Issues accessing emulated Mifare Classic chip
This article describes issues regarding reading and writing an emulated Mifare Classic chip when using OMNIKEY 5x21 CL or OMNIKEY 5x22 CL readers in Nexus Card SDK. The article also describes the solution.
The Mifare Classic emulation is not 100% compatible with real Mifare Classic especially regarding its proprietary protocol. This can cause errors.
- For OMNIKEY 5x21 CL readers, accessing (read/write) an emulated Mifare Classic chip results into error code 0x6986 and the following message "Reason for this error is probably a MIFARE EMULATING CHIP that is not supported by default.".
- For OMNIKEY 5x22 CL readers, accessing (read/write) an emulated Mifare Classic chip may result into a not responding reader, thus only a power off/on will recover it.
Solution:
HID offers a free tool, called HID OMNIKEY Workbench. With this tool you can enable/disable the so-called Mifare Emulation Mode (for the OMNIKEY 5x21 CL readers) respective mifarePreferred (for the 5x22 CL readers). The standard setting for both is disabled.
One of the last Workbench version which supports both above mentioned reader generations seems to be version 1.8.1.955. Newer versions won't (fully) support the old OMNIKEY 5x21 readers.