ScanMate Plus debugging

[Heinz]

Hi,

I recently got a really cheap ScanMate Plus. I know it's not the best scanner and super old (heck I couldn't even find the exact specs anywhere) but it cost me 50 bucks and I want to learn a bit about drum scanning - so it felt like a perfect opportunity. That said I ended up slightly stuck with too many unknowns (aka cheapest components I could find) to be really sure how to best progress. In other words, I'd love some advice from ppl that know what they're doing .

The setup/status

ScanMate Plus

It powers on and goes to "ready" when the mac is powered up too.

G8 Mac

Boots, seem to work well, I installed ColorQuartet 5.2.2 on it, and right now starting CQscan hangs indefinitely seemingly in the SCSI probe from what I can tell the console says.


ATTO UL3D SCSI card

Recognized by the OS, the iotool shows the card and the different SCSI id's (all empty/unused), I suspect something here.

Small stuff

I have a 68 -> 50 SCSI cable I connect the scanner with, and a active 50 SCSI terminator I put in the second port of the scanner.

Console

This is what baffles me the most, my reading suggests that the serial port on the scanmate (at least 4000, I couldn't find an older manual) should activate debug mode when the toggle switch 8, with 9600 Bound, 8 bits, 1 stop bit, no parity. I get nothing from that.


So bottom line, any advice on debugging this further? My next ideas are:

1) Try OS X 9 with Color Trio or an older version of ColorQuartet
2) Try to find some old cheap SCSI device to validate that the card can detect devices (I don't think it's a problem as I can list the SCSI items but better safe than sorry)
3) Perhaps it's a cable issue?
4) Validate the Serial Port connection with another device with a serial port (I might have an old switch somewhere that has one, but I used the connector successfully before so I don't think that is it either)
5) Open up the scanner and poke at the internals (what could go wrong?)
6) Try to find a g4 mac (I read some horror stories about g5's not working, I would like to avoid that as well more computers take more space)
7) Try to find a windows XP machine that I could try with (or a SCSI card that would do the trick in a VM)

Any other suggestions?

[FotoD]

I've only used the 5000 on Windows.
From (hazy) memory:
-The serial connection activates when you power up the machine and says "Hello World.." etc. If you don't listen at power up you can't see the menu.
-The serial cable is non standard and requires switching cable/connector on a couple positions.
-I would start by fixing the SCSI. The serial connection is only useful if you need to calibrate etc. (which you probably will eventually)
-Have you tried all SCSI IDs by flipping the dip switches?
-According to people on the internet not all SCSI adapters seem to work with the Scanmate.

There's lots of info in this thread:
https://www.rangefinderforum.com/node/142313

Good luck!

[Heinz]

Hi FotoD,

thank you so much for your reply!

The serial cable is going to be interesting, when you mentioned it I noticed that the cable I used was also non-standard for a certain brand of switches so I'll have to experiment a bit. And you're totally right, SCSI is the first hurdle, might be that the G5 isn't a good choice as it limits the available SCSI cards are very limited. I'll read through the thread on rangefinder forum it's huge! thanks for that resource !

Cheers,
Heinz