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Making a bit of order at home, and we needed to decide what to do with my old A4 scanner. An Agfa Snapscan 1236s.
It is a SCSI scanner of a manufacturer that stopped making scanners in 2001... connected to an Adaptec 2940UW (one of the more popular cards at the time). Luckily my mainboard has 1 available PCI slot... you can see where this is going!
While Windows 10 did not have a driver for the 2940UW, I did manage to install an older unsigned one (reboot into troubleshooting mode).
Microsoft has a legacy SCSI scanner, but somehow it did not make the scanner show up in device manager - not sure if it does anything actually.
The bios of the host adapter listed the scanner as one of the connected devices, so it is still alive (as I thought).
The Agfa software refused to install, but the installer is a simple self-extracting zip, so I extracted it and tried running it directly. It complained about some missing resource files; they were in different subfolders so I just copied them in the folder of the exe.
And lo and behold: it works! The scanner still scans as beautifully as it did nearly 25 years ago! Windows does not see the scanner, so no possibility to use more modern tools but the Agfa software sees it and allows me to scan to jpg and tif (with full access to all quality settings the scanner offers). We don't need it often, but it will offer better quality than using our phones (Microsoft Office Lens - quite good for the purpose).
It felt like a bit of retro computing, nostalgic but rather fun... the humming of the scanner was the icing on the cake.
It is a SCSI scanner of a manufacturer that stopped making scanners in 2001... connected to an Adaptec 2940UW (one of the more popular cards at the time). Luckily my mainboard has 1 available PCI slot... you can see where this is going!
While Windows 10 did not have a driver for the 2940UW, I did manage to install an older unsigned one (reboot into troubleshooting mode).
Microsoft has a legacy SCSI scanner, but somehow it did not make the scanner show up in device manager - not sure if it does anything actually.
The bios of the host adapter listed the scanner as one of the connected devices, so it is still alive (as I thought).
The Agfa software refused to install, but the installer is a simple self-extracting zip, so I extracted it and tried running it directly. It complained about some missing resource files; they were in different subfolders so I just copied them in the folder of the exe.
And lo and behold: it works! The scanner still scans as beautifully as it did nearly 25 years ago! Windows does not see the scanner, so no possibility to use more modern tools but the Agfa software sees it and allows me to scan to jpg and tif (with full access to all quality settings the scanner offers). We don't need it often, but it will offer better quality than using our phones (Microsoft Office Lens - quite good for the purpose).
It felt like a bit of retro computing, nostalgic but rather fun... the humming of the scanner was the icing on the cake.
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