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MAME running on Kodak Digital Camera 127

Posted by Hemos from the and-then-i-ported-soulcalibur-to-my-cell-phone dept.
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.
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MAME running on Kodak Digital Camera More

MAME running on Kodak Digital Camera

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  • Now if somehow we could use this technology to get rid of the videogame banner ad on /., then we'd be getting somewhere.

    Yeah, I know this is slightly offtopic, but this videogame banner is lagging my system and needless to say its pretty damn annoying. I'm calling for a ban against 'interactive banners.' Get your guns.

    Hoping this fad goes the way of the parachute pants.

  • I have been following the emulation scence since I discovered MAME around the time when version .26 came about.(approximately)
    It is the coolest thing.
    I waste enough on my time on my computer playing with MAME games. Help me if I ever get anything done if this becomes widespread.

  • Don't forget the old saying

    No program is complete until it has the ability to read your mail.

    So i guess that goes for all devices as well now..

  • 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!!
  • Isn't there an add-on camera for Gameboy? If i remember correctly, it has really bad image quality, but has some means for sharing pics with your friends.

    Now, this Kodak suddenly looks like the ultimate Gameboy killer, with both excellent image quality and excellent games!

    I can't begin to describe my admiration for hacks like this!

    Lars

    Lars

    --
  • Tet writes:
    I *really* hope this isn't a hoax. Not knowing anything about the camera, my only concern is that a typical digital camera wouldn't normally have the processing power or memory to run this.

    My thought exactly. I've given up running MAME on my 120MHz Pentium because it is too slow. And they are claiming useable results with a 66MHz processor and zilch cache. I just don't know .. I will have to see it to believe it.

  • 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,
  • I work at Motorola supporting the MPC821 and MPC823, which is what this camera is based on. Motorola recently announced a new MPC823e which has much larger caches than the original MPC823. The original MPC823 had 2k I cache and 1k D cache. The new MPC823e will have 16k I cache and 8 k D cache. Also, the maximum frequency for the MPC823/MPC823e is currently 81 MHz. If you want more info on the processors, try http://www.mot.com/mpc823 [mot.com], or hang out on comp.sys.powerpc.tech

    BTW, that screenphone on our webpage? I've actually played with it, runs pretty damn well. Not Linux, but probably could be if they wanted to.
  • Sounds crazy? I dunno. As long as no one gets into their mind to drive a car remote through a webcam on the hood...

    Damn good idea! Patent it!

    Actually... well, I think it would be pretty cool to get a small car, like an RC car on steroids, drive it down to the liquor store, say.. and order some beer and so forth thru the speaker... well..

    okay maybe not.. but it could be pretty cool to remotely drive a web enabled rc car through my neighborhood..

    ---

  • This is the reason why Linux will fail... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It was this kind of time, energy, and enthusiasm that people devoted to Linux back in the pre 0.99 days when they just wanted to see how well they could get a Unix clone up and running on the PC. Eventually, through much sweat and late nights it happened, but the enthusiam doesn't last forever. Eventually, everyone wants to work on new things and no one ever wants to finish that last 10% or 20% of a project to make it complete.

    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.

  • hmm. i'm annoyed that a digital camera can do something more impressive than my beloved TI-86.

    anyway, the logical next step is to make LinuxPPC run on it.
  • Also keep in mind the market Mot lives in... they've always been designing and supplying devices (not just processors) for embedded applications. (eg. the DragonBall in palm devices, MCU's found in some modems and ISDN TAs, various Cisco routers, etc.)

    I started out my life of crime, err, computers with the venerable 6809E. I've always like the motorola world of processors. I've never liked that Hewbrew-ish Intel syntax... I learned to read and write American (I ain't gonna say "English") so I like things to read left to right. Besides, that ugly real mode vs. protected mode and segmenting just makes me violently ill.

    (BTW: a 1MHZ 6809e could do most things faster than a 4.77MHz 8086/8088.)
  • I guess I've written a few "complete" programs then.

