I have been trying to use a parallel to USB converter to see if my old Olympus film scanner would be seen. As near as I can tell it appears to show up in the USB section of Hardware Information(Yast) as a printer!
I was wondering if I installed the Olympus software under Wine whether there would be the slightest possibility of getting this old film scanner to work. I have quite a large number of old slides that I would like to have as digital images without it costing an arm and leg. I tried one of the low to mid range USB film scanners but found that the quality was abysmal with an uncorrectable colour cast.
I am using a one year old tower PC with serial, usb, and 1394 sockets, 4 Gb memory, AMD Phenom quad core processor running 11.3 64 bit.
Anyone any ideas or suggestions?
IIRC the cheap USB<->PP converters support only printers, they don’t behave like a real PP and usually don’t work with other devices (like scanners, HW keys needed to run some software and so on).
Either try another USB converter (read the specs carefully or try it before buying!) or buy a PCI card (all of them should have “real” PP).
(I noticed that when I was looking for an USB<->PP converter for my old HP LJ5L, some product descriptions mentioned that…)
On 01/03/2011 02:36 PM, lslezak wrote:
>
> (I noticed that when I was looking for an USB<->PP converter for my old
> HP LJ5L, some product descriptions mentioned that…)
Off-Topic, but did you get a converter to work with a LJ5L? If so, what
make/model? I have that printer for my RV - perfect size. I still have a laptop
with a parallel port, but I’m looking for ideas when that box is no longer running.
Well a PP scanner will not have a USB ID and anyway the ID shown by lsusb is that of the USB converter, not the PP device. As mentioned, it depends on how good the PP emulation is and whether the scanner software needs to deal with real PPs.
On 2011-01-03 23:06, ken yap wrote:
>
> and whether the scanner software
> needs to deal with real PPs.
Reading data out of parallel ports was a hack. An usb emulator would have
to be real good to allow reading. It would also need some handling on the
linux software side.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
On 2011-01-04 04:06, ken yap wrote:
>
> robin_listas;2273405 Wrote:
>> Reading data out of parallel ports was a hack. An usb emulator would
>> have
>> to be real good to allow reading.
>
> Getting SPPs to return data was a hack using the 3 status lines, but
> later on bi-di ports (ECP?) provided a full 8-bit return channel.
Correct. And DMA as well (which I didn’t get to work). It was a very nice
feature for things like using an iomega zip drive over the parallel port:
that was what I had to use to move files on the field, there were no usb
thinghies then. Oh tempora! It was that or dozens of floppies.
I doubt an usb emulator does all that, it would need a special software
driver, too. But it would be certainly interesting.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
Of course it would. But it is possible with software technology to emulate a hardware port. All you have to do is get the CPU to trap on access to that port address and then the driver redirects the I/O instruction to actually generate a USB transfer. Virtual machines like VirtualBox do it all the time.
On 2011-01-04 16:36, ken yap wrote:
>
> robin_listas;2273577 Wrote:
>> I doubt an usb emulator does all that, it would need a special software
>> driver, too. But it would be certainly interesting.
>
> Of course it would. But it is possible with software technology to
> emulate a hardware port. All you have to do is get the CPU to trap on
> access to that port address and then the driver redirects the I/O
> instruction to actually generate a USB transfer. Virtual machines like
> VirtualBox do it all the time.
It should not be necessary to go that depth, in linux it is not necesary
for applications to handle hardware, that is reserved to the kernel. You
should only need to use the special files in /dev/*.
However, things like the iomega drive needed a kernel module which handled
the parallel port part. That module would have to be rewritten to use the
usb-lpt converter instead - my guess. Wild guess, really. I wonder if a
generic parallel-usb module could be written.
Virtual machine handling? Interesting idea.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
I wasn’t referring to any particular OS, just pointing out that you can emulate any particular hardware behaviour in software even though the hardware doesn’t really exist, provided the CPU has the appropriate traps. E.g. the virtual floppy drive in VirtualBox works for any guest OS. So there’s no reason a USB PP port adaptor cannot be made to look like a real one with the use of a driver. However if it’s only desired to emulate the behaviour of /dev/lp0, then the driver is simpler, it only has to support the usual I/O syscalls for the lp(4) device.
On 2011-01-04 22:36, ken yap wrote:
>
> I wasn’t referring to any particular OS, just pointing out that you can
> emulate any particular hardware behaviour in software even though the
> hardware doesn’t really exist, provided the CPU has the appropriate
> traps. E.g. the virtual floppy drive in VirtualBox works for any guest
> OS. So there’s no reason a USB PP port adaptor cannot be made to look
> like a real one with the use of a driver. However if it’s only desired
> to emulate the behaviour of /dev/lp0, then the driver is simpler, it
> only has to support the usual I/O syscalls for the lp(4) device.
Perhaps… perhaps… :-?
I think that solution may be too complex to exist. Dunno. Certainly
interesting, but… dunno.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
