In a few hours, millions of fresh-faced children will be tearing open presents like the Leap TV, a Wii for the pre-school crowd that has a number of educational games. And, once they get bored with them, what could be more educational than fighting your way through a horde of demons to save the earth? Yup, [mick] has hacked the Leap TV console to play Doom. After some poking around he discovered that the Leap TV is built around a quad-core nxp4330q arm7-A processor, with 1GB of RAM and 16GB of flash memory, while the controller links to the main console using Bluetooth LE. That’s more than enough to run Doom on (in fact… too much), so he whipped out his handy compiler and got Doom and SDL running with only a few minor code changes.
This isn’t [Mick]s first such hack: he previously hacked the V-Tech InnoTab, a cheap tablet for kids, which persuaded the manufacturers to release the full source code for the tablet. Will Leapfrog follow suit? That remains to be seen, but in the meantime, [Mick]s work gives us some insight into the internals of this device.
The source code for this unit is probably already released by leapfrog, they have been *very* forthcoming with source code and tools in the past for the didj etc. I expect if he checks the box there will be a paper gpl license in there, if not just request it :D
It was just a matter of time, wasn’t it?
Well leapfrog make toys to help kids learn, and what better way to learn than hacking?
Doom is maybe the most cross platform game ever…
Indeed. All of the monsters are quite cross, but Doom is no platformer! ;-)
eh… no
pong/tetris/pacman/Space Invaders/zaxxon/frogger
you are not even in the right time period
and platform as in machine not leftscroll 2-d platform game
He doesn’t mean a 2d platformer. He meant multiple platforms, like phones, computers, arm chips, toasters, etc…
Oh come on you serious!?
Actually, both yours and mcnugget’s responses make this even funnier :-)
I was, of course, joking, btw.
An angry platformer lolololll :-)
tomorrow on hackaday: how to fix a broken sarcasm detector.
You see this… this is what i expect from HAD.
Good interesting articles that are not just page fillers.
I thought you were done with Hackaday? 48 hours cool off period seems to have done the trick. http://hackaday.com/2015/12/23/the-hackaday-2015-omnibus-a-puzzle-so-dense-even-we-dont-know-the-answer/#comment-2851118
+1! :-)
This thing is $49 on Amazon, not bad for the hardware (console, camera, controller) if it is fully hackable. Is the firmware based on linux/libc or android? What 3d chip does the nxp4330 have?
You know cost 10 dollar at the 99 cent store ????
any chance anyone has been able to compile OSMC or XBMC for the leaptv yet?
I picked up 4 of these damn things @ that price, only to find the work and links are all long since dead. :(