Canon printer hacked to run Doom

coldpie 11 years ago |

The linked-through blog article describing the decryption process was interesting:

http://www.contextis.co.uk/resources/blog/hacking-canon-pixm...

What I especially liked is that this was literally one of the challenges from the Matasano crypto challenges:

http://cryptopals.com/sets/1/challenges/6/

It's fun when theory meets practice.

Tomte 11 years ago | |

Do the solution links work for you? I've never seen a link that doesn't return "Not Found".

coldpie 11 years ago | | |

No. Like the homepage says, the site is incomplete. But really you shouldn't be looking at the solutions, anyway.

leoedin 11 years ago |

The guy has such a classic engineer mentality - spend a while hacking the printer (the important bit) and then spend the next 3 months trying to get Doom to run (completely unnecessary, but oh such a great challenge!)

vanderZwan 11 years ago | |

> completely unnecessary

I'm not so sure about that - it's sure to help get the point across to the technically less savvy. Also, it got the BBC to devote an article to the subject that it otherwise probably wouldn't have.

Nexxxeh 11 years ago | | |

It didn't need to play Doom. It could have played Pong, it could have played Space Invaders, Pacman, Mario, Tetris. It could have played some variation of Flappy Bird.

There are lots of video games that are now more widely known than Doom. People who have never played an FPS have had Flappy Bird on their phone.

Doom was unnecessarily ambitious. Awesome, but unnecessary.

wesley 11 years ago |

I'd like someone to make custom firmware to stop these new canon pixma's from cleaning themselves at every start, and generally taking minutes before even starting to print. It's ludicrous.

brudgers 11 years ago | |

My next printer will be a 24 pin, wide carriage dot matrix with a tractor feed. Though it seems counterproductive to use a high duty cycle device for the small amount of printing I do, truth is that the racket of an impact printer is a small tradeoff.

It used to be that inkjet would print black with an empty color cartridge. Now, printing something may take hours or days until I get to the store to buy a Yellow...nevermind if I order from Amazon. An impact printer just prints lighter as ink is depleted.

Printing should just work. It doesn't any more. I miss my Star Micronics NX80.

bzbarsky 11 years ago | | |

Have you looked into laser printers? I've found that for sporadic printing they're much better than inkjets, and not too expensive as long as you don't want color.

electromagnetic 11 years ago | | |

This is what me and my wife did. She bought the same laser printer she has at work for home and it works amazing. It was cheap, and not being caught in the ink racket makes it cheaper.

There's very few instances you actually need to print in colour.

phyllostachys 11 years ago | | |

This is what I did. I bought a Brother monochrome laser printer (HD-53??) back in 2012 for use printing out college junk. If memory serves, I was on the starter cartridge for a year or so, In fact, I may still be on the starter cartridge. I can't even remember if I bought a new cartridge.

The total cost has only been about $150 or $200.

anigbrowl 11 years ago | | |

I second the advice to just buy a simple business laser printer. I too have had it with inkjets and the refill scam, but a typical laser cartridge is good for thousands of pages. Although I have a technician's nostalgia for dot matrix printers, I can't think of any valid reason to run one for normal home printing needs.

brudgers 11 years ago | | |

I'm not nostalgic. Back in 2002, I bought a cheap little Brother laser fax. Refills ran $30 for a few thousand pages; I could make copies; and life was grand. In 2007, the output degraded to crap when the drum died. The cost of a replacement drum was more than I paid originally, so it went to the dumpster. I've pitched a lot of printers over the years. Other than the three I have currently, the only two I gave away in working condition were the Star I bought in 1988 and an Hp 550c [a printer that made pleasant noises unlike the 600 series that succeeded it].

Anyway, I'm tired of pitching printers. Wide carriage allows printing US B size drawings. Tractor feed means not running out of paper in the middle of a job. And impact technology means not thinking about running out of Magenta every time I print something.

I don't want to wait for nozzles to.clean or fusers to heat up. I just want the damn thing printed quick enough that I don't have time to browse HN. It's about flow.

nwh 11 years ago | | |

What's the driver support for dot matrix printers like in linux these days?

brudgers 11 years ago | | |

Given the business use case, I doubt it is worse than for consumer oriented models.

e.g. http://www.okidata.com/drivers

Also, keeping in mind that dot matrix printers are old hardware, there has been a long time for someone to write a driver:

e.g. http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Oki/Oki-ML-520

dubcanada 11 years ago | |

I don't even know what they clean? What would a printer need to clean and how would a printer clean itself without actually printing anything.

userbinator 11 years ago | | |

Inkjet printers squirt ink through tiny nozzles. When they're left idle in a dry environment for a long time, the ink tends to dry up and clog them, and you get white streaks.

The "cleaning" basically involves moving the printhead over a receptacle with a sponge in it (it's called a spittoon, seriously) and firing all the nozzles for a short time while suction from a platen-driven vacuum pump sucks on them (that's why the feed rollers spin when it's doing this.) It uses a ridiculously large amount of ink in the process too - Google "waste ink container" for some further reading.

binarymax 11 years ago | | |

Ink is so expensive, that this sounds less like cleaning of printer head than it does a cleaning of the wallet. The conspiracy theorist in me says its designed to purposefully waste ink so you need to buy more.

--EDIT-- @DSMan195276 I cannot reply to your message (we're too far down the thread) - but the sensible less wasteful thing to do would be to offer the clean action as an option, not as a default on every startup.

coldpie 11 years ago | | |

Honestly, with how little printing most people do these days, and especially quality printing that would require an inkjet, I think I'd rather go to Kinkos than bother owning and maintaining a printer myself.