    (It's so much fun to "email" yourself an xterm :-))
  • 1. Get nsam and use the assembly cpu cores.
    2. Use DGA, rendering in a window blows.

    It works fine on my cyrix chip PR 233. Also you won't be doing any sort of compilation massive dowloads or other things if you want good speed. Remeber MAME isn't just emulating the cpu(s) (usually more then one) its also emulating the sound chips and other assorted bits in the arcade machines. Pre-Built rpms are at ftp://wacko.gxsnmp.org/pub/RPMS if you grab em you'll need to grab the xmame one then pick your display method. (x11, svga, svgafx, xfx, xgl) and grab that one also.
  • This camera, with a 66MHz PPC chip, is more powerful that 3 of the 7 computers that are on my home network.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    Conclusion: Don't compare the "MHz" of the camera to that of your Mac, or whatever. It's not the same chip.

  • It has hardware support for taking screenshots ...
  • True. No offense, but someone@aol.com sounds like Mickey Mouse is on the line.
  • "without special software or drivers..." Right, just a JAVA VM, a Jini "driver", RMI... No wonder we need 200MHz PPC's in our tie tacks.

    How Jini Technology Makes This Work
    Jini Technology provides mechanisms that group devices together into a service network, secured through the Java[tm] language.

    Umm, NO.

    Sun Community Source Licensing
    ...

    HAH! I don't think so.

    Close
    Jini technology is the architecture to streamline the future of computing.

    Didn't they say similar things about JAVA years ago? It still doesn't have the platform independance.
  • 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.

    Ok. Thanks for the clarification. But I won't give up my magic box that easily.

    Actually, I just had this vision: You have the household network, with microwave, coffee maker, alarmclock, cd player, telephone, etc. hooked into the little white box called the server. Among all those pieces of electronics, you also still have a scanner, a printer, a mouse, a screen, and maybe a joystick and some big storage media.

    Why?

    Because you need to do your homework, write a newsletter, work on your geneology, code, and play some serious Mechwarrior IX.

    And so, you still effectively have a PC. It's just about the size of your house, that's all.

    "Universal" portable computers like laptops and palmtops are in a slightly different realm. I'd rather have it all crammed into one component to lug around, rather than have to go out and purchase that compiler module that I have to clip onto my belt and connect to my personal network...

    I see it, but I wonder how many people will actually like it.

  • Why did he feel the need to zip the readme? It's only 5 bloody kilobytes. :)
  • Reminds me of the appliances in Michael Marshall Smiths [dejection.com] books Only Forward and One of Us. Only Forward is full of intelligent (and humorous) appliances (including street lamps) whilst in One of Us the kitchen appliances are a key plot line. Read both these recently and laughed out loud - but also makes you think where appliances are heading.
  • From the Readme:

    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.

  • Um, I realize you were making a joke (and quite a good one too, IMO :), but the part about "user becomes the center of a small network universe" is just about how I imagine Bluetooth [bluetooth.com] will turn out. Soon...
  • Why anyone would ever want a game on these cameras is beyond me. I have a DC260 and it's a really great camera but it sucks batteries faster than the original "discman" style CD players do. In fact I keep an extra set of batteries in my car just for this thing.

    I don't even use the preview screen anymore unless I absolutely need it. Why? It makes it suck batteries down even faster. I'm willing to bet because these things have such crappy battery life with the screen on that you couldn't even play a whole game.

    I'll just take my Palm Pilot along for games. :)

  • I followed some of the links on the that page. It would seem that the Kodak DC220 and up have a RTOS that can run applications other than the primary camera functions.

    The FlashPoint website:
    http://www.flashpoint.com
    talks about "Digita" - the RTOS inside the Kodak cameras. It looks like it can do some nifty things.

    It doesn't *seem* to be a hoax, but I've never looked at MAME code before, and I don't know the features of the "Digita" operating system.
  • 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,
  • 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.com]
    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.
  • Nobody seems to have commented on how these types of so-called "frivolous" projects wouldn't be possible without access to the original source code. See what open-source gets you? Really cool hacks like these which lead to other people saying "Hey, I have an idea for porting X to Y, maybe I should give it a whirl." What a change from only a few years ago.

