Sweden-Number/documentation/ioport-trace-hints

cat > /dev/null <<EOF
The above line is necessary, leave it alone!!
--------------------------------------------------------------------

DOING A HARDWARE TRACE IN WINE
------------------------------

The primary reason to do this is to reverse engineer a hardware device
for which you don't have documentation, but can get to work under Wine.

This lot is aimed at parallel port devices, and in particular parallel port
scanners which are now so cheap they are virtually being given away. The
problem is that few manufactures will release any programming information which
prevents drivers being written for Sane, and the traditional technique of using
DOSemu to produce the traces does not work as the scanners invariably only have
drivers for Windows.

Please note that I have not been able to get my scanner working properly (a
UMAX Astra 600P), but a couple of people have reported success with at least
the Artec AS6e scanner. I am not in the process of developing any driver nor do
I intend to, so don't bug me about it. My time is now spent writting programs
to set things like battery save options under Linux on Toshiba laptops, ans as
such I don't have any spare time for writting a driver for a parallel port
scanner etc.

Presuming that you have compiled and installed wine the first thing to do is is
to enable direct hardware access to your parallel port. To do this edit
wine.conf (usually in /usr/local/etc) and in the ports section add the
following two lines

read=0x378,0x379,0x37a,0x37c,0x77a
write=0x378,x379,0x37a,0x37c,0x77a

This adds the necessary access required for SPP/PS2/EPP/ECP parallel port on
LPT1. You will need to adjust these number accordingly if your parallel port is
on LPT2 or LPT0.

When starting wine use the following command line, where XXXX is the program
you need to run in order to access your scanner, and YYYY is the file your
trace will be stored in:

    wine -debugmsg +io XXXX 2> >(sed 's/^[^:]*:io:[^ ]* //' > YYYY)

You will need large amounts of hard disk space (read hundreds of megabytes if
you do a full page scan), and for reasonable performance a really fast
processor and lots of RAM.

You might well find the log compression program that David Campbell
<campbell@torque.net> wrote helpfull in reducing the size of the log files.
This can be obtained by the following command:

    sh ioport-trace-hints

This should extract shrink.c (which is located at the end of this file. Compile
the log compression program by:

    cc shrink.c -o shrink

Use the shrink program to reduce the physical size of the raw log as follows:

    cat log | shrink > log2

The trace has the basic form of

    XXXX > YY @ ZZZZ:ZZZZ

where XXXX is the port in hexidecimal being accessed, YY is the data written
(or read) from the port, and ZZZZ:ZZZZ is the address in memory of the
instruction that accessed the port. The direction of the arrow indicates
whether the data was written or read from the port.

    > data was written to the port
    < data was read from the port


My basic tip for interperating these logs is to pay close attention to the
addresses of the IO instructions. There grouping and sometimes proximity should
reveal the presence of subroutines in the driver. By studying the different
versions you should be able to work them out. For example consider the
following section of trace from my UMAX Astra 600P

    0x378 > 55 @ 0297:01ec
    0x37a > 05 @ 0297:01f5
    0x379 < 8f @ 0297:01fa
    0x37a > 04 @ 0297:0211
    0x378 > aa @ 0297:01ec
    0x37a > 05 @ 0297:01f5
    0x379 < 8f @ 0297:01fa
    0x37a > 04 @ 0297:0211
    0x378 > 00 @ 0297:01ec
    0x37a > 05 @ 0297:01f5
    0x379 < 8f @ 0297:01fa
    0x37a > 04 @ 0297:0211
    0x378 > 00 @ 0297:01ec
    0x37a > 05 @ 0297:01f5
    0x379 < 8f @ 0297:01fa
    0x37a > 04 @ 0297:0211
    0x378 > 00 @ 0297:01ec
    0x37a > 05 @ 0297:01f5
    0x379 < 8f @ 0297:01fa
    0x37a > 04 @ 0297:0211
    0x378 > 00 @ 0297:01ec
    0x37a > 05 @ 0297:01f5
    0x379 < 8f @ 0297:01fa
    0x37a > 04 @ 0297:0211

As you can see their is a repeating structure starting at address 0297:01ec
that consists of four io access on the parallel port. Looking at it the first
io access writes a changing byte to the data port the second always writes the
byte 0x05 to the control port, then a value which always seems to 0x8f is read
from the status port at which point a byte 0x04 is written to the control port.
By studying this and other sections of the trace we can write a C routine that
emulates this, shown below with some macros to make reading/writing on the
parallel port easier to read.


#define r_dtr(x)        inb(x)
#define r_str(x)        inb(x+1)
#define r_ctr(x)        inb(x+2)
#define w_dtr(x,y)      outb(y, x)
#define w_str(x,y)      outb(y, x+1)
#define w_ctr(x,y)      outb(y, x+2)

/*
 * Seems to be sending a command byte to the scanner
 *
 */
int udpp_put(int udpp_base, unsigned char command)
{
        int loop,value;

        w_dtr(udpp_base, command);
        w_ctr(udpp_base, 0x05);

        for (loop=0;loop<10;loop++)
                if (((value=r_str(udpp_base)) & 0x80)!=0x00) {
                        w_ctr(udpp_base, 0x04);
                        return value & 0xf8;
                        }

        return (value & 0xf8) | 0x01;
}


For the UMAX Astra 600P only seven such routines exist (well 14 really, seven
for SPP and seven for EPP). Whether you choose to disassemble the driver at
this point to verify the routines is your own choice. If you do, the address
from the trace should help in locating them in the disassembly.

You will probably then find it useful to write a script/perl/C program to
analyse the logfile and decode them futher as this can reveal higher level
grouping of the low level routines. For example from the logs from my UMAX
Astra 600P when decoded futher reveal (this is a small snippet)


start:
put: 55 8f
put: aa 8f
put: 00 8f
put: 00 8f
put: 00 8f
put: c2 8f
wait: ff
get: af,87
wait: ff
get: af,87
end: cc
start:
put: 55 8f
put: aa 8f
put: 00 8f
put: 03 8f
put: 05 8f
put: 84 8f
wait: ff

From this it is easy to see that put routine is oftern gouped together in five
sucessive calls sending information to the scanner. Once these are understood
it should be possible to process the logs further to show the higher level
routines in an easy to see format. Once the higest level format that you
can derive from this process is understood, you then need to produce a
series of scans varying only one parameter between them, so you can
discover how to set the various parameters for the scanner.


Jonathan Buzzard
<jab@hex.prestel.co.uk>


--------------------------------------------------------------------
The following is the shrink.c program.
EOF
cat > shrink.c <<EOF
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

void 
main (void)
{
  char buff[256], lastline[256];
  int count;

  count = 0;
  lastline[0] = 0;

  while (!feof (stdin))
    {
      fgets (buff, sizeof (buff), stdin);
      if (strcmp (buff, lastline) == 0)
	{
	  count++;
	}
      else
	{
	  if (count > 1)
	    fprintf (stdout, "# Last line repeated %i times #\n", count);
	  fprintf (stdout, "%s", buff);
	  strcpy (lastline, buff);
	    count = 1;
	}
    }
}
EOF