Patent ID: 7979264

Claim:
A system comprising: a computer having an operating system configured to automatically detect and communicate with a common class of external devices; and a media processing apparatus communicatively coupled to the computer, the media processing apparatus configured to emulate a mass storage device, wherein the computer communicates with the media processing apparatus by employing (i) an operating system (OS)-supplied kernel-level common class device driver and (ii) a communication protocol in which at least one sector of the emulated mass storage device is assigned as a polling sector and the computer periodically reads the polling sector of the emulated mass storage device to receive requests from the media processing apparatus, and wherein an application on the media processing apparatus includes Universal Serial Bus (USB) mass storage device emulation logic, and according to the communication protocol, performs a write operation to an emulated signature sector for identification purposes, performs a write operation to an emulated polling sector for handshaking with the computer and sending requests, performs a read operation from an emulated command sector for receiving commands from the computer, performs a write operation to an emulated response sector for sending back its response to the computer, and performs read/write operations to an emulated data sector to transfer data to and from the computer.