    You may think porting sendmail to a digital oven or automobile engine controller is ridiculous, but that's the kind of thing OS makes possible. Sometimes just because something can be done really does mean it should be done.

    Er, just don't expect me to do it (at least, not until my coding improves to the point where it stops generating Mac OS Type 1, 2, 3, 10, and 11 errors at random intervals). As it is now, I couldn't port myself out of my chair.


  • The guy's email address is not @aol.com. It looks like someone anticipated the /. effect and wanted someone else's server to get creamed.
  • 66MHz PPC is more powerful than a 66MHz Pentium

    PowerPCs are simply better designed chips, with more internal registers, a cleaner instruction set, and streamlined architecture. Although PPC is nominally RISC, when you program it in assembler, it's actually much easier than x86. x86 is actually worse than 68k (the Motorola chip /before/ the PowerPC) - it's just motorola realised that rather than work around the obsolete design, and get 68k code going at 500MHz (basically what intel have done with the x86), they'd be better off doing a ground-up redesign, thus enabling them to have cheaper, faster, smaller chips capable of expansion will into the gigahertz range, without having expensive design issues. Basically , their 68k->PPC decision was like intel's x86 -> IA64 decision, they just made it several years earlier.
  • Hmmm... yeah, let's make this interconnevted personal electronics reality.
    Who wan't to help me PORT LINUX TO THIS CAMERA.Ok, seriously though... while many posters are saying, who cares,
    who would want to, I'm thinking... let's see, first we get a port of a simple
    ftp program on here, and then get a cellphone that uses usb to connecto to a digital
    device(Ok, wo I'm dreaming here.) Who needs flash cards when you are
    sending all your images to your home computer.Or better yet, get the image, have the software on the camera send
    it away uncompressed, and let the desktop compress it. More time to paly
    pac-man.

  • Re:okay (Score:2)

    by Eccles ( 932 )
    WHY?

    Never ask a hacker why, just smile and slowly back away.

    I'm surprised no one else has said this yet... Rob?
  • Well... I haven't met anyone with an AOL account who wasn't clueless. I'm sure some are out there, but I automatically distrust the intelligence of any @aol.com email.
  • hmmm, that gives me one hell of an idea...

    1 - 900MHz FSK broadband modem
    1 - Mot. 5206eLITE prototype
    1 - Philips SAA7111
    1 - Ind. std. NTSC CCD
    1 - Radio Shack RC car
    1 - Garmen GPS :-)
    ...

    I'll get back to yah. (And people thought the Lego Mindstorms' "Magic 8 Ball" was hot shit.)

  • Jeez, people really are smart and in the end are only limited by their imagination. It really depresses me to hear all these cool things that people are accomplishing while I am stuck doing all the rinky-dink sh!t that I do in a day...

    [Nothing interesting deleted]
    This is off-topic, but I think you need to get a real life.
    In my case, that's what I do in a day:
    • wake up
    • eat something
    • go to the University [www.puc.cl]
    • study
    • lunch
    • read my mail, some web sites and/or newsgroups
    • study (if applicable depending of the weekday)
    • go to work [webhost.cl]
    • build two or three php3 web pages
    • drink coffee
    • do something for the story I'm writing
    • read my mail, some web sites and/or newsgroups
    • go to home
    • eat something
    • sleep
    And all the day I'm complaining I don't have time for anything else. I'm not limited by my imagination, but my LIMITED TIME is my worst enemy nowadays. (my web page [webhost.cl] is a prove of that)
    Add to that the fact that I'm a physically weak, sleepy man that don't want to be awake for more that 12 continuous hours... :-(
    I NEED MORE TIME!
  • Easy. display x/y/z as a point on an isometric cube. With a 'shadow' on the x/y grid(at the bottom of the cube). T will be displayed as color. Red for negitive t, blue for positive t. and white or grey for 0 t.

