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MAME running on Kodak Digital Camera
Anonymous Coward writes "M.A.M.E., the arcade game emulator, has been
Ported to a
Kodak DC265 Digita Camera by James Surine. A great new
way to run down those batteries. " It's true. Download the binaries or check out the readme. The is online as well.
I can confirm this as well. It's been fun just walking around with the camera watching the jaws hit the floor (I work at a game company, so most people here are familiar with MAME). It just so happened that I had my camera with me at work today--as soon as I saw this news I grabbed the binaries, dug out my USB cable and started downloading! Now all this puppy needs is sound!!
Hell, why not a moderation hypercube?
;)
x: interest/relevance
y: humor
z: technical acuity
t: timeliness
Only problem is displaying it properly..
Your Working Boy,
Look at the LessTif project for example. It was cool to have a Motif clone back when most Unix apps that were being ported to Linux required Motif. Now, it's dead. We've moved on to KDE and GNOME. What happens when they get to the 80% completion mark? Something new will come along, but we'll never achieve a 100% completed, useful product under Linux.
Another one is the Mozilla project. Everyone was hyped when Netscape released the source code to it. Everyone thought that we'd be incorporating it into every software component that needed a browser. But alas, the interest fizzled out because everyone enjoys reinventing the wheel instead of taking a project to completion.
On the flip side. Look at Microsoft's Developer Studio. It has been around for quite a while and it is probably the most refined, most usuable IDE for software development ever written. And I am not much of a Microsoft fan, but their continual refinement of the product has made it a world-class product.
When are going to see such products for Linux? I bet it's not an open-source project that fills these shoes, but a commercial product from the likes of Borland.
The point being that time-and-time again I see projects die before their completion because of a lack of sustaining interest.
Why did he feel the need to zip the readme? It's only 5 bloody kilobytes. :)
-- queef
The DC265 camera has a PPC 823 running a 66Mhz. It's about like a Powermac6100/66 but without a big processor cache. So expect the older games to run well but the newer games to run a bit sluggish.
This sounds as suspicious as the person who got Quake I to run on a Newton Messagepad on April 1, 1998. Has anyone actually downloaded, installed, and run these MAME camera binaries?
this is incredibly stupid, and proves that the OS on DC-series cameras is un-necessarily complex. i use a DC260 at work and it sucks. it has all these fabulous bells and whistles and features and colorful menus, and now you can play games on it... but you may as well forget about EVER getting an action shot with one of these, or getting another picture out of it for at least 10 seconds after you snap one @ medium resolution. to be fair it does take good pictures, but it doesnt seem to have alot of spare power to process them. keep it simple,
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
Picture a world where all of your personal devices can talk to one another.
That world is here, its called Jini. http://www.sun.com/jini/
Sun has done things like make Dig. Cameras talk directly to Palm Pilots, without special software or drivers... just Jini Enabled. Saw a presentation/demo of it a few weeks ago.
WHY?
Never ask a hacker why, just smile and slowly back away.
I'm surprised no one else has said this yet... Rob?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Don't bet on it. The MPC823, while certainly faster than your old calculator, is by no means any powerhouse. It contains a stripped ("embedded") PowerPC core with no floating point unit, only 1KB data cache and 2KB instruction cache (that's a whopping 512 instructions!) and also has some limitations in the out-of-order execution and branch folding department.
Hey, I resent that! The MPC823, even in the non-extended version with bigger (16k I/ 8k D) cache is plenty fast for most portable work. Runs Windows CE pretty well, and it can even run the Doom demo WAD file acceptably. The bigger cache version can be up to 3x faster, depending on the application & environment.
Motorola likes to say that this thing runs 99MIPS @75MHz, but I'm tempted to call that "benchmarketing". The core can't fetch more than one instruction per clock (due to the data bus being only 32 bits wide), so you're hard pressed to squeeze your actual MIPS up anywhere
beyond your MHz.
This is DHRYSTONE MIPS, not MIPS MIPS. Of course it's bench-marketing. Everything is. Dhrystone MIPS compares the core to a VAX(?). It's a crappy benchmark, but it's the only really popular one in the embedded space. Most instructions take longer than a clock to execute, so the instruction queue has time to fill from the cache. It does have multiple execution units, so it could do a load/store while adding, etc.
One side-effect this misses is the cache size though. The caches are still big enough that the dhrystone mips benchmark fits inside them. The bigger cache version is noticeably faster in real-world apps, but it benchs the same.
The MPC823 is, however, ideal for this kind of application, because it contains pretty much everything you need in a single chip, except for some RAM and an oscillator. It's got the CPU, the memory controller, the LCD controller, the USB controller, the IrDA controller, the timers, the realtime clocks, the DSP, the DMA and the PCMCIA controller (plus a bunch of other stuff that the camera doesn't appear to use). All in one teeny 256-pin package, costing not much at all.
I wish I could send a sample of the device to everyone just to show how small it is. But, just to give you an idea, take a quarter and draw a square INSIDE it. That's how big the chip is, in the package. And on top of that, it draws less than a watt.
Conclusion: Don't compare the "MHz" of the camera to that of your Mac, or whatever. It's not the same chip.
