[sane-devel] Another platform for sane

[Peter Coghlan]

Hello,

A friend gave me his Agfa snapscan 310 SCSI scanner. I connected it
up to my old VAX at home which runs VMS (aka OpenVMS) and begun
the quest for some software to use it. I came across sane, downloaded
version 1.0.17 and gave it a go. I was very impressed by the
portability of the code and had very little difficulty getting it to
compile under VMS 7.1.

After some coding (mainly an additional section in sanei_scsi.c plus
a few run time routines not provided by VMS), I now have scanimage
working and producing scans. At the moment it is sort of
proof-of-concept level as I only implemented very basic synchronous
SCSI communication and a single statically linked backend. Hopefully,
in the future, I will find time to improve on this now that I know
that the basics work.

I have only tried the snapscan backend so far as I have no other
scanners to test with. Hopefully, other (SCSI) backends should be
just as easy to get working. I have not looked at frontends
other than scanimage. I have also compiled the code on a Dec Alpha
machine running VMS with no problems, although I do not have a
scanner attached to that machine to test with. I suspect it should
also compile ok on Itanium machines running VMS and hope to test
this shortly.

I don't suppose there is much interest in this out there, but I
thought I would people know that it can be done, just in case
someone somewhere is interested.

Thanks to all the developers for providing an excellent software
package.

Regards,
Peter.