    This would lead to a very graphics intensive message board, but displaying a 4-d coord in numbers wouldn't be very intuitive.
  • Hmmm.... definition of irony.
  • 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.
  • Sorry for my bad knowledge of English language, but... What means "REM Requirements"?
    Also, I'm not knowing that Da Vinci do that thing, but actually I sleep whenever I'm going on a bus from home to PUC to work to home, sometimes in the interval between class and class (Tuesday and Thursday only, other days I have a single 100 minute class) and when I'm just too tired to maintain myself awaken, and I fall asleep anyway.
    I think it's a good idea to do things a la Da Vinci, to get more time to program and create my own crazy sh!t.

    Again, thanks for the advice. :-)
  • Don't forget your TiVo box is running linux .... you should have it cracking RC5 between fields ..... (and while you're sleeping ....)
  • If *I* knew my site would get slashdotted, I'd sign up for an AOL account too, that way if my e-mail address gets slashdotted (whether from spam or from real mail), AOL takes the hit, and my personal e-mail address is still fine.
    --------
    "I already have all the latest software."
  • Imagine you're a CEO of an electronics company. You're given two facts:

    1) Digital cameras have to do some pretty quick thinking. They capture a million+ pixels in a split second, shuttle them around memory, encode the images (via presumably complex algorithms), and communicate them to a PC.

    2) Inexpensive, fast, multipurpose processors are readily available.

    As a company, you have two options: spend millions developing a hardware brain for the camera that can do nothing but what it's intended to do because it doesn't have an underlying programming language. Should you find a bug, you'll be rewiring the whole damn thing. Competition making faster cameras? You'll have to reinvent your underlying thinking in order to speed up your own chip. You'll also need to interface your chip with 3rd-party memory (or spend another million developing your own) and USB protocols.

    OR, just go buy a ready-made processor for a fraction of the cost and hire a couple software engineers. When faster chips become available, just use them instead. A JPEG-compression algorithm is a helluva lot easier to put together if it's not hard-wired.

  • Imagine, if Java were implemented as widely and as generically as everyone hoped, we'd get to run everything at one quarter speed. Whee!

    This certainly is cool, for novelty's sake, but why would you go out and buy a digital camera just so you can run an emulator which runs much quicker (and with sound) on a real computer?

  • Ridiculous (Score:3)

    by Foogle ( 35117 ) on Tuesday October 26, 1999 @06:38AM (#1586541) Homepage
    BEOWULF!!!

    No, I'm kidding. But seriously - what kind of processing power is behind one of these? Would the emulation run well?

    -----------

    "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.
  • I like this! The reduced drivers & no sound are a bit of a pain, but I'm sure there's a way to deal with that. (If it's a case of a huge symbol table, then there should be a way of overloading, to reduce the number of symbols you need to store.)

    "Harold! Are you taking holiday snaps, or trying to get the high score on Golden Axe?"

  • Where this is headed (Score:4)

    by Skyshadow ( 508 ) on Tuesday October 26, 1999 @06:49AM (#1586545) Homepage
    Okay, let's begin by admitting that running an arcade emulator on your digital camera is, at best, silly. Oddly enough, however, it is silliness which most often seems to point to where we're headed.

    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.

    ----

  • 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.
    ---
  • 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 [chrisworth.com]

  • Like Java, only it isn't. (Score:3)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Tuesday October 26, 1999 @06:53AM (#1586549)
    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.

  • Wow! (Score:2)

    by Tet ( 2721 )
    I *really* hope this isn't a hoax. Not knowing anything about the camera, my only concern is that a typical digital camera wouldn't normally have the processing power or memory to run this.

    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.

  • okay (Score:1)

    by tweek ( 18111 )
    I'm not one to bash porting of any kind but here is my only time I say this....


    WHY?

    I guess the same reasoning applies as porting netbsd to so many different platforms. Just cause I could. =)
    "We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece

  • Re:Ridiculous (Score:3)

    by nwetters ( 93281 ) <ngourlayNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday October 26, 1999 @06:45AM (#1586552) Homepage
    From the README: 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 isn't to imply that I ever did any porting work on netbsd by any stretch.
    "We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
  • it is cool, but you didnt get first post, and the Ufies are loathing you for stooping so low.

