Scanulator

Feeling pretty good today as I've managed to get a dead old scanner working on my old computer. It was originally my uncles and he didn't really use it that much before punting it over to me when he got an all singing all dancing printer / scanner combo. After locating all the bits including 'cutting edge parallel cable' and driver disk complete with MicroGrafx* picture publisher in both 16 and 32 bit flavours, It was time to install.


Looking at the 16it folder on the disk I saw it was broken down into 5 disk folders which if it wasn't for them entirely housed on CD would require an awful lot of disk swapping, thankfully though we XP and so can use the 32bit folder. Helpfully the autorun works so it doesn't require you to do that even simply boot up and install off of the CDROM. Simply installing Micrografx Picture Publisher and then the Driver software will do the job. We were shocked when it actually worked first time with no problems.

We were also shocked when upon saving a scan it gave out options to transfer at modem transfer speeds in either 14.4k and 28.8k flavours. It also proclaimed itself to be the best graphics utility on the market. Which it probably was back then (although with choices to save as a Photoshop file that was then as now a moot point). It was certainly no better than Amiga stuff at the time like P Paint or XI Paint.

Also seeing as its the bad old days and that, you get the odd dialogue box that makes no sense and even less help, whatsoever.

This is what you get sometimes, when installing the main driver.

Of course you'll want to make use of something more modern rather than rely on a program who's guts have long since been absorbed by the Corel corporation. So I decided to see if it could be handled entirely through paint.net. Now its hardly my first choice of paint program but seeing as its A. free and B. already loaded up on XP we gave it a go.

First hurdle, seeing as its not my main PC anymore, its not connected to the internet. So their help file is useless. Firing up my main rig I find out I need twainable, a plug in that lets you use scanners with paint.net. Installing and switching this across with a thumb drive, means that with some poking we can now take images with paint.net.
(located in the effects menu, use grab from clipboard.)

Post script: we were hoping to create an ISO. image from the main CDROM but to be honest, who wants an ancient version of Micrografx, an even more ancient version of Acrobat reader and what little driver software there is on a Multi language CD.
Incidentally if anyone has a Plustek Optic Pro 4831p Scanner and has lost their driver disk then they are located here along with a whole lot more Plustek stuff. Oh and the actual scans.... Damn guess I just forgot.
Maybe later Jack.

* oh and Finally Micrografx still exist its just that all the graphics stuff they used to do are now part of Corel. They do other stuff as outlined in their link above.