It Runs DOOM #1

“But can it run DOOM?” is the techie’s go-to joke for just about any piece of hardware with a screen – and for good reason.

The original DOOM’s software was so ubiquitous at height of its popularity during the shareware era that fans took it upon themselves to get it running on as many devices as possible – no matter how ridiculous.

As a result, the game has been ported, emulated or imitated on countless devices thanks to skilled programmers with a little know-how and some elbow grease. They may not all be the most optimized rigs for playing shooters, but these fun feats in engineering deserve a shout-out because, well, they run DOOM.

A Kodak Digital Camera

In ancient times, by which we mean the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, we didn’t all have high-quality cameras conveniently embedded in our mobile phones. In fact, most of us didn’t have mobile phones at all. (Dark times, indeed.)

Most cameras still used – gasp! – film, and digital cameras were in their infancy, laughably underpowered compared to what we have today and prohibitively expensive for the average consumer.

Several of the most popular models did, however, have decent LCD displays and a robust operating system. For some digital cameras, that operating system turned out to be relatively easy to get into and mess around with – as evidenced by a group of hackers who were able to convince a Kodak DC260 to run the venerable arcade emulator MAME.

And then, for their next trick: DOOM on a camera