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Comment by Topgamer7 | Hacker News Reader

> The software that drives these scanners is compiled for 32bit architecture and hasn’t been updated in well over 10 years

Might be worth it to try using Wine to run the windows software if they have windows drivers. Wine should run on mac if that's your poison.

> It seems the Firewire ports on these things start to go bad after about a decade. If that happens you’re looking at a 3,000 Euro repair bill

A soldering iron is cheap, and so are firewire ports on digikey. I doubt they invented their own proprietary firewire connection. Ferrari's use volvo parts, you can probably fix it for like $3.

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Does userland driver software, which probably wants to make all sorts of weird syscalls to communicate with hardware, tend to actually work under Wine?

It doesn't work, as far as I know, other than a specific category of WiFi drivers.

"It depends" there was definitely work to around scanners in Wine, there was SANE/TWAIN bridge at some point.

It's also work checking out SANE itself and seeing if anyone got the scanner working in Linux natively.

I'll second this. I bought some ridiculous behemoth of a Fujitsu scanner that could do 60ppm 20 years ago when it was manufactured and got it working under SANE in Linux. I reported a bug that they fixed to make it work (it didn't initially) I think because it had really old firmware they'd never seen before.

I'd suggest running Windows in a VM since USB passthrough is pretty dependable in that scenario. Presumably Firewire has similar transparency.

FireWire is a fundamentally different protocol, in that it has direct memory access. You have to treat it more like PCI than USB.

People have done it with vmware ESXi and passthrough. But you can't do it with say, Virtualbox. So with Firewire, real OS on the metal is usually the answer.

I have so far successfully: used eeprom programmers, flashed a multi of android software, interfaced with a PLC from under wine with no problems or workarounds whatsoever

Nice. Out of curiosity: all USB?

Heck, I’ll do it for the low cost of $1000, save 2 grand! Fixing a broken connector is trivial if you’ve done any soldering work.

I suspect the part that is failing is not the connector itself, but rather a controller chip somewhere upstream.

Given the skills you could def DIY repair it for cheaper, the high price is likely including uncertainty of what's broken and some form of warranty.

It could be Firewire controller chip getting probed by software for kind of MAC or ID for authentication and licensing.

That’s sounds even more devilish than keeping an obsolete app closed source.

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