DSMan195276 11 years ago | | |

To respond to your response, while it may be sensible to offer cleaning as optional, I'm not really sure that's in anybodies interests. It's simply not fair to push this off onto the consumer, they'll have no idea when cleaning would be necessary. The printer is already doing the 'right thing' in that it will clean itself when necessary, and all that really needs to be done is make sure the printer is only using the necessary amount of ink when cleaning itself, and only cleans itself when it actually knows it's necessary.

For example, laundry detergent companies mark their measuring caps to measure out how detergent then you actually need, but companies found that if they didn't put any mark on the caps at all people on average assumed they needed more detergent then even the company said you should use, which was already more then you needed. People just have no reference point to guess when these types of things need to be done.

userbinator 11 years ago | | |

they'll have no idea when cleaning would be necessary

I wouldn't be so sure about that - I've seen a lot of office workers who probably don't have any idea how printers work know to take the toner cartridge of a laser printer out and rock it a few times when the printouts start to fade.

To me the biggest annoyance with cleaning (besides the ink waste) is how long it takes, and how difficult it is to do a test pattern print - usually it's a long cycle of "push cleaning button, wait a minute or more, then go back to the computer to fiddle with the disgustingly bloated software to get the test pattern option".

What I'd prefer is a simple pushbutton that starts cleaning the moment you hold it down, and keeps cleaning as long as it's held down. Next to it could be a "print nozzle check" button. Instruct the users to use these when streaks start showing up in the output, and there will probably be far less ink wasted as a result. (There will always be the idiots who lean on the cleaning button until the cartridges empty, but that's a problem of the existing system of fixed-length cleaning cycles too.)

DSMan195276 11 years ago | | |

To me it seems like a mixture. It's definitely an important process, but it's pretty easy to abuse as well.

pizza234 11 years ago | | |

The problem is in the perverse incentive that the printing producers have to "use" as much ink as possible, and consequently pay for it, which prevents significant progress on the consumption.

Well, progress would be already an excessively optimistic concept. There's no need to imagine conspiracies - one just need to observe how cartridges stop working before being fully depleted, or how ink is sold at ridiculously inflated prices.

ChuckMcM 11 years ago | | |

This is exactly right. Of course to understand it you have to have experienced an 'early' inkjet printer which would, if left alone for a week "break" by not printing one or more colors. That led to printers with a wiper sponge and a bit of ink solvent. Better but not really all that reliable, and that led to the current squirt+clean+vacuum sort of systems which had been standard in large format printer/plotters for a while.

And yes, given the price per oz of ink the process is quite expensive (I've heard that it is as high as 0.25/cleaning). And in the least expensive Canon printers the "waste ink" sponge is irreplacable leading to a planned obsolescence of the printer itself. Most of the 'key' ink jet patents have expired so it may be possible for someone to build a printer that is more economical but so far no one has. I suspect if they externalized the true cost of the printer and avoided the ink subsidy that they would not sell enough printers to stay in business.

I chuckled at the idea of using an old 24 pin dot matrix (or why not go seriously old school and use a line printer) printer, it is informative to note that people used inkjet printers that broke down a lot rather than use the older dot matrix printers. Granted the Canon system sucks, the Epson system is a bit better but not by much, HP, well HP can't really afford to lose any margins in their printer business.

So perhaps there is an opportunity here for a new printer from a new company.

brudgers 11 years ago | | |

I gave away my impact printer because I had purchased an HP DeskJet 550c. It made sense as a replacement because it produced "letter quality" output and it made a really pleasant sound while printing. The landscape has changed a lot since the early 1990's.

How much "letter quality" printing do I need in an age of emailed PDF's?

Is futzing with consumables at the expense of flow better than noise? For me, I don't think so. I'm looking anew at printing like I came to recently look anew at the command line. There are tradeoffs, and for me one of those with home lasers and inkjets is loss of flow.

If I wanted old-school misery, we'd be talking pen plotters.

femto 11 years ago | | |

Memjet[1] would claim to be that company, but they seem to be taking an awfully long time to fulfill their promise of taking over the printing world.

[1] http://www.memjet.com/

furyg3 11 years ago |

Slightly OT, but what is everyone's favorite minimalist printer? Are there any?

I avoid printing like the plague, but sometimes you just need to print a ticket, letter, or a photo of a document you have on your computer. I don't need a scanner, wifi, 500MB of software, or even color. I need something which is small and out of the way when I'm not using it (most of the time), cheap, and ready to go when I have to print something.

I kinda miss dot-matrix printers, to be honest.

userbinator 11 years ago |

Would've been so much more awesome (not that it isn't already) if it could print screenshots of the game too.

dbarlett 11 years ago |

Reminds me of the sadly-defunct It Plays Doom site https://web.archive.org/web/20070320131602/http://www.itplay...

simi_ 11 years ago |

Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INZR9P_SnjY

thisjepisje 11 years ago |

I was hoping for a huge stack of Doom frames rolling out of the printer.

skizm 11 years ago |

SMBC might be starting to overtake XKCD for king of referenceable (is that a word?) comics.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2158#comic

hywel 11 years ago |

I wonder if you could turn his work into a preprocessor, so you could just compile a more general source code into a Pixma binary :)

shr42 11 years ago |

Printers do crazy things. Grace Mink hacked one at MHacks IV to print make up.