Serial Wacom with Keyspan adapter

S

slur

Geek / Hedonist
I'd really like to get my big Wacom ArtZ serial tablet to work under Mac OS X. It works great with Mac OS 9 and the Keyspan two-port USB-to-serial adapter. Is there some way to hack the Mac OS X drivers to make them work with this configuration?

Thane, I know you could do it... Are you listening? Help!
 
ouch...

im guessing it wuld be painfully choppy and unresponsive, even if you could get it to work....

ever thought of getting a nice new Intuous? I have the 6x8 and it is sweet.
 
There's no reason whatsoever why it would be "choppy and unresponsive" if it was connected through a USB to serial converter. A serial port is a serial port, no matter how it's physically realised. And as I mentioned, it works perfectly well under MacOS 9, all functionality intact, just like it's supposed to. All Wacom needs to do to make this work is add serial support to their Mac OS X drivers and the Keyspan Adapter drivers will take care of the translation details.

As for trading in for an Intuos, call me spoiled, but I prefer my large 12 x 12 ArtZ II over the smaller Intuos tablet. It just seems all-around higher quality to me. I've used the Intuos and found the surface had too much friction compared to the good ol' ArtZ II.

So once again, Please, Wacom, please... Don't let all that fine tablet data streaming in through my serial port go to waste...

commssetup28x.GIF
 
Even though Keyspan release a final working driver for X.

The problem is that Wacom's OSX driver currently only work with USB. Not serial.....and it seems Wacom has no plan to do the serial support in X....they are giving those serial tablet users some discount on USB tablet.....
 
Well, I just sent a long email to Wacom begging them on my knees to give one of their programmers some extra Pepsi and lock him in a room for a weekend to add serial support. I figure, (1) if you can connect the thing and (2) the data coming from the tablet follows a similar protocol on both USB and Serial and (3) Apple has a standardized serial driver API (they do) then there's no decent reason not to add support for older tablets. If it was a "hidden and unsupported" option they could justifyably refuse to handle user support calls for serial tablets under X.

*snif* I just want to keep using my lovely ArtZ.
 
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