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DOOM Port for Digita OS Digital Cameras
Greg Hackmann writes "Those nuts behind the MAME and MESS ports for the Kodak Digita cameras have done it again. Now DOOM has been ported to the Kodak Digita OS, which powers a number of digital cameras. You can pick it up at the MAMED homepage if you're so inclined. Now, I like DOOM as much as anybody else, but I think this is just a little bit insane." I gotta get one of these cameras. I don't want to take any pictures, I just want to play.
By that logic, we should probably be spending all our time helping fight disease in Africa, saving the whales, and doing other incredibly useful things, but spend no time writing posts on slashdot. So, you don't seem to be following your own philosophy :).
But the real problem with that, imho, is that it's not easy to figure out what's the best thing to do. Porting doom to a camera gives valuable experience to the developers (which can be used later for beneficial software), and shows off the capacities of the camera, which can have many positive effects.
Also, you gave the example of OS design as something more useful. But the vast majority of free OSes are used by no one, and are no more useful than the doom port.
Besides, some people just aren't capable of doing a good job coding certain things. Just because they can port an app from one OS to another doesn't mean they could even understand the algorithms behind (insert "Great Programming Problems" here) let alone implement them. There are reasons that they're unsolved.
Lets put it this way. Suppose teen pop music is the top seller right now, and that more people listen to (or at least tolerate) it over anything else. Does that mean that Techno or Jazz or whatever else should be shunned upon and the artists should be involved with teen pop instead? No! Does it mean that Fatboy Slim could compose an Opera, or the Eagles could do Drum & Bass? No again, its just not their thing.
Go watch good will hunting or something, maybe then you'd at least come close to thinking about possibly understanding something like this. I'd be amazed if you were actually a programmer, let alone a good one.
the fact that the doom source has been availible for a long time... I asume it was ported :)
Luke
There's a psion port of a cut-down doom. www.palmtop.nl/encore.html
Choice of masters is not freedom.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I'm all for nifty toys, but please make the basic work solidly before taking leaps and bounds to put a DOOM-capable OS on the camera.
Kinda like the guy on TV: "imagine JINI in your washing machine... it (the washer) will call you on the cell phone if it's flooding your basement. Now isn't that cool?" Now cool would be a washer that doesn't overflow in the first place!!! You would think that they could build that, if they can connect it to the net, wouldn't you??? But noooo...
Roland
Imagine how much better the world would be if God had given you talent instead of arrogance. You go off and fight crime, I'll port video games. OK, superhero?
Jpeg eats cycles.
sounds like my 11th grade Java programming class.. I think we looked at any actual information on java once.. the rest of the time was spent playing unreal, tribes, or starcraft..
;)
;)
ahh, those were the days
of course, the next year, the network was restricted to the point that all we could play was tetrinet.. but it all worked out
"Short, tall, fat, skinny, from the highest king to the lowest man, everyone uses the potty." - Brak
A better video Editor for Linux.
How many people do really care for that? Not too many, obviously - otherwise some company would be going for that market. Or somebody would write it. Might it be you need one and you don't want to pay for it?
Sega CD Emulator
Now THAT's a worthy thing to do. WE NEED IT NOW! </SARCASM>
Seti@HOME/RSA cracks
Yep. Right. We don't want to think. We just want to run software. And don't forget all those cool screen savers that could be running on your machine, instead of a stupid editor.!
I almost agree with you that talented people should be using that talent in a responsible manner... let me just rephrase it a bit. They should not use it in an irresponsible manner. That's a bit different, isn't it? And people can now (GASP!) choose on their own what they want to do - without needing your guidance. (Thank you for trying, though)
Apart from that - if you'd be following open source discussions at all, you should've seen the explanation what makes open source happening about a million times. I refuse to repeat it - go look for 'an itch to scratch' on your favorite search engine.
And if you want people to act responsible with their talents - give an example! Don't waste your time on /.
