here's the Ricoh RDC-i Mounter software for Mac OS X. despite only USB being mentioned in the manual (no, it doesn't use USB Mass Storage; it seemingly runs ethernet over USB, but I don't have the cable to check) it can totally mount the camera's storage media over the network!
once mounted using this utility, they show up like regular network share drives, and the only giveaway that they're doing something weird and custom is that there's a progress dialog that pops up if you do something which takes more than a moment, otherwise it's fairly transparent. nice work, Ricoh! FTP would've been easier, but whatever!
it also features probably my favourite function ever to grace a File menu,
File → Uninstall
more software should be so polite about this
but yeah, this utility only works up to Mac OS X 10.3, which is sadly not readily emulated, so my options are real hardware or reverse engineering - I was hoping this would be using some protocol I could decode, but despite poking it with Wireshark, I think it's beyond my abilities; it uses a weird protocol with two open ports (6220 and 6221)
so I think instead I think I will scrape the HTML pages it emits on port 80, which is a bit more human readable
I installed the Windows equivalent of this Ricoh software last night and it's awful, like, unbelievably so. Feels like one of those apps that ships to the end user with the default MFC icon. There's no real documentation. It's barely worth taking a screenshot of1. Just awful.
BUT the technical details are interesting
It looks like the camera is intended to emulate a serial port over USB, over which it sends a virtual network connection. It then has no fewer than two components on Windows; a "Virtual Server" utility which runs in the system tray and turns a COM port into a network connection, and then the "Explorer Plug-In" which puts a permanent RDC-i700 icon into My Computer.
So, this is also supposed to work over the network, given the Explorer Plug-In asks for an IP address, and defaults to 127.0.0.1 (lol), again I don't have the USB or Serial cables so I can't test that but I do know that while it can retrieve the settings, opening the disk on Windows XP completely does not work
just like the network functions on the camera, there are no error messages, there's nothing, you double click it and it just never does anything and expects you to figure it out
I am imagining the target audience for this thing would've had approximately zero patience for the arcane bullshit it's pulling; it's completely absurd that this bizarre matryoshka doll of protocols is how you talk to the camera directly connected over USB, and while I kind of get why they would've avoided USB Mass Storage due to the multiple storage media it supports… surely you could just show as three drives? was that not possible yet? completely deranged behaviour.
the only decent explanation is that they wanted backwards compatibility with computers which only had serial ports, which is probably why the manual specifies the USB cable as being "for Macintosh," specifically, but again, if you were spending ¥158,000 in 2000 or US$1,299 in 2001 on this camera which can use cellular data was your computer really going to lack a USB port?
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I mean, I want to, but I fucked up my Windows install and have to repair it first lol