[shotgun blasts] [zombies groaning]
- Now that's what I call a point and shoot camera.
[piano playing, PC bootup sounds]
Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing involving Doom
running on devices that are unusual [laughs].
This is the Kodak Digital Science DC260 ZOOM Camera
released around June of 1998 for an asking price of $999
or around $1577 adjusted for inflation.
And on the surface this was a pretty typical
late '90s camera for consumer market.
Kind of a mid, upper mid range,
not the best but certainly not cheap.
You get a 1.6 megapixel sensor,
an auto focusing 3x optical zoom lens
and all a bunch of other cool stuff.
You know, compact flash, memory card storage
to store your flash pics and jpeg format photos.
And connections all over the place,
serial and infrared but also USB.
In fact this was one of the first digital cameras
on the consumer space to actually
use USB that I can find anyway.
But that's just all camera stuff we're not really
gonna be looking at that at least in this video,
I might cover it again in the future just a look at it
in terms of how it performs as a retro camera.
But it's all the stuff inside and in particular
the Digita OS, it's kind of this Digital Science thing.
But yeah Digita OS is what it runs and that is something
released by FlashPoint Technology in 1997.
And this was an initiative to have the power of a
desktop computer without all the desktop computer stuff.
You know just stick all these image editing
and manipulation things in the camera itself.
So end users could do things like review, edit,
and share photos directly from your camera.
But developers could also develop third party apps
that could be installed to the camera itself.
Which is really forward thinking stuff for the '90s.
I mean good grief downloading apps to augment your camera,
I mean that took years for that kind
of thing to be common place.
And the reason that is possible
is because inside of this thing
is actually running a 66 MHz PowerPC NPC 823 CPU,
eight megabytes of RAM, and 11 kHz sound input and output.
This is kinda like having an older Macintosh computer,
like a Power PC in a digital camera.
It's pretty nuts, like I have the Macintosh
The Power Mac 60100 and it's got really similar specs,
66 MHz Power PC CPU and it's got more RAM
'cause I've upgraded it.
But I mean yeah it's capable of running Power PC stuff
under this Digita OS.
You combine that with that sound and the little D-pad here,
and the two inch TFT LCD with 288 x 216 resolution
and you've got yourself an interesting little machine here.
So of course we gonna install some software on here,
in particular Doom but also some other things.
We're gonna start with Doom though because I mean
that's the title of the video so.
yeah really all you need is this camera itself
and the normal stuff that goes a long with it
like a compact flash card and a card reader.
These will work with other DC200 series cameras,
not the DC220 really it doesn't have enough memory
but the others one's as well as some other cameras
from Minolta, HP, and Pentax,
but yeah we're just gonna look at this one right here.
Really the first thing to do is just take your CF card
plug that into the reader and then get that going
in whatever your computer system is that has a
capability of reading these cards.
And then you'll need some ZIP files from the developers
of this source port of Doom, or DOOMD as it's known
put together by Jim Serene and Scott Angel.
They also did some other things like MAME
and MESS ports to this camera,
so I'll have to try those out later.
But yeah we're just gonna go with Doom for now.
And it's extremely simple you just extract the CAM
application file into the system folder on the compact
flash card and then you copy the Doom WAD into the base
directly of the card itself and that's it,
the camera will take care of everything else.
So yeah we'll be trying some other things in addition
to Doom but for now let's just get this thing plugged
into the wall and powered on.
So while this does support four AA batteries for getting
power normally it's not really optimized
for doing so with the LCD turned on,
like it'll last a while if you're just using the viewfinder,
normal camera stuff but we're gonna be playing Doom on here
so I'm gonna be plugging in the AC adapter
that it came with and just sort of forgetting
the whole battery situation.
And that's pretty much that,
we'll just put it into review mode here,
power it on and yeah this'll be the thing
where you normally go into messing around with your images
and whatnot just sort of looking
at what's on the camera of course.
Checking out the memory card and options and things.
And yeah this is pretty much the Digita OS,
and it's all the stuff that you normally
do on a digital camera.
