Modifying TWAIN/WIA Drivers to work in Win XP?

[jjackson79]

I’m new to this forum, so I’m not sure if this is the place for this or not. I’m a school teacher and I’m trying to use a Brother MFC-3820CN with a program called ExamView to scan, grade and record responses on bubblesheets generated by the program.

The problem I’m running into is Brother did not write a TWAIN driver for this product to be used with Windows XP. According to their documentation (and tech support), the only TWAIN drivers available are for Windows 9x, ME, and 2000. Oddly enough, the program is able to operate properly in Vista. However, as this scanner is needed at school and I don’t want to bring my Vista x64 laptop from home just to scan in papers, I’d like to figure out a way to make the drivers work at school.

My questions are:
1. Is it possible to modify a Windows 2000 TWAIN driver to work in XP Pro? (I have tried installing with the Win 2000 drivers, both in regular and compatibility mode, to no avail.)

2. Is it possible to convert/modify an XP WIA driver to TWAIN?

3. Is it possible to modify a Vista TWAIN driver to work in XP?

I realize this may take some time to do, I just need some direction in regard to software I would need to complete this, and the location of any reference material that I could use to help write/modify/convert this driver.

Thanks,
Joel

[Kaij]

Joel,

To your questions

1 – no.

2 – there is a WIA / TWAIN layer which allows to run WIA drivers in TWAIN apps. But due to the limitations of WIA and the quality of Brothers WIA implementation I guess that you will not be able to scan all the bubblesheets of the whole class in one batch from the feeder.

3 – Only for the developer of the driver but not for you as the user.

But it surprizes me that a driver which works under 2000 and Vista does not work under XP.

Best regards,

Kaij

[jjackson79]

Kaij,

Thanks for the info. I’ve downloaded Visual Studio and WDDK to see if I can insert the WIA-TWAIN passthrough code into the driver. I’ve never tried working with a dll file before, so I’m not sure how to get in to the code to do it.

It’s been extremely frustrating trying to talk to Brother support and find out why XP is not fully supported even though they claim this product came out in 2003 (their “Control Center” software won’t even load in XP because there is not a TWAIN driver).

Joel

[Kaij]

Joel,

I know other schools using the Brother DCP 8065DCP and that TWAIN driver works fine under XP. Sorry for the moment I have no other idea as to try if wiatwain.ds can run your WIA driver as TWAIN device.

Best regards,

Kaij

[Author]

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