TWAIN scanner driver trouble

[thokon]

Hey guys,

I administrate an old Pentium III in our non-profit association where we help psychiatry patients when they have problems with the staff of hospitals or other institutions. Somebody donated an Agfa SnapScan 310p I have trouble installing. It's connected through a parallel port.

There is no driver for this model from Agfa for Windows XP. However I read in some forum that the AcerScan 310p is build identically and I managed to get hold of its driver MiraScan 3.42. After installing it Windows recognized the scanner and offered a Driver for the Agfa model from its own database.

The problem now is the TWAIN driver. The MiraScan TWAIN driver doesn't regognize the installed Agfa scanner nor does Agfa's TWAIN driver ScanWise I tried in version 2.0. Is there any general TWAIN driver I can try or is the TWAIN driver always specific to the scanner? Is there anything else I can try?

It would be realy usefull if we could make photo copies that way.

Thanks a lot!!

[tokenuser]

I dont think you'll have any success getting this working. XP had no support for parallel based TWAIN scanners - they needed to be SCSI or USB.

Something that might work is a parallel to USB adapter, and the USB based Agfa drivers. Doubtful - but if you cna find an adpater locally that can be returned if it doesn't work it might be worth a try (if the PC has a USB port - which might be on a later model PIII machine).

Sometimes technology is just too outdated to be recycled efficiently. You *might* be able to get it to work under a Linux distro, but given the age of the device, and its interface I think that is probably doubtful as well.

Good luck.

[thokon]

I thought SCSI was just an internal connector to attach drives similar to ATAPI. Or can it be SCSI over a parallel port? I think I saw something with SCSI in the device manager (don't know if it's really called like that in an english Windows) after installing the one or the other driver...

It has USB 1.1 but I don't think there's a place I can buy and return an adapter after I used it. But thanks for your effort!

[tokenuser]

SCSI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI) was mainly used for harddrives (especially in Macs), but was used for other things as well - such as CDRom drives, scanners, and even some highend (for the time) colour printers (my memory is fuzzy on this - we are going back to the early 90s - but I want to say the Tektronix Phaser printers were SCSI connected to Macs).

To be honest, I think that a scanner being hooked up to a PIII is going to be slow. Scanners are CPU intensive, and it will frustrate the hell out of anyone that needs to use it.

[burkhartmj]

SCSI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI) was mainly used for harddrives (especially in Macs), but was used for other things as well - such as CDRom drives, scanners, and even some highend (for the time) colour printers (my memory is fuzzy on this - we are going back to the early 90s - but I want to say the Tektronix Phaser printers were SCSI connected to Macs).

To be honest, I think that a scanner being hooked up to a PIII is going to be slow. Scanners are CPU intensive, and it will frustrate the hell out of anyone that needs to use it.

Can't comment on the connector working or not, but I have to agree that the scanner will be horrible on a PIII. Even on my old 2.8 GHz P4, my old USB scanner took forever to copy a page.