SAC4-2 camera support?

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wolf340
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Joined: Thu Jul 20, 2017 12:49 pm

SAC4-2 camera support?

#1

Post by wolf340 »

Any chance for supporting the old SAC4-2 camera in SharpCap?

It had drivers from FCLab(s) that only work under Windows XP as far as I know. The driver is available from the files section of the SACimaging Yahoo group.

The only program that still seems to work with this camera is catch-42, which can be downloaded here:
http://www.stark-labs.com/downloads-2/downloads.html

but it also only works on Windows XP (and earlier).

The manual is still available here:
http://www.opticstar.com/download/Astro ... Manual.pdf

More information is available here:
https://www.cloudynights.com/articles/c ... amera-r133
(there seem to be earlier SAV4 versions that used different drivers)

Just wondering if there is any chance to support this hardware, or if it is basically a brick as soon as you move beyond Windows XP.

Wolfgang
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Re: SAC4-2 camera support?

#2

Post by admin »

Hi Wolfgang,

I hate to say it, but I suspect that it's now just a brick :(

With Windows XP and earlier versions life was easier for very small hardware manufacturers - they could write the drivers for their device, the only had to worry about 32 bit operating systems and they could ship them.

Windows Vista comes along and suddenly there is a requirement to not only support 64 bit, but drivers need to be digitally signed which adds a lot of overhead and the driver model changed too so WinXP drivers don't tend to work with Vista and newer versions. The rules got tightened up further with Win7/8/10.

This is why you find a lot of older hardware from smaller manufacturers is only usable on WinXP and before, simply because the manufacturers never produced Vista/7/8/10 compatible drivers.

The versions of SharpCap I'm now working on (3, 3.1) no longer support WinXp, so I'm afraid I'm never going to add support for WinXP only devices in the future.

From a purely practical point of view, experience has shown me that to support a device I need a minimum of

1) At least one camera of the brand on hand to work with and test against
2) A supported SDK to use to communicate with the camera.
3) A responsive manufacturer who can fix SDK issues and answer questions if I have any problems

cheers,

Robin
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