Re: [PARPORT] MicroSolutions backpack cd-rewriter


Karl-Max Wagner (karlmax@oberland.net)
Wed, 7 Jul 1999 13:27:50 +0000 (GMT)


> The recent backpack CD-RW drives use a different protocol from the rest
> of the backpack family.
>
> As you may be aware, MicroSolutions is unwilling to support the development
> of open-source drivers for their products. The existing drivers have
> been developed entirely by reverse engineering the protocols from traces
> of the DOS drivers in operation. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell,
> the newest adapter is not supported by any DOS driver, so I would not
> be able to reverse engineer the protocol, even if I were to get my hands
> on a drive.

Yeah, this pattern is not so uncommon :-(((((((.

However, it might be interesting that Wolfgang
<scherr@net4you.net>, who is working at a driver for the
Miro/Pinnacle DC1 framegrabber card and who has to entirely rely
on reverse engineering under Windoze is about to build a
hardware tracer card for tracing selected adresses on the bus.
AFAIK it is for the ISA bus right now - so to use it best use a
plug in paralell port interface.

At the moment he is about to build the prototype. As soon as the
prototype works the design will be made available publicly under
GNU/GPL.

I STRONGLY recommend contacting him and telling him about your
needs - this way your input can be put into his design (right
now or in the next release).

Anyway, thanks for the tremendous amounts of good work you did.
I also rely heavily on some of your drivers. Please keep on
going !

================================================================
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Wed 07 Jul 1999 - 12:38:20 EDT