Friday, March 09, 2007

Doom on a Camera

I have a fairly old digital camera. The HP 618 still works great, and scores quite highly with users. However it is starting to show it's age. It is a glutton for batteries, uses compact flash cards, and is only 2.1 MP. When I thought that it had crapped out on me at DragonCon last year, I found that I could replace it off eBay for about 30 bucks.

I think it takes great shots, but with 7 and 8 mega-pixel cameras coming down in price, I may upgrade this year.

Until then I thought I would look for some new firmware to see if any enterprising haxxors have squeezed more performance and utility out of an old workhorse. I found that no one had yet written more improved firmware for it, but they have developed a MAME emulator and a Doom Mod. James Surine of "Mamed" provides all the necessary files and instructions to have you playing Pac Man or Doom on your Digita enabled camera.

In technical terms:
"Basically Digita OS alternate applications (.CAM files) are nothing more than unresolved relocatable object files with an entry() function. Digita OS uses the vxWorks loadModule() function to load and link the application object file at runtime with the OS."
In real-world terms:
"Holy farking shnit, I can run Doom on my camera!"
Some may ask "Why"; to which I reply, "Because you can."

I really cant risk bricking my camera because I need it for the 365 Days project, but I may try this out when/if I get an upgrade.

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