    *grin*
  • 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.
  • ...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.
  • 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.

    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.

  • 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.
  • You mean, like a certain, well-known company in Mordor, sorry, Redmond that is producing the X-Box [cnnfn.com] games console?
  • Actually the Kodak takes CompactFlash, not SmartMedia, so there isn't any reasonable limit to the amount of storage. Simple has a 128MB type I modules. If you get one of the cameras that take type II modules (unfortunately apparently not the newly released DC290) you can use the IBM Microdrive, giving you 340 MB. Samsung says they'll have a 1GB type I module sometime next year. However, as someone else pointed out, it's storage, not RAM.

  • But... (Score:1)

    by icing ( 94825 )
    Nice, but can you take screenshots with it?
  • For those wondering if digital cameras have such powers, yes they do. How do you think they save your image, and compress them? with a 1mhz cpu?, How do you think the process sounds, and the colour images on the display? 1mhz cpu?
    Another thing to notice is that the author of this emulator has his account on AOL. Cool eh? Hope those of you who judge people because of the accounts they use learn a lesson.

  • This is a first class hack.

    Now, how soon before LinuxPPC is ported to it?
  • Is it just me, or is Slashdot gotten really bland in the past 6 months?

    This sort of comment pisses me off too. If you dont like it, dont damn well come here.

    By the same logic: If you don't like my comments, don't read them.
    ---
  • *ahem* /me raises his hand.

    As if it matters, but, my apartment should be zoned commercial as it's mostly a warehouse now.
  • Now we know why Daikatana is so late....
  • I think it's about time one should seriously consider a port to a PalmPilot. It'd still be amazing in 4 shades of gray... If only I had an extra 8hours/day. :-(
  • On the News page:
    Oct 24,1999
    Added source and README to web site. (Found a bit more disk space)

    I guess that couple of k from zipping the readme really zip.
  • You are right, to a degree. While it is true that if you don't get paid you tend to do what's more fun which (in the hackers case) often changes.

    But this does not apply to sufficianlty large open-source project where there (almost) always are people to pick up when others tire. MAME is in fact a good example of an open-source project that's been goin going for a long time and has now been ported to a large amount of platforms and supports around a 1000 games - an enormous effort that even Mircosoft would have a hard time matching.

    Also, Allthough Visual C++ has a very good IDE it's still heavily lacking in configuration possibilities. Maybe that's because *nix users expect more configurability, but it's still very annoying.

  • A videogame emulator on Digita. Great idea. But what would be truly great to have is a PINBALL machine emulator. So I could play Twilight Zone on it.

    "This is a most... unusual... camera."

    :-)

    (There's already a motion sensor in the Kodak DC260 that detects when you tilt the camera...)

  • Of course, at $900 a pop, I don't think it's going to be killing too many GameBoys... :)

  • I confirmed this today with an employee of FlashPoint (makers of Digita, the operating system in this camera)...

    It's TRUE.

    Haven't seen it in person yet, but hope to soon...

  • Maybe, but _I_ wouldn't want something like that running MY house, well except maybe the surviving power outages and stuff (Bring the UPS).
    But i'd rather have something where I could configure my house right down to the colour of the water is when I flush the tiolet.
    Maybe have a panel with a web page kind of layout where you can setup everything.. or telnet/ssh to it, and edit the settings in /etc yourself :)
    ie: vi /etc/bathroom/tiolet/watercolour - would be fun *grins*..
    Just my view
  • So that i can test MAME on it:?)


    LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
  • You realize, of course, that Rob's entire moderation system could easily be patented and marketed out the yin-yang to boards all over the internet. "Stay good, Rob!"
  • if your life passes before your eyes when you die, does that include the part where your life passes before your eyes?
    Yes. And then it goes through the replay, only twice as fast as the time before. And then when it gets to the replay, it does it again, only twice as fast again. And it goes into a faster and faster infinte loop. At that point, God himself hits Ctrl-C on his divine keyboard (which I am sure has the Ctrl key in the right place) and then the infinite series is summed and your perception of your life becomes an impulse (infinitely small time duration). At that point, your perception of your birth, life, and death are all at the same point. After that, what happens is undefined.

    Crypt.x

  • Actually, JINI does not require a JVM, at least for network devices. Each device that wants to be identified by the JINI system somehow 'broadcasts' itself to the network, and contains a small Java 'driver'. Any devices with a user interface that want to use JINI devices must have a JVM, though. Any device that has a JVM can use any JINI device. Sun has been doing some pretty good work squeezing Java into embedded devices, and new Palms should be coming with an embedded JVM, as well as many future cell-phones, etc.
  • most newer digital cameras take 64 MB mem cards :)

    more than enough to handle retrogames =D

  • M.A.M.E developers in league with the SPA (Score:3)

    by negative_karma ( 106940 ) on Tuesday October 26, 1999 @06:59AM (#1586589)
    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!

  • Re:Where this is headed (Score:4)

    by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Tuesday October 26, 1999 @07:00AM (#1586590) Homepage
    "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."

    Oh, you mean like a kind of 'lint' for clothes - er, wait a minute...

  • Cameras that play videogames? Oh I can see where this is headed - videogames that take your picture. Think how handsome and dignified you looked after that last 12 hour quake session. *Click*

    Now imagine your mug on alt.binaries.pictures.nerds.

  • Think of it... this little stunt is proving that videogames can exist anywhere. Not being content with existing in computers, consoles or hand-held game units, the MAME infection will spread everywhere! Cameras are just the beginning!

    Now, what if those Disposable Milk-Carton Computers [slashdot.org] 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)

  • Wait, wait, wait. This is simply too good. I mean, if this is true, this man is a God. However, look at that screen shot. Look at the camera, look at the background. Who has an all-white background like that? Why only one shot? (Maybe more, I'm lazy) It looks like a catalog shot of the camera with a screen shot pasted in. Why wouldn't the camera be rotated to set the display correctly? Why isn't someone 'playing' this?

    I mean, come on! Most screenshots/photos look like they were taken by a blind photographer standing next to the sun with an old, cracked Polaroid. It's just too good, imho...

  • Coolest thing I've seen in a while. My wife's cell phone can play some crude games, but this takes the cake. I was planning on buying a Mavica, but this may just change my mind.

    BTW, how did he take the picture of his camera?
  • I heard somewhere about a game where you could import your picture and it would digitize your picture to your character... just think of all the wonderful ways that could be used.
  • look at the third link...
  • does anyone know what kind of processor is hiding inside the newer olympus (c2000 and c2500) ??

    these cameras are what i believe to be the most advanced in the amateur market as far as memory and screen size (64 MB memory and 1.8 inch, 122,000 pixel display)

    Ive been wanting one of these puppies anyhow, all the more reason to get one if i can play games in between snapping pictures :)

  • Jeez, people really are smart and in the end are only limited by their imagination. It really depresses me to hear all these cool things that people are accomplishing while I am stuck doing all the rinky-dink sh!t that I do in a day...

    wake up
    read ten web sites
    shower
    read ten additional web sites
    add three comments on slashdot
    eat something
    play quake/doom/star wars
    read more web sites
    drink
    drink
    eat
    sleep

    I guess I should get some more proper motivation or something.. does Tony Robbins read slashdot?
  • 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
  • I think moderation should be two dimensional. Instead of the one-d moderation we have now, the score of the poster would have two seperate values. Humor(for example) could be on the other axis so a post that was very funny but not informitive or trolling could get a moderation of (Score : 0 + 5i Funny) at the same time puns and other more iritating forms of humor could be negitive i. (Score : 0 - 5i Pun)

    Then each user, in addition to setting a 'threshold' you'd set a 'perspective' that would be various ways to combine the two values to form a single value to compare to your threshold.

