Giving an old Ricoh SP 112 printer a second life
I have a perfectly good Ricoh SP 112 laser printer. The hardware still works, but it is USB-only and getting it to print from a modern Apple Silicon Mac was far more difficult than it should have been.
A community driver existed, but installing it involved old dependencies and manual configuration. I wanted something simpler: open a normal macOS package, add the printer in System Settings and print.
I also wanted to connect the printer to my Unraid server so that every computer on the network could use it without moving a USB cable around.
I used Codex with GPT-5.6 Sol on high to do most of the work. I gave it the old driver and asked it to turn it into something I could install normally on my Mac, then added the Unraid setup. After a few rounds of testing and cleanup, I had a much smaller driver, a macOS installer and a Docker container.
A smaller macOS driver
The printer expects pages in Ricoh's own format. The new driver lets macOS do the normal document conversion, then performs the final two jobs the printer needs: compressing the page with JBIG and wrapping it in the Ricoh printer commands.
This reduced the driver to one small CUPS filter and a printer description. It
can now be installed with a standard .pkg file and appears as Ricoh SP 112
Gurich when adding a printer on macOS.
It supports both 600×600 and 1200×600 dpi. The closely related Ricoh SP 110 uses the same protocol and should work too.
Turning it into a network printer
The same filter can run in a small CUPS container on Unraid. The printer stays connected to the server by USB, while CUPS shares it over the network using IPP. Macs normally discover it automatically through Bonjour, and other computers can connect directly to its IPP address.
Once the repository is on Unraid, starting it is one command:
docker compose -f docker/compose.unraid.yaml up -d --build
The container detects the USB printer, creates the queue and shares it. Client computers do not need the Ricoh driver because the server handles the final conversion.
Using it
The source code, macOS installer and Unraid instructions are available in the ricoh-sp112-cups repository.
For a Mac connected directly over USB, download the package from the latest release, install it and add the printer through System Settings → Printers & Scanners. The package is not notarized, so macOS may ask you to approve it under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
For Unraid, clone the repository into an appdata directory, connect the printer by USB and start the included Docker Compose configuration. The shared queue is then available at:
ipp://UNRAID-IP:631/printers/RICOH_SP_112
It is a satisfying way to keep a simple, reliable printer useful instead of replacing working hardware just because the original software stopped keeping up.