CrossOver Support - Community Forums

Hi...

I've been a fan of crossover for the past year and it's worked great for those few Windows programs there just aren't equivalents for on the Mac.

I've be holding off upgrading to Lion because of one issue. I have an older HP ScanJet 4670 scanner that I just love and which is no longer supported on the Mac by HP. For some reason this wonderful piece of hardware has no driver for it since about Tiger or so. In fact it only runs on Snow Leopard with Rosetta and using a third party scanner program (VueScan).

Since Rosetta is dropped from Lion, it kind of kills this scanner, which is just plain dumb as it's perfectly good and there is no vertical format scanner like it on the market today. I do have VMWare Fusion for running full blown Windows on, but what a pain to launch it when I only need to scan one page!

Do you think there is any way I could install the Windows scanner driver for this and then run the Windows version of VueScan? Seems like a long shot but I have to ask!

Thanks very much.

Deborah Oakley

This is a badnews-goodnews story.

I had an Epson Stylus CX6000 that scanned fine using Image Capture (in Applications) back in early Snow Leopard. It was USB Connected.

I moved it to an Airport Express so I could print to it across the room.... this worked fine through SnowLeopard and Lion -- but I could not scan with it unless I moved it back across the room and plugged the USB cable back in.

The poor thing finally stopped loading paper just before Thanksgiving, so I looked about, discovered from Epson that the entire Stylus Line (which was everybody was offering sales on) had been discontinued and replaced with the Workforce and Artisan lines.... Then I got the Micro Center "Thanksgiving sale" flyer, and bingo they had a nice shiny new Epson Workforce 630 on sale for 60% off!.... so I brought it home on Wednesday... (11/23/11).

Bingo, this is a WiFi printer, and I can print, scan and fax, directly from Lion - as well as from my Snow Leopard MacBook Pro. (So far I haven't tried to access it from anything within CrossOver or CrossOver Games.) Scanning is done via Apple's Image Capture Utility. Epson's scanner software doesn't work, and I haven't tried any of the other TWAIN scanning/OCR utilities I have as yet.

So, in short... it looks like the WiFi (AirPrint) solution may be the answer.

Image Capture doesn't see any scanner connected when I have it plugged into a USB port...why on earth would it see it through an AirPrint connection? I have an AirPort Extreme wireless router, so I could give it a try but I'm 99.9999% certain it won't work either....AirPrint barely works with my older Canon i860 printer, so I just run that directly off my iMac and it works better. Can't imagine a scanner working any better.

There needs to be an Intel driver for this scanner, and unfortunately HP in their infinite wisdom has decided to not support it since PPC days. Googling turns up a fair number of his on this issue, so there are plenty of others who are similarly peeved. Corporations like this ought to face penalties for generating needless e-waste. This is a perfectly functional device that needn't be tossed simply because there isn't a small piece of code to make it work. I wish one of the wizards out in Internet Land would write one for Lion, but that seems unlikely. American stupidity at its finest. For years and years I was a loyal fan of HP products...from calculators to plotters to printers and computers, but no longer!

I'm just hoping against hope that Crossover can make this work, but I just don't know how I'd go about it if it is. I may be stuck with needing to run Windows in a virtual machine after upgrading to Lion. Inconvenient at best, but at least it works.

Anyone else out there have any ideas or know if this is possible?

Thanks,

Deb

Deborah Oakley wrote:

Hi...

I've been a fan of crossover for the past year and it's worked great
for those few Windows programs there just aren't equivalents for on
the Mac.

I've be holding off upgrading to Lion because of one issue. I have
an older HP ScanJet 4670 scanner that I just love and which is no
longer supported on the Mac by HP. For some reason this wonderful
piece of hardware has no driver for it since about Tiger or so. In
fact it only runs on Snow Leopard with Rosetta and using a third
party scanner program (VueScan).

Since Rosetta is dropped from Lion, it kind of kills this scanner,
which is just plain dumb as it's perfectly good and there is no
vertical format scanner like it on the market today. I do have
VMWare Fusion for running full blown Windows on, but what a pain to
launch it when I only need to scan one page!

Do you think there is any way I could install the Windows scanner
driver for this and then run the Windows version of VueScan? Seems
like a long shot but I have to ask!

Thanks very much.

Deborah Oakley

Hi,

....I'm just a little confused here ...when you say "[i]In fact it only runs on Snow
Leopard with Rosetta and using a third party scanner program (VueScan)[/i]", are you saying
you use that setup to access the scanner via a win32 app running under crossover?...

...if so, and seeing you've identified that Rosetta has been dropped from MacOS 10.7.x,
then the moment you upgrade your MacOS, you are going to loose that functionality altogether
by the looks..in your OS, crossover. and wrt to VueScan -- instant large paper-weight, as
you've already somewhat surmised....

... you won't be able to install windows drivers for the scanner ; with little doubt, they
will be expecting a 'real' windows kernel & USB driver stack to work/communicate with the
device -- windows drivers will only work if you install Windows (be that via bootcamp or by
using a virtual machine like VMware) ....

... I gather you're stuck in that place between a rock & a tight space, wherein you'd like
to update your MacOS to take advantage of 10.7.x improvements, but, you don't want to do
that if it impacts on your crossover usage (which it definitely will by the looks) ; I'm
not sure what I would do, short of buying a new scanner...

