Printing to Epson R800 doesn't work

Discussion in 'Parallels Desktop for Mac' started by lumpidu, Jan 22, 2007.

  1. lumpidu

    lumpidu Bit poster

    Messages:
    3
    Hi,

    I installed the newest driver for my Epson R800 and connected it directly to the VM. However there seems to be no communication to it. I managed to see once a Ink fill level, but that was pretty it. USB communications seems mostly not working.
    I am using the newest VM from yesterday.

    Any hints ?


    Best regards,

    Daniel.
     
  2. BladeRunner

    BladeRunner Junior Member

    Messages:
    18
    I have an Epson R800 connected to one of the WinXP systems in my home office. The printer is shared. I can print on it - in color - from my WinXP virtual system under Parallels. I know that's not what you are attempting, but it does show that the basic Epson driver software will work in the Parallels environment.
     
  3. lumpidu

    lumpidu Bit poster

    Messages:
    3
    I want to get rid of my Windows Desktop

    Yeah, I really hate having this Desktop Computer next to my MacBook, only because of Printing. The Printer is not working on my MacBook. Besides that I use QImage, which is Windows only.

    Common Parallels team: it can't be that hard: Why aren't you simply tunneling the whole USB traffic through ?
     
  4. joem

    joem Forum Maven

    Messages:
    1,247
    You aren't the first one to make that point. In fact, it's been suggested just slightly fewer than 1,437,325 times. :rolleyes:

    USB support is improving in each release though.
     
  5. lumpidu

    lumpidu Bit poster

    Messages:
    3
    Okydoke, then I just have to wait. Can you give me a short Developer centric hint, what is the architecture behind this layer ? Probably you have to emulate an EHCI compliant PCI device. This is a few registers, which can be mapped 1:1 to the Macbook EHCI controller. Then I would take a shovel realtime task to minimize latencies and a few message queues for the different endpoints. Something like that ?
     
  6. joem

    joem Forum Maven

    Messages:
    1,247
    I don't know how they're doing it, but I'm sure that if it were simple it would be done by now. I suspect that intercepting the hardware would be easy, but passing the bits Parallels didn't want back to Apple, absent an Apple defined hook, would be difficult without emulating (or really reverse engineering) the Apple driver, and that would break the next time Apple changed it.

    They are aware of the importance of full USB passthrough, and have promised it for the future. My wild guess is that they are waiting for Apple to commit to a hook. But I've been wrong before.

    I have neither the time nor the inclination to take Parallels apart to see how it works. I just want to use it.
     
  7. dkp

    dkp Forum Maven

    Messages:
    1,367
    Have you tried installing Bonjour for Windows from Apple.com? If not it may solve your problem. The printer remains an OS X connected resource but via Bonjour it becomes available to Windows, and Windows apps use the native drivers. Bonjour passes the print stream through to OS X which passes it untouched to the printer. Worth a look, at least.
     

Share This Page