is usually pretty simple (stupid compiler generated
    stuff) but likely to be very long (lots of boring work, you might like
    to look at a program called BIEW), and the quirks of Windows APIs are
    not to be messed with.

    [...] 

    -- 

    	http://altern.org/vii

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