.... my immediate notion (which I just did =) was check on ebay for one of the older mac
mini machines ..<grin> .... I mean, either way you have figured the situation correctly ;
you are going to need another machine/OS to service the scanner, if you take your current
Mac to Lion, and the question could be is that to be a virtual machine or the real thing?
Old mac minis are pretty cheap ...hehe... but obviously it depends on what you want to do,
how crazy/fanatical you are (apparently wanting to keep older, perfectly serviceable gear
running and productive can be considered that =) Don't worry ; I empathize around such
premises -- I still have my old Amiga machines, and a 266mhz pentium box with a genuine
voodoo2 card to play 1 game the way it was meant to be played (sorry nvidia =), so I do
know where you're coming from (and also know the industry conspires to have us buy new stuff)...

Cheers!

edit: as I posted, I just realized you were using the windows version of VueScan - eyes open ;)

Okay, so I see there's a little misunderstanding.

I do not currently run the scanner with a Windows driver...I run it with a Mac driver written for PPC code...and it only runs through Rosetta. Remove Rosetta and the scanner is, as you say, a large paperweight, simply because HP has chosen to not write a driver for this scanner for the newer Macs with Intel processors. Very bad of HP. ☹️

I can also run it in Windows via virtualization (VMWare Fusion at the moment, but may be switching to Parallels, though that's a different topic). What I like so much about this scanner is that it stands vertically vs. horizontally, so takes little desk space, and also has a removable see-through scanning system that is fantastic for scanning books by placing it face down on the book. There's nothing like it on the market any longer, and thus my desire to keep it.

If I upgrade to Lion, I lose Rosetta. I'm grasping at straws here to find a way to run it without having to launch Windows, but it's looking like that will just not be possible. I definitely will not be adding hardware to use an old scanner (I'd bite the bullet and buy a new scanner before that). I think I'm just stuck with needing to use virtualized Windows. Not a killer but a definite pain. After 20+ years of broken promises by Microsoft I finally jumped ship for Mac and would love to break the tie, but for those few programs for which there is no equal (mostly high end CAD used in architecture and building engineering (my actual profession).

But if anyone comes up with a brainstorm on this (or would like to while her or his idle hours away writing a Mac system driver for the scanner!), I'm all ears.

Alright, I've done some googling of my own this morning, hoping that some Ninja searching would turn up a bit more of hope for you.
The HP Scanjet 4600 series looks awesome, too bad it's not really around anymore, I think I would have loved it!

Anyway, after quite a bit of reading, I know we cannot help. CrossOver relies on the drivers your Mac has and without those working properly, CrossOver is not the solution for you.

That said, I did stumble across some other possible solutions (SANE, Hamrick, Chmil). All of their solutions came up dry, quoting the same as your description above "not supported because of the need to use Rosetta to gain the PPC plugin".

I then had another thought -and you'll have to forgive me as I don't use this software myself, so I'm suggesting something third hand- and after another spat with google, I've found someone who has accomplished it. You can actually try it within your current setup to verify it works before you upgrade to Lion.

The solution I found is here. The thread does mention some of the other possibilities... but the most interesting thing it talks about is putting Snow Leopard on VirtualBox. I know it's not a trivial (easy) setup to get going, but once you have the machine up and running within your Snow Leopard OS, you should be able to back it up, upgrade to Lion and then restore the Snow Leopard Virtual Machine within your Lion box. The advantage here is that you can have Virtual Box running as a guest operating system from your Lion system (no rebooting!).

I do wish I had more experience with it, but I am not a Virtual Box power user so I can't offer more than lip service. Of course we would love to have you as a customer, but first and foremost we want to see you get up and running (whether it's using CrossOver or something else, in this case CrossOver is not the solution). I sincerely hope this helps you get your scanner running.

Hi for scaner HP ScanJet 4670 in mac os x use VueScan http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/vuescan.htm#hp
it full works and ease use..

Read my original post...I use VueScan. But no, it will not work without a driver. Says incompatible right on the VueScan web site as well. "This scanner isn't supported on Mac OS X Lion, since HP uses a PowerPC plugin for this scanner and Rosetta isn't available with Lion."

Thanks so much for doing the digging on this.

I really see no benefit to using VirtualBox as it's essentially akin to running Windoze 7 in VMWare Fusion...still is virtualization. And on top of that I'd STILL need to run Rosetta...so in a sense I'd be virtualizing a virutalized driver!!! At least the Windoze driver is native. I whittled down the memory requirement for Win7 and the boot time is much faster, plus I can put it into suspend and it seems to work well...take about a minute to restart, and I think that's acceptable. I'd rather avoid that and run a native Mac application, but looks like this will be my best option after upgrading. I'd just assume not upgrade because I haven't seen anything terribly compelling about Lion after working with it for a few hours on my father's new iMac. But unfortunately I DO want to use iCloud and will be forced to migrate from MobileMe by mid '12 anyway, so I might as well and go ahead and do the upgrade sooner than later. I'm just trying to make sure I know what I'm getting into.

But as far as my business is concerned, I do have a registered copy of Crossover and do run a few of my favorite older Windoze programs (TextEdit is one) on it, plus I do think MS Office on the PC is a bit better than on the Mac.

Thanks again for your help!