I had a very good friend, who, a genius programmer, once wrote pong in DOS Batch. This was far far far more useless than porting DOOM to a digital camera. ;)
See, this is all well and good, and as for the earlier argument about these people wasting thier time, I think any project thats interesting and complicated is never a waste of time, because you're most likely learning something that you can apply elsewhere. But, what I *REALLY* want to know is how well does the camera function as a controller (placement of buttons, etc) and how playable it really is.
http://youare.whyihate.com
I went through the entire website linked to from this article. I didn't see any indication that this is the ONLY thing Mr. Surine does with his time! For all you know, this man could be spending his days raising money for Greenpeace, or EVEN programming this Linux software you think would be such a boon. Of course, even if this is how he is spending all his time, who's to say it is not of benefit to society?
Many of us have talents that we either don't use or use in an "irresponsible" fashion. In most cases, excepting talents in criminimal activity, this doesn't hurt society at all. In high school, I was pretty good at math, understood the physics I was taught, enjoyed history - heck, I enjoyed and was pretty good at just about every subject. Does that mean that I have some sort of responsibility to society to get degrees in every subject I have talent in and then work in all those fields?
The talent of people to entertain (this includes programmers of entertaining software, as well as actors, comedians, etc.), even in the most nonsensical and light-hearted ways, is something precious. The willingness to spend a lot of time to give people smiles and fun is a sign of dedication. Based on these criteria, porting Doom for use on digital cameras is not just justifiable, but it is serving the needs of those who are going to have fun playing with it.
Keep on keepin' on, entertainers. Without you, my job would rule my life, and NOBODY needs that!
Heheheh, Grade 13 computer programming class of Westdale Secondary School - 1998 - Descent, Warcraft II, and Duke Nukem 3d. Damn that was fun.
'ocourse, now that the network is restricted, they all just play Liero.
I want to hear him reply to this so I can see him work "post-Columbine" into another article ;-)
lf.o
I suppose we wouldn't call them "cameras" anymore, then, huh?
I was just thinking that (avoided a -1 redundant, nice!). I have one of the other ones, a DC210 plus, and battery life isn't all that even with solid extra-capacity NiCad rechargeables. You've got to be nuts to waste your battery power on this thing. It's so cool, you wonder why they don't run Digital OS on other stuff that might actually be useful to play games on.
lf.o
You are absolutely right, programmers aren't allowed to have fun with what they are doing!
In stead they should be doing something usefull, like improving speed and accuracy of hi-tech mass distruction weapons (purely for defence offcourse), or improve these meaningfull things like SETI so that the government gets more raw power to unraffel more of our earthly secrets..
Or do impressive work on a 3.10.xx kernel, which
will be obsolete after 18 months...
And certainly programmers shouldn't waste any time
either on those peculiar species called females, pure a waste of time, I say..
Yep, you are absolutely right..
Strange that more people use 10 year old Doom nowadays than, let say Linux 0.0.1.. really strange
Back OT, I think stuff like this is great. Just shows how close we really are to a totally intigrated world. Kinda makes me wonder how many other gizmos are capable of such things. So, lets check the score, Linux on iOpener, hacks on the TiVo, Doom on digital cams... the list goes on. I'd like to see perhaps all of these such devices connected together. Bring your digital cam to grandma's, upload the pics to her iOpener, play a quick game of Doom or 2 while you're connected to it, and set the TiVo at home to record "Hackers" because you just saw a preview for it and you didn't know it was going to be on. Ah yes, I can't wait. Now, who said ports like this are useless?
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
We all need a little fun, and these people have chosen this as theirs. Sure, they could be doing something 'constructive', but so could we all. I'm wasting my time posting here on SlashDot for example, when I could be trying to cure cancer. One nice thing about living in a free society is that we can make these choices (and we can also lament them, as is your perfect right as well).
wonder, if we can have digital cameras with processors that can run Doom, and lots of RAM to store images, why can't we have a PDA with the same power?
I don't have experience with the Kodak Digita camera, but if it's anything like my Kodak DC260, the batteries have a lifespan measured in minutes if you use the display screen. I don't think you'd enjoy having to lug around a car battery to power your PDA for a full day.
When will they start porting Commander Keen?
Whay about porting emulation of some of the 8-bit consoles... a camera might handle that...
--- Ãther SPOON!
You are painfully ignorant of the history of Linux and BSD, and are blaming Linus for something that is not his fault.