    Also karma would have to be reprisented as a complex number as well.

    Or perhaps since some people get so iritated about spelling errors the second axis should be gramer related. (score : 1 - 3i Spelling errors) or (score : 1 + 5i Sounds British)

    Prehaps I've thought too much about this.
  • That server will someday be a sealed white box, bought off-the-shelf from K-mart right next to the phones. It will be about the size of today's external modems and will be your firewall, ISP, email, ftp and web server. It can sit unobserved and unmaintained in the attic and will survive power outages and spikes about as well as your toaster does today. You will expect it to remain powered up 24/7 and run flawlessly, just as you expect your refrigerator to do.

    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.

  • Perhaps I've thought too much about this.

    perhaps the Sun will come up tommorrow.. :^)

    Although if this were a "normal" website, I'd place big money on the implementation of "Karma" being patented, copyrighted, and placed in a small holding cell.

  • > I use a DC260 at work and it sucks.

    The DC265 is reportedly significantly faster. I bought one a couple of months ago (it's the third digital camera I've owned), and I'm very happy with it. The only real flaw is the *very* slow updating of the LCD if you use that "live" while taking pictures, but that doesn't bother me since I very rarely use that.

    > but you may as well forget about ... getting
    > another picture out of it for at least 10
    > seconds after you snap one @ medium resolution

    With the DC265, I only use high resolution and the maximum quality (compression) setting, and I've never had to wait. The camera has enough RAM to buffer two or three pictures, so the only time you'd have to wait on one to be completely stored is if you're taking more than three pictures in less than, say, 20 seconds.
  • Internet JUNKBUSTER [junkbusters.com] will solve your problem.

    --
  • This is a great step !

    Soon we can connect our camera to the cell-phone, and just download some pics into the camera.

    Saves a lot of work, and give us more time to play Pac-Man.

  • I can just see it.

    A camera that runs games doesn't strike me as so odd in this day and age. As a matter of fact, I've seen plenty of these things in recent time that it seems like a trend is forming. (I mean, who thought you could install an OS on a Lego brick??)

    Where is this headed? Well, certainly if the trend follows, we'll see more and more software-oriented technology toys. As far as I'm concerned, for instance, the Palm Pilot is a notepad with an OS running on it. It starts that way, then people realise just how much they can do with what they thought a simple emulation of primitive technology.

    However, the next step is more interesting. Digital cameras already exist, but they're not integrated in our highly computerised world. Sure, you have cameras which output directly into a JPG file. But how long before, oh... You can download the image directly to your computer via a wireless LAN?

    I think that's the way to go: make tools simple peripherals to the awesome power of a PC. Heck, the whole wired house deal is a dream of exactly that. You run your radio through the PC and play Real Audio files. You download MP3 files to your stereo. You corrolate your fridge's contents with an online calorie table. You drive your car with assistance from online atlases.

    Sounds crazy? I dunno. As long as no one gets into their mind to drive a car remote through a webcam on the hood...

    Hey, how about having a camera with Photoshop integrated? It's Pac-Man now, but just you wait...
    "Knowledge = Power = Energy = Mass"

  • most newer digital cameras take 64 MB mem cards

    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 :-(

  • Re:Where this is headed (Score:3)

    by Bob(TM) ( 104510 ) on Tuesday October 26, 1999 @07:13AM (#1586612)
    What's more likely is that your devices will detect when you're not actively using them and will take the opportunity to blast up an ad or two.

    Ad shown in the viewfinder, just after you press the button:

    ****

    What a great picture! This would look wonderful on Kodak(R) brand paper.

    Kodak(R) - for the good look(TM).

    ****

    Ah, but the best part is the camera only costs $10 bucks because it's underwritten by these ads and all the demographics that get blasted back when you take a shot.

    Not to mention the Jennycam potential: "By using this camera, the user signifies acceptance of the following terms: 1) Kodak can, at their option, randomly select and display shots from your session on their website as examples of the quality of their subsidized camera ..."

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