This Guy Installed Doom on a Kodak Digital Camera from 1998

Popular retro tech YouTube channel LGR recently pulled off something pretty awesome, if totally ridiculous. The channel’s host Clint Basinger managed to install a working copy of the original video game Doom onto a Kodak digital camera from 1998. Really gives new meaning to the term “point and shoot” camera, doesn’t it?

The camera in question is the Kodak Digital Science DC260 Zoom, which featured a respectable 1.6MP CCD image sensor, 3x optical zoom, and CompactFlash storage for an asking price of $1,000 ($1,575 adjusted for inflation). And the reason it’s the perfect candidate for this particular conversion is that it uses an actual PowerPC CPU and 8MB of on-board RAM that ran an actual operating system called Digita OS.

This operating system was way ahead of its time, allowing developers to create third-party apps for these Digita OS cameras so that you could potentially do things like edit your images in-camera. But, of course, Basinger had something different in mind:

The actual install is surprisingly simple. The heavy lifting–read: coding–was already done by the folks at MAMED! more than a decade ago, so all you have to do is download the files and add them to the appropriate directories. It’s no more than a three-step process, and once you’re done, the camera will take care of the rest. Once installed, you can boot into Doom from the Applications section of the menu.

Once he’s done showing you how to play Doom on the camera, Basinger hooks the camera up to a monitor using its included AV cable and goes on to install some of the other games that have been ported over to the Digita OS platform and are readily available. With all the available games installed, this little Kodak camera turns into something of a mini gaming console, which is just plain cool.

Incidentally, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a working version of Doom installed on photography gear. Way back in 2014, security researcher Michael Jordan (no relation to the basketball icon) managed to do the same thing with a Canon Pixma photo printer. I guess from now, when it comes to photography gear, we should replace “but will it blend?” with “but will it play Doom?”

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