Siemens 'Pocket Reader'

I've obtained Sioemens 'Pocket Reader' (called a 'Reading Pen' in the luser manual). This is a handheld 1-line scanner/OCR device. It's very modern for me (the manual is copyright 1998) but I guess it's on-topic here now. And it was cheap enough in a local charity shop... It came with a cable to link it to a PC (3 conductor 2.5mm jack (phone) plug at one end, DE9 socket at the other, the latter connects to a PC serial port) and a disk of software alas for Windows... Anyway, I have of course taken the thing apart. If yoy have one and want to do this, you stat by ignoring all the safety warnings in the manual (to be honest, there is no way this thing is goign to harm oyu unless you try to swallow it!). Take off the battery cover and remove the batteries, then undo the 4 TX6 screws on that side. Turn it over and lift off the top case (the buttons are captive in the top case). Unplug the display modeul (a stnadard 14-pin LCD text display I believe), then lift out th roller assembly (this operates the mirocswithc when you press the 'pen' down to scan a line of text and has the interrupter wheel to detect motion along the paper). Unplug the read head (CCD and LEDs) from the front edge of the main PCB. Free the batteryt contacts and lift the PCB out. My first real suprsie is that I expected this thing to be based on an ASIC, probabbly driect-on-board and expoxy capped. It isn't. It's all SMD chips with numbers I recgnise. The smarts is an ADSP2816 DSP chip, together with 1M*16 bits of mask ROM and a 29F040 flash ROM (to store the scanned text I assume). A few TTL parts, a DC-DC comverter, a compartor chip and an ERS232 buffer. Nothing really odd. Anyway, the problem is that the software is for an OS I don't have or wich to run. The manual doesn't give the seiral protocol (or even the baud rate), does anyone know of a description of it, or any open-source software that talks to this device? -tony