Including camera to camera infrared transfers, oh.
But anyway this is really what we want,
we have the applications section which is normally
unpopulated with anything but of course we've installed
Doom so we're gonna start Doom.
And so yeah you just sort of start it up,
click the power button really quick
and it'll boot into this application.
And it takes a second to load here but
you know it's a digital camera we can forgive it.
And there we go, we've got doom running on a Kodak
digital camera from 1998 [laughs joyfully].
Oh yeah I'll zoom in here a little bit,
so the demo is playing in the background there.
I've got sound,
[gunshots]
[demonic groaning]
got the volume wheel right there
and these buttons are your enter and escape keys.
I believe that's enter yeah,
menu is escape.
Bring up the main menu here and yeah
I mean you can see it is just straight up Doom.
It's just a port of Doom,
there is no music [groans] I assume that Kodak
didn't exactly [laughs] worry about
like a general MIDI implementation
when they designed this thing so
that's fine.
Let's go into new game and we're gonna start a game here,
knee deep in the dead episode one,
ah we'll do hurt me plenty why not.
And well here's something that's kind of weird,
I don't know if you can here this
[electronic buzzing]
Yeah there's like a squeaking sound coming out
of the speaker when nothing else is going on
or really just about all the time.
I don't know if that's like the capacitors being weird
or who knows what, anyway it's there can't really
get rid of it I've tried.
Ah but yeah I mean you know, here we go we got Doom
and we've got the little D-pad down here
that is perfectly functional,
Er [laughs] it's not great but it works
I mean what are you gonna do
it's a digital camera playing Doom.
We have got this zoom wheel up here so
that does shooting and then telephoto goes to open things.
So we'll go to the door here and open this up.
Yeah!
[gunshots]
[groaning]
[laughing happily]
And you know it actually runs pretty decently,
it's about on par with what my Macintosh 60100 is
and that makes total sense.
I believe this is a map yeah,
that opens this, this enables the run mode
which is a little too much.
We have this here for switching between weapons.
I don't really have anything but fists and pistols
right now and
anyway, yeah.
[gunshots]
I kind of wish that the shutter button
[laughs] was shoot but it's not,
instead you have this over here.
I mean it's fine, it works.
[gunshots]
Oh, I do wish the D-pad were a little more purposely
directional if that makes sense.
It's kind of vague you're just sort of rocking a long
this weird center axis.
It kind of reminds me of
like a Gravis GamePad honestly
that's not a great D-pad either.
[laughing]
So it's not a positive reminder,
but it is a reminder none the less.
[laughing]
Mmm I don't know why this is so enjoyable to me,
man playing Doom on absolutely anything
that it doesn't make sense,
makes all the sense in the world in my opinion.
If it plays Doom I want to do it.
[relaxing music]
All right, yeah let's just get out of here.
[lever clunking]
Yeah, oh yeah photo finish right there.
Next level, we're gonna play through
the whole game in this vi--
No I'm not [laughs] just a couple of levels,
just to show you what's up.
[gunshots]
[death cries]
Now that's what I call a point and shoot camera [laughs].
I mean it's a totally playable version of the game,
like it's way more so than I anticipated
when I first learned about this however many years ago.
[laughing] it's just fun.
Here's where I wanted to go,
all right.
[gunshots]
[demonic moaning]
Yeah.
Nope, not gonna mess with you sir.
And we're outta here.
Nice [laughs].
And there we go that is Doom on the Kodak DC260
and actually I wanna show a couple of those other things
that it can run like MAME and MESS but also
I am going to stop ruining my posture and my eyesight
and use an AV cable that it comes with,
because this allows you to have composite video output.
So, in fact we'll use this as little handheld console.
A mini MAC kind of situation, this is [laughs]
just so cool, ah yeah
let's hook it up to a TV.
Okay I got the camera plugged into the TV
[TV powers on, Doom sounds playing]
[chuckles] and there you go.
[Doom continues doomily]
So yeah this should be a little easier to play
since I can just hold the camera down here
off screen like a controller.
