I’m helping my dad with a SciTex scanner – I think it’s a SciTex EverSmart Supreme? It’s a similar proposition in many ways as far as I know. High-end professional equipment from the golden age of digital prepress. Firewire is involved. Will essentially only run on old Macs. With the SciTex scanners I believe a PowerPC Mac is a requirement in practice.
From reading the post, the biggest issue with these Hasselblad scanners is of course the scanner mainboard, and I assume the same is true of the Scitexes.
A smaller problem is needing to have old Macs around. Regarding that, I am now curious if SCSI/Firewire controller passthrough into a VM can help. In the same way that recent PC hardware can pass a PCI-Express GPU into a virtualized macOS guest. MacOS VMs in qemu-kvm on recent Linux kernels running on IOMMU-enabled hardware affords a lot of control and compatibility – the guest OS gets direct control of a physical PCI-Express device, and it works.
Doesn’t solve the mainboard problem on the Hasselblad side of course. And doesn’t completely solve the old-mac-hardware problem on the other side either. But it might reduce the hardware dependency on the Mac side into just a SCSI or Firewire controller card instead of a whole old Mac.
Have you had the chance to look into this side of it enough to give any hints about it?
And/or can I be useful in any way? Have set up macOS VMs with physical GPU passthrough and have working prepress experience with Macs ranging back to a Macintosh Plus :)
The post as it is is already immensely valuable insight into the whole ancient-prehistoric-digital-prepress world my father and I sometimes burrow a little into – many thanks!
You are actually on the money. We do this at my company. With much more challenging scanners than the Flextight. We've virtualised the Fujifilm SP3000 this was as well the the Noritsu S-1700 (which is a rarer precursor to the HS-1800 with very similar specs).
I’m helping my dad with a SciTex scanner – I think it’s a SciTex EverSmart Supreme? It’s a similar proposition in many ways as far as I know. High-end professional equipment from the golden age of digital prepress. Firewire is involved. Will essentially only run on old Macs. With the SciTex scanners I believe a PowerPC Mac is a requirement in practice.
From reading the post, the biggest issue with these Hasselblad scanners is of course the scanner mainboard, and I assume the same is true of the Scitexes.
A smaller problem is needing to have old Macs around. Regarding that, I am now curious if SCSI/Firewire controller passthrough into a VM can help. In the same way that recent PC hardware can pass a PCI-Express GPU into a virtualized macOS guest. MacOS VMs in qemu-kvm on recent Linux kernels running on IOMMU-enabled hardware affords a lot of control and compatibility – the guest OS gets direct control of a physical PCI-Express device, and it works.
Doesn’t solve the mainboard problem on the Hasselblad side of course. And doesn’t completely solve the old-mac-hardware problem on the other side either. But it might reduce the hardware dependency on the Mac side into just a SCSI or Firewire controller card instead of a whole old Mac.
Have you had the chance to look into this side of it enough to give any hints about it?
And/or can I be useful in any way? Have set up macOS VMs with physical GPU passthrough and have working prepress experience with Macs ranging back to a Macintosh Plus :)
The post as it is is already immensely valuable insight into the whole ancient-prehistoric-digital-prepress world my father and I sometimes burrow a little into – many thanks!