ADB Wacom Tablet

[kraneo]

Hi people, I'm new in the block!
Anyone knows a way to make active an old Wacom tablet artz II (ADB port) Under Mac OSX ?
It seems that ol the serial devices may be lost forever for the OS X...
Anyone knows if connecting the tablet with an USB adapter could work?
New USB drivers from Wacom could recognize it?

TIA!!!

[gibbs]

Serial to USB adapters DO exist. The question is whether your mac will recognize the device once its plugged in. I would fire off an email to Wacom support and ask, although I fear you may get a "no, buy one of our newer tablets" responses.

Good luck brother.

[kraneo]

I`m afraid that that's Wacom Policy, but....
I'll try.

Thanks fellow

[ladislav]

Hello, well, i do have two wacom tablet, with adb connectors, the first thing you should know is that they are called UD.
Unfortunatly, wacom replyed that they do not intend to support UD tablets on MAC OSX
My tablets are doing fine on OS9 plus the Imate... (ADB TO USB connector)
the right link to get all drivers from wacom is
http://www.wacom-europe.com/uk/downl...iver/index.asp
All we can hope is for the Linux / Open source communauty to get a driver working, witch will mean we will have to get are hands under the hood, and maybe install the xwindows...
But your tablet is not going to the discarded hardware basement we all have as mac users, the driver for Windows XP 2K 98 and ME exist ...
I know, hardware manufacturer are weird people...
I do have two A5 tablett, one for each of my display, it works great (on Mac OS 9)...

[adambyte]

Yeah, me too. I've got an old Wacom tablet, and an iMate adapter. You can use it to move around the cursor, but don't get any special features like button functions, pressure, or anything like that.

Oh well. Some things are just too old.

[strobe]

You can write ADB HID drivers for Mac OS X. This isn't a limitation of the OS. There are 3rd party ADB drivers. For example there is a Thrustmaster ADB joystick driver for Mac OS X.

I could write the driver myself but I don't know the protocol Wacom uses. Somebody would have to reverse engineer this using ADB prober or something.

[slur]

You're in luck, strobe! The Wacom protocols are documented in the Developer section of Wacom's web site. Not only that, but...

I have fully implemented the Wacom UD protocol in a REALbasic application that reads a serial Wacom tablet, dynamically displays the state in a window, and allows you to send commands to the tablet to change its mapping, etc. It even lets you draw lines in a little graphics control.

If you would like a copy of this application and believe that you can write an HID driver I would be most interested in assisting you. I believe some hooks to the IOKit will be required to communicate with the (POSIX) serial port, meaning it would likely have to be implemented in the limited subset of C++ required for IOKit drivers.

From my investigations I've determined that the most promising course for making serial and ADB UD tablets work on Mac OS X is to make the Wacom tablet appear to the OS as if it was a newer USB Wacom tablet, and then the Wacom drivers would happily do the high-level interpretation. (The UD protocol has only been extended, not altered.) So all we'd really need to implement is a serial-USB bridge.

Are you familiar with IOKit? Do you have the skillz required to pull this off? Folks like me would be most grateful if this could be made to work! I've contacted Wacom about this but they have no interest in "supporting" older tablets. A developer I spoke to at Keyspan seemed to think the idea of a serial-USB bridge was fairly promising. I just haven't had the time or inclination to get down with IOKit since I've been so busy with SDL / OpenGL.

adambyte: Is your tablet being detected in Mac OS X without having the Wacom driver installed, or do you mean it (almost) works under 9?

[adambyte]

Oh yeah.... I have an ADB Wacom tablet..... plugged into my iMate adapter.... which is plugged into my PowerBook's USB port. And my PowerBook is running Mac OS X.... and I can use the tablet in a very VERY limited manner....

The "eraser" thingy and second button don't do anything special... and rather than making the tablet proportional to the screen, it's more of a "real time" thing... and you end up picking up the pen and moving it over and over, much as you would pick up and move a mouse when you run out of room on your desk... kind of a pain in the butt..... well, arm and wrist, actually....

It seems to me that USB provides very basic mouse driver functions, and the iMate adapter is probably providing those basic functions. I dunno. I'm no programmer.

If you could create a driver and software for old Wacom tablets, I bet a lot of cheapskates with adapters would be VERY happy. I know I would.