Absolutely true. But still, one damn capable processor. BTW, this is the same group of people that did the original DragonBall processor. Not the same designers, but the same management team.
"Though it may take a thousand years, we shall be FREE."
No, I'm kidding. But seriously - what kind of processing power is behind one of these? Would the emulation run well?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
This just goes to prove the old adage - Some people have far too much free time.
I love it.
"Harold! Are you taking holiday snaps, or trying to get the high score on Golden Axe?"
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
See, the fact that a camera has enough horsepower to run Rampage now indicates that the whole personal device market is not immune to Moore's Law. Personal devices will start having more and more power to spare as the applications we run on them become more and more demanding.
Picture a world where all of your personal devices can talk to one another -- take a few shots with your camera, and your cell phone will detect that you're not using it ad take the opportunity to blast a few backups to your home server. Pretty soon, the individual user becomes the center of a small network universe - it's just a matter of some powerful processors and a lot of good coding. Hell, maybe some day your socks will even let you know that they're mismatched before you walk out the door (I can see the average geek's house: "Excuse me, sir, but I've noticed that you are committing 21 violations of common dress-sense, three in particular of which will keep you from ever getting laid.").
Cool time to be alive.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
The idea that this might be a hoax wouldn't even occur to me were it not for one thing: the site is hosted on AOL.
That fact requires me to swallow the following conclusion: There exists a programmer, capable of porting software to a CAMERA, who thought that using AOL would be cool.
No way.
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Most interesting thing is how it blurs the line between PC and devices yet further. This is good news for devices - and bad news for companies writing everything-but-the-kitchen-sink OSs that don't strip down well to device needs.
Chris Worth
- Read fiction at www.espressostories.com
Imagine; if java were implemented as widely and as generically as everyone hoped, we'd be doing this on everyhing. I'd play Tapper on my camera while it sent a signal home to record Buffy. I could even use its IR port to transfer funds to the taxi on the way home.
But for now, we'll have to settle this item of coolness. Hands up the number of people who had no intention of ever buying a digital camera and have suddenly changed their minds.
BTW, I can't download zip files through our firewall, so I haven't been able to check any of the downloadable stuff on the site.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
This camera, with a 66MHz PPC chip, is more powerful that 3 of the 7 computers that are on my home network. Maybe 4, depending on how you count the 166MHz Alpha UDB.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
...what sort of RC5 keyrate will they get? Another poster mentioned Moore's Law and consumer electronics. Wonder how long before I can have everything in my house cracking keys during the night....mmmm....Inferno RC5 client.....tasty.
I hear this all the time on the news and industry reports. And maybe it's true. But let me offer an alternative vision:
Sure, you have a proliferation of dedicated, smart devices, all running OSS dedicated software no less. But every-thing-but-the-kitchen sink OSs stick around. Why? Because there is that one computer sitting in the bedroom, or in the closet, or maybe on a desk in the den that acts as a server.
Yeah, the whole house is networked, maybe even including the kitchen sink! Or maybe it's just a few things in the house, but still...
Oh, maybe it's a dedicated server... But I think for management and trouble shooting purposes, it would look a heck of a lot like your average pentium or AMD, complete with keyboard and mouse. And it will probably run either Windows or Linux, or it will be a Mac.
And why do I think this? Because I'm a hopeless romantic who can't get the notion of a real computer out of his heart and mind.
-- "So far, I have not found the science" -Soul Coughing
It looks too well-documented to be a complete hoax, but... Where's the source? Binary-only versions of Mame should not be given this much attention until the actual modifications are made public.
This is clearly an attempt to photograph clueless users who play arcade games by illegally downloading secret ROM files from K-RAD 31337 pirate BBS's and ftp sites. Watch out!
Worse than an untouchable, when I reincarnate I'll be lucky to return as bacteria.
Now, what if those Disposable Milk-Carton Computers were able to play MAME games? I can tell you right now... no kids would go to school! They'd stay at the breakfast table playing Donkey Kong on thier milk jug! No school, no education! No education, well, Bad Things Would Happen©.
This is the beginning of the end! Rage against the game juggernaut my friends, and try to think of the sour smell of Pac Man wafting out of that half-day-old-out-of-the-fridge MAME carton!
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
Well, lucky me, I've got a DC265, and having nothing better to do (except class), I stuck the mame.cam program and centipede, frogger and galaxian onto my 265... and PLAYED THEM. It really does work, this is pretty stinkin' cool...
It takes quite awhile to start up, and when you first run the program, the camera shuts off and you have to turn it back on... But it works, and that's just neat, in my opinion.
Off to class,
-bs
Most likely it will fully autoconfigure itself the first time it is plugged into a wire and turned on, perhaps asking a few questions of its new owner as it configures itself (eg, what emails accounts do you want to set up?).
There is nothing intrinsically complex about servers and someday basic server functionality will be this simple to acquire and administer; and this, the reputed final domain of the home PC, will also disappear into the specialized device world.
Yes, they do, and some can take 128MB. However, that's storage, not random access memory (as I understand it, at least). Even if it did have enough memory, is there really enough processing power on a digital camera to run an arcade machine emulator at a sensible speed? I tried to check Kodak's site for the specs, but it was too slow :-(
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown