Doom runs on a 1998 Kodak camera with 2″ screen

It’s that time again: Doom is running on a device that wasn’t designed for it. This time it is the Kodak DC260, a camera from 1998. The device has a 2″ screen with a resolution of 288×216 pixels.

That’s according to a video from Lazy Game Reviews, a YouTube channel that highlights hardware curiosities. The operation of Doom on the DC260 is via the small d-pad present on the camera. With the wide switch you fire your weapon and with the telephoto button you open doors. There’s also a button to run, but moving sideways doesn’t seem to be an option.

According to channel manager Clint Basinger, Doom is running “pretty nice.” He adds that it “runs a bit like my Mac 6100.” The camera has a 66MHz CPU, 8MB of RAM and an 11KHz sound chip. Overall, the handling is a bigger hindrance to Doom performance than the frame rate. The small screen can still be circumvented by using the composite video output, so that it can be played on, for example, a TV.

The camera can run the software because it uses the PowerPC instruction set. That makes the installation of extra programs possible and a modder has taken advantage of that by making ports of Doom, MAME, MESS. That means that games like Frogger, Galaga and Pacman are also reviewed.

Doom is more often ported to devices not originally intended for playing games. For example, the classic shooter also runs on graphing calculators, printers, ATMs and as a minigame in the game Doom itself.