See A Brief History of FreeBSD for some of the gory details of how FreeBSD got started, out of personal and legal fights over the old 386BSD code in 1993. FreeBSD didn't get fully clear of the legal problems until December 1994.
Meanwhile, Linus started writing Linux in 1991, and he did so because there was no freely available Unix-like operating system for x86. For heavens sake, Red Hat had already been founded by the time FreeBSD had a clear legal status!
So don't blame Linus for not working on BSD. He did NOT fail us miserably. (By the way, I have nothing against BSD - I use FreeBSD at work, and have an OpenBSD machine at home.)
And what's with your attitude that people should do what's best for the community? What community? Who decides what's best for the community? You? A system like that really would deserve the label "communism" that Free Software has been unjustly stuck with.
Free Software has historically been about people writing software that "scratches their own itch". If somebody's itch is to play DOOM on their camera, who the hell gives anyone else the right to say they should be doing something else?
God forbid that we end up with an "Open Source Community" that tells people what to do.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Opinions suck. Save it for springer.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
That's because the iPAC HW has screwed up the buttons, you cannot detect multiple buttons at the same time making diagonals and firing while moving impossible.
Those are benchmarks for pacman running on MAME aren't they? Are there any benchmarks for Doom at all anywhere?
--
Jonathan Hunt
There are some cool games on Sega CD, which does not include Trivial pursuit. On my Genesis (2nd gen) with SegaCD (2nd gen) the answer was ALWAYS "true". No word on whether that's normal.
What I'm more upset about is the lack of a playable saturn emulator. The Sega Saturn was a kick-ass system, though it is considerably more complex than SegaCD. Then again, I have a chipped Saturn hooked up to my 25" trinitron, so I guess I'll do okay.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Lynx is fairly gutless, and doesn't have the CPU power to run any but the most rudimentary arcade games in emulation. Ports of the games would be another story.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And I thought at one time it was a crime to play Mario Brothers on my TI-86 in English class. The things people will do to play their games.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
taking pictures of a historically important event in human history or playing doom?
tough choice...
now where are those plasma cells?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
My father recently asked me to look into finding a good digital camera for the family... I might just steer him toward a Kodak Digita device... ;)
But the question is, when will they port NetHack? Hmmm?
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Leknor
http://Leknor.com/
(need to change my sig)
Leknor
http://Leknor.com
Leknor
http://Leknor.com
"So many idiots, so few comets"
I fully expect to hear about some legal or moral action group against the use of Doom with digital cameras.
It would be more important than the paper vs. bidet battle of the late 20's.
PFfft. That's nothing. Once they port Doom to my 35mm camera--*then* I'll be impressed. (Hey, if they can do text-mode quake...)
I find that these kind of things are part of a natural cycle. First, there is the prototypes, with little features at all. Then, there is the gizmo stage where all the companies put bells and whistles out, and people hack together completely unrelated items to be used with a given peice of hardware (this is where cameras are today). The third stage, is simplification, in which complicated features are hidden or removed, which is the stage PCs are in right now (*cough* netappliances *cough* emachines).
====
Crudely Drawn Games
As I line up my next system, with a 19" monitor, I ponder not only why someone would port these games to a tiny screen, but why? How long can one play something like this before serious eyestrain sets in?
Next hazard to driving: People who can barely focus on the road after bugging their eyes out, playing Doom for 2 hours.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Benchmarks for the various cameras are here
HP C500 Photosmart is best -- 33 fps!
You know, this kind of makes the 486 that I had 5 years ago seem really obsolete.
--
I just bought A Kodak DC290.. Overpowered? Nah.. It has a 66Mhz PowerPC in it.. Works Perfect under USB under linux.. The only problem is I wouldn't suggest running DOOM under it... The LCD screen tends to eat batteries like mad.
I wonder, if we can have digital cameras with processors that can run Doom, and lots of RAM to store images, why can't we have a PDA with the same power?
--
Look at how many great programming problems remain unsolved. People are dying for better graphics and video capabilities (particularly a video editor) for Linux, which is certainly a much more popular OS than Digita! Even in the realm of entertainment, there's a lot of better things to do (we still don't have a working Sega CD emulator!). And there's always distributed projects like SETI@Home, the hunt for prime numbers, and the RSA cracks.
