Please help!!!

I have a special offer for fi-5110EOXM (MAC version).

Do you think I can purchase the unit and use it in WindowXP?

WIll it works?

I do not rquires to use in MAC OS.

Thanks in advance.

LOL! By no means am I the "ScanSnap king"!

It was out of shear frustration I did this in the first place (I wasn't about to buy a new scanner either although the thought had crossed my mind once or twice while debugging this!

I doubt you'd believe me if I told you that I'm not an engineer; I work in marketing – it's the honest truth. I also just got a Mac this past year, so by no means am I an expert in OS X either.

What I did anyone could have also done if they would have just took the time. Once I figured out that you could turn an S300 into an S300M by loading the Mac firmware file under a Windows VM (then disconnecting the scanner and giving it back to the host OS) – I knew the Mac ScanSnap Manager could be re-written. It clearly wasn't a "hardware" limitation (given the firmware has to be loaded by the software each time the scanner is initialized.)

From there, all I did was use otool/otx to disassemble the code. Once I had the disassembly to work from, I used the assembler reference guide to decipher the instructions (in hex) along with a hex editor to re-write and patch the code in the appropriate addresses. (It's very tedious, but I was rather stubborn to get it working.)

It was fairly easy to locate the correct routines since the DevIDs of the scanners are clearly readable in the code (and I got those from the SANE supported device list web page.)

What I mean by that is you'd see a cmpw instruction along with 0x117F (S300M) DevID – so you knew for sure you found one of the code paths. Some of those DevIDs, would then need to be re-written for their PC-scanner counterparts – for instance, S300M – 0x117F needed to be changed to S300 – 0×1156 (or 5611 in hex) and so forth for all the different scanners. The rest of the code sections were documented well enough from the disassembler (i.e. firmware load, initialization, etc.), so when you were following the code paths you could see exactly where you were at least.

Essentially, there's only 3 unique scanner code paths in the drivers – S300M, S500M/S510M, and fi-5110EOXM. All the scanner types fall into one of those code paths which I then changed to support their PC-based counterparts.

There was only 1 other change I needed to do in order to fix a bug I found in the about->details menu. This was a bit more tricky, because I had to re-write the instructions (not just the DevIDs) to handle the other scanner types (this is where the assembler instruction guide came in handy.) Otherwise, it wouldn't correctly identify the scanner name in the details window, and at least for the S300 (I believe for others as well), it wouldn't show the correct icon in the dock and if it's running on USB or AC power (it's more cosmetic than anything, but I wanted it to be right.)

For the most part, it was just a bunch of trial and error to get it working (since I couldn't read through every line of code (there's literally tens of thousands of lines), so I made a lot of assumptions and took a *LOT* of guesses) – meaning, you make a change, and then test it out until I finally got the entire code-path working and debugged.

Surprisingly enough, there's already a lot of the PC-based scanner support code in the Mac ScanSnap Manager application so it wasn't a ton of work for me (there might be only 15 places I had to patch a few bytes). It looks like Fujitsu originally had it in the code, then pulled it out at the last minute for some reason (I'm certain the code was there then removed based on what's left.)

I recently emailed Fujitsu and asked them if they could provide cross platform support in their drivers for their other scanners now that they've released cross-platform support for their new S1500-series (obviously there's been a number customers complaining about it.) Hopefully, they'll have it in their heart to do it, but I'm still waiting on an answer (but I'm not holding my breath.)

Finally, I've documented my patch and also posted a link to download it in the MAC OS X Hints forum. This way if anyone would like to know what I did or learn from this then the information is available.

Anyway, even though it was a lot of "fun" to do – I'm glad at least that it's been helpful to others in the same situation as me (I'm definitely not alone.) My patch kit has already been downloaded almost 390 times so far without a single issue reported! Thanks!

Regards,
E

Honestly, the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners are really great – no complaints whatsoever except for one. Having switched to a Mac laptop for my new job ended up orphaning my S300 scanner (expensive paperweight) with no way to work on the Mac (it's ridiculous that Fujitsu does this) and I wasn't about to buy another one.

I tried just about everything to get the S300 scanner working with the MAC driver under OS X (including the resource swap trick with the Japanese driver – but it doesn't support S300, not to mention it's a complete waste of time), but it just doesn't work. Even though most of the code is in the MAC driver to support all of the PC-based ScanSnap scanners – Fujitsu just disables it in the initialization routine based on DevID's.

Essentially what I found out after a lot of testing is that there's no discernible difference between the the PC-variant and the MAC-variant scanner hardware – even the firmware for the S300 line is software loaded from the driver. The only real difference is the PCI Device IDs (0x117F vs. 0×1156), which holds true for the rest of the ScanSnap scanners.

After months of procrastinating I decided that I had enough of the VMware/VirtualBox solution and decided to just do a binary patch for the ScanSnap Manager software for the Mac and add support for all the ScanSnap scanners. Now the S300, S500, S510, and fi-5110EOX/2/3 scanners will work under OSX with the latest V2.2 L11 Mac ScanSnap drivers from Fujitsu (which was designed to work with the S300M, S500M, S510M and fi-5110EOXM scanners.) Go to forums at MAC OS X Hints, read through the thread to find the installation instructions and you will also find a link to download the patches that I created ( http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=32… ). It's a simple 1-step process to do the patch (just drag the ScanSnap Manager application on the patch utility and it does all the work for you plus it supports multiple languages!)

Finally, I also figured out and documented how to use MAC-based ScanSnap scanners on PCs (Windows) with a 1-line change to the device drivers. Even though I did it with the S300M, I'm positive it will work with the S500M, S510M, and fi-5110EOXM scanners. It's in the same MAC OS X Hints thread I linked to above (just read it for details.)

This should eliminate *all* cross-platform incompatibilities with the Scanners and the corresponding drivers.

Hopefully that will help others.