Fixed MacOS Drivers for older Wacom tablets

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D.T. Nethery
Posts: 4125
Joined: 27 Sep 2006, 19:19

Fixed MacOS Drivers for older Wacom tablets

Post by D.T. Nethery »

Wacom Bamboo, Graphire, Intuos 1+2+3 and Cintiq 1st gen tablet drivers for macOS Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey (including M1 Macs) .
Wacom's macOS drivers for Bamboo, Graphire, Intuos 1, 2 & 3 and Cintiq 1st gen tablets have bugs in them that cause them to completely fail to start on macOS 10.15 Catalina and later versions (including 11 Big Sur and 12 Monterey). This doesn't apply to the Windows driver, or to the drivers for their newer tablets.

When you try to open the Wacom preference pane with a Bamboo tablet, you'll get an error message saying "Waiting for synchronization", then finally "There is a problem with your tablet driver. Please reboot your system. If the problem persists reinstall or update the driver". For an Intuos 3 or Cintiq 1st gen tablet, the preference pane will open, but clicking anything will cause it to crash with the message "There was an error in Wacom Tablet preferences." For Graphire and Intuos 1 & 2 tablets, the driver's installer couldn't even run on Catalina.

Thankfully I was able to track down the issues and I have patched the drivers to fix them!
https://github.com/thenickdude/wacom-driver-fix

Animator, TVPaint Beta-Tester, Animation Educator and Consultant.
MacOS 12.7.1 Monterey , Mac Mini (2018) , 3.2 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7,
16 GB RAM , TVPaint PRO 11.7.1 - 64bit , Wacom Cintiq 21UX 2nd Gen.
,Wacom Intuos Pro 5 , Wacom driver version 6.3.39-1
Svengali
Posts: 1552
Joined: 28 Dec 2006, 10:08

Re: Fixed MacOS Drivers for older Wacom tablets

Post by Svengali »

Though I'm not a mac user I found thenickdude's GitHub offering fascinating: He seems to know his way around the Wacom drivers and (after some disassembly, discovered a few wrong values in unpublished fields of Apple's "private" API).

Apparently, he now offers a variety of patched drivers for various Wacom tablet devices that suddenly work (after he tweaked a byte or two in the code). He also suggests simple swap-in installation directions. In return he requests a modest tip.

His short detective story (and mystery solved-fix) is worth a read...

David, I'm curious whether you tried out any of the replacement drivers?

sven
TVP Pro 11.0.10-64bit Win10 - 64GB ram -2TB HHD - 256GB SSD - Wacom Cintiq 16, driver 6.3.41-1
Android Tablet: rel. 11, Samsung Galaxy Note10.1 - 32GB with microSD 32GB
Android Tablet: rel. 11.5, Samsung Galaxy Tab S7plus - 128GB with microSD 64GB
Xavier
Posts: 1852
Joined: 01 Oct 2019, 11:08

Re: Fixed MacOS Drivers for older Wacom tablets

Post by Xavier »

Thanks David !!!
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