Re: [Gimp-print-devel] Oki Hiperc driver development - C5250, C3200...

[Robert L K. <rl...@al...>]

   Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2007 20:17:01 +0200
   From: Andreas Weller <we...@an...>

   Hi!
   There's no free Driver for the hiperc language used to control Oki's GDI
   color laser printers.
   I had several ideas to reverse engineer Oki's protocol:

   1.) Using the MacOs X (intel) driver under Linux:
   file identifies the binary as "Mach-O bundle ppc" or "Mach-O fat file
   with 2 architectures". But there's no Mach-O to ELF converter I heard
   about. So this seems to be a dead-end :-(

That would have copyright problems, in addition to not being useful
for architectures other than x86/PPC.

   2.) Try to dissect hiperc by analyzing the output generated by the Win
   Driver:
   I printed several documents (empty page, one letter only, b/w and color
   only) for opening them with a hex editor. In the empty page I discovered
   blocks of "03 00 FF 02 00 00 00 17" (repeating 27 times). AFAIK the data
   transferred to the printer must be represented as bitmap. But how to
   discover which compression scheme is used? Is there any tool for
   examining unknown picture file formats?

There's no general tool; you have to analyze the output patterns by
hand until you can figure out what the patterns are.  We can discuss
this on the list; some of us have experience doing this kind of
reverse engineering.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rl...@al...>

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lp...@uu...
Project lead for Gutenprint   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton