Tuesday, October 13, 2015

ActionPrinter 2000 in Mess - awesome work by Ramiro Polla

http://blog.arrozcru.org/?p=11
http://blog.arrozcru.org/?p=38

So I started fiddling around with MESS. It already had some incomplete drivers for the Epson LX-800 and Epson EX-800 printers. I used them as a basis to get my head around the MESS codebase and add support for the ActionPrinter 2000. It shouldn’t be so hard, right? (whenever I ask “right?”, the answer is “wrong”).

...

I got a few more instructions being run and the firmware would hang again. At this point it was getting complicated having to read the assembly all the time, so I started manually decompiling the firmware. It is a 32 KB firmware. It shouldn’t take too long, right? (remember: the answer is “wrong”)

...

At this moment we take a little pause. We need to realize that the work up to here has already taken me many months. It may seem simple when being read in a blog post, but it was a lot of hard work.


I love it. I wish I had the skills to do hardware hacking...

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