Let's do, oh yeah that's just the shareware WAD,
I guess we'll play knee deep in the dead again
on ultra violence 'cause why not.
Squeaky, squeaky.
Yeah you can still hear some of that
squeaking coming through.
[gunshots]
[groaning]
[screaming]
[laughing]
Well you know, 'ultra violence.'
Yeah the controls are still awful but
that's how it is this tiny little D-pad with like
a complete lack of dead zone.
It just sort of rocks around this center mass.
If it weren't for the absolutely terrible ergonomics
of holding this camera I would completely
forget this is a camera.
I mean this could be like an early
32-bit console or something.
Okay well that's, that [laughs].
It's no surprise, so we will quit out of here.
And you get some craziness right here whenever
the camera's power cycling.
But yeah we'll get back to the menu.
So I wasn't able to get MESS working,
but I was able to get MAME or MAMED working,
so we'll do that.
MAMED!
So this is an absolutely awesome source port,
MAME 0.37 beta six.
So I'm gonna switch some of these options
to make sure that it's not rotating around on you.
Because yeah I mean it's easy enough to [laughs]
rotate the camera in your hands to get the
proper vertical kinda gameplay but
yeah we're playing on a TV we don't want that.
Well let's try Frogger.
Typical MAME start up there,
but as you can see it's a little slow.
[electronic tone]
[faster electronic tones]
[rapid electronic tones]
[laughing]
I mean it works.
Oof.
Get about a half second lag
everything is just running abysmally slowly.
But that is,
that's what you get man.
I mean this is about how MAME would run
on that MAC 60100 I have anyway.
So, you know.
[sad Frogger death]
Let's get out of there.
And it's the same with all of these
in terms of everything running slow.
So we'll get Pac-Man going here.
You can already tell it's a little bit slow
[cheeky electronic music]
[laughing]
So this is the special fart noise edition of Pac-Man.
[electronic beeps]
[groans]
That's enough of that.
As you can see there the screen was cut off
on the top and bottom as well,
and that has to do with the aspect ratio thing
that I was messing around with,
the rotation and all that.
You can apply some stretching,
or resolution scaling and whatnot,
but it really doesn't like doing that.
And then some games like Galaga here,
they just don't run at all.
In fact it freezes the whole camera
every time I try to run it.
Now that may just be an emulator issue.
It's tricky to get this thing configured
when all you're looking at is what's on here.
And all of the things that you'd wanna switch around
with command lines and all that, ah you can't really.
Unless you do it before you put everything
on the memory card, so.
But here's another one that's on here
that I was able to get working.
This is called Multi Pac,
it really is just Pac-Man
using the same ROMs that MAME would
but it's supposedly optimized for this camera.
And well it does kind of,
well no I think it runs about the same.
And there's no sound but...
So anyway I don't know why I showed this.
Unfortunately all the other things that I wanted to try
like there's a version of Boulder Dash and Minesweeper
and several other things.
They all seem to be made for like the DC290
and I guess they just don't work on here.
I mean I haven't been able to get them working at all.
So this is the other thing that
I've really gotten working is PLAYMP3.
Now this is a very simple MP3 player,
it doesn't even have any visuals really.
But it does in fact play MP3 files that you put
on the root directory of the compact flash card.
[energetic rock music]
[laughing]
So I've got the,
that's the Andrew Hulshult LGR theme song remix.
So yeah this is just an absolutely fascinating thing.
Like the fact that it works as well as it does
and allows you to run Doom dang it [laughs].
It's just way to enjoyable to me.
Well I guess that I'll probably cover this camera again
in some way in the future,
just to do more of like a traditional LGR retrospective.
And maybe I can get some of the other
cameras in the range to sort of compare it to,
or maybe one of the other Digita OS compatible cameras.
I don't know, if there's anything that you'd like to see
let me know and if you enjoyed this let me know that to.
Or if you had any experience messing
around with this thing yourself.
I don't know man leave comments.
Either way I hope that you enjoyed this video in general,
and as always new one's coming out every week
here on LGR so stay tuned if you like.
And as always thank you very much for watching LGR.