It's sad that the most talented people are often the least willing to contribute to society. I hate to see brilliant kids behind hacks like this fritter away their time instead of committing to the important stuff. Imagine if Linus had spent his time porting Bubble Bobble to his digital calculator instead of coding the Linux kernel.
One of the responsibilities that comes along with being talented is using that talent in a responsible manner -- and this is a good example of a good way of not using talent to help people. No, there' nothing specifically wrong with porting DOOM to Digita OS, but it's hardly a project that's going to benefit anyone. It's like those old superhero comics, where Spiderman or the X-Men realize they can't ignore the powers they've been given and decide to fight crime.
Upgrade the lens to a multispectral scanner. Give it some advanced analisis capabilitys. Port Linux.
Put it in a nice hansom leather carrying case with a strap... put the sensor in a portable RF probe so you can wave it around as it scanns..
Make software for medical analisis and scientific analisis...
Just so people won't be confused.. call them tricorders instead of camras....
I don't actually exist.
How about porting MAME over to the devoted handheld units, like the Atari Lynx?
Something strange here. There's better resolution on these digital camera screens(and color) than on a typical PalmPilot, and they play games better.
Then again we have candy with artificial flavors, but Pledge with REAL lemon juice.
Your Web site is down, JJJ, as of 12:15 AM PST...
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
I read the site, and they mention several times that ROMs are required to run the emulator... but surely this doesn't apply to Doom. So, my question is, does anyone know did they guy convert Doom to run natively on the cameras processor or is there some sort of thunking layer that coverts x86 opcodes to whatever processor is in one of those cameras?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
No, the DC280 doesn't have the DigitaOS.
Otherwise, It IS a kick-ass camera, isn't it? I have one too. ^_^
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Well, playing games on that tiny LCD screen is kinda useless. Make no mistake- it's extremely cool, but pretty useless from a practical standpoint...
So what I want to know is this: can you play these games on your TV using the video-out features of the camera??!? Most digital cameras have a TV-out feature. I know my Kodak DC280 does, but it doesn't use the DigitaOS, unfortunately. :-)
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Maybe not quite as cool but there is a CE version here for all you pocket PC guys
It must be those l33t h4x0rZ again. They must be stopped at all cost! No one will know how to buy my best-selling games!
- J. J. J. Julius, author of a considerable number of best-selling games
Some possible scenarios while taking some pictures.
why so many people complain about how useful playing doom on a digital camera when you have a big powerfull computer. Sheesh people it is not like these people had a digital camera and not a computer and needed to play doom. They did it because it was a challenge, because it was interesting, and because they could (some of the same reasons I am building an 80" tall desk that sits next to my bunk bed). I would go so far a to say Geeks in general enjoy doing strange and unexpected things that don't make sense to a "normal" person.
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose."
I have a Kodak DC280 camera. Will the DOOM and MAME ports run on my DC280, or is there some technical difference between the 280 and the 290 that will prevent them from working on my camera?
..but can you take screenshots with it? (:
Actually, this is pretty cool, and you can thank the wonderful folks at ID for making insane stuff like this possible. If ID wasn't opensourcing their old code, these guys would be stuck doing pseudo-practical work on these devices.
I think this one takes a close second to text-mode quake for sheer cheesiness, but I like it. Yea, ID!!!
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
I cannot imagine the battery life is > 1 hour but maybe I am wrong. It is really more practical for _taking pictures_ but it will be hard to convince the /. audience of that. I do think it is nifty that hardware is being exploited beyond its "intended use". Maybe one day all devices will be able to do everything (...wait, that would mean we would only need one device...perhaps with a "Don't Panic" in large-friendly letters on the front).
| Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
is a digital (full motion) video camera, with just the overlay of the doom character that shows up on the digital readout, then I could walk around and BFG anyone I see.
(Note--this post in no way supports the use of real guns on real people)
The NRA = The Nation's Republican Asses.
-- Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people. Guns just make bullets go really, really fast.
now i can edit out the red eye in the demons
Them Kodak cameras have been running MAME for almost a year now, as reported previously here on Slashdot. Good, now they've got the a direct port of the PC/Unix version of Doom.