Hacking The Leapfrog TV To Play Doom

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.

16 thoughts on “Hacking The Leapfrog TV To Play Doom

  1. 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

  2. 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?

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