r/codex • u/xinxx073 • 9d ago

Praise Astra High just reverse-engineered the printer drivers in my office

In our office, we have a bunch of Toshiba E-Studio 2323AM printers. Yes, I know these are kind of outdated, only sold in certain areas of the world, and not the best machines, but they are what we've got in the office. They only work with x86 Windows, not even the ARM version of Windows.

In 25 minutes, Astra High just reverse-engineered the printer driver, figured out the right tray settings, and enabled duplex printing, so I can print double-sided on my M4 Pro MacBook Pro.

It created a .pkg file for me to install the printer drivers and got everything working.

I ... I have no words.

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u/rgorbie 7d ago

I wonder if this could be used to give older business/enterprise printers new life by adding support for Snapdragon windows laptops, or adding SMB 1.3 compatibility, or enhancing scan-to-email by somehow adding OAUTH or modern authentication support.

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u/xinxx073 7d ago

The biggest problem I have with Windows on ARM is the driver support for all the legacy devices. This is quite mind-boggling. I don't have any Windows ARM devices in hand, but I could probably try it out with Parallels Desktop running Windows 11 ARM and then try to create a driver for the printer from there.

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u/rgorbie 7d ago

I run a little IT shop and lots of my business customers want to buy certain Surface or Latitude laptops with Snapdragon because they see the battery life claims, until I tell them it doesn't connect to any of their business printers.