Dirt cheap toy cameras have long been a target for the curious camera hacker, and we’ve seen plenty of lens swaps and other hardware hacks. Until now their internals have remained something of a black box though, so it’s very interesting indeed to see [Spode] breaching the firmware on one and making it run DOOM. Yes, it runs the game, but the value is in opening up this platform.

The Achiles’ heel on this particular camera is its easily updatable firmware, allowing new firmware to be placed upon it with ease. The SoC is an HX3302B which [SpriteTM] has done some work on, so he’s not going in entirely blind. A neat hack to dump the camera’s memory into EXIF data on photos completed the puzzle. He was able to benchmark the thing and find it to be surprisingly powerful, certainly enough for a game from 1993. Doomgeneric looked promising, but first there was the matter of the device’s RAM.

In another clever move he was able to keep only the most-used piece of the doom code in memory and the rest in flash, allowing the game to run. A custom synthesizer completed the experience, and on the write-up there’s a chance to travel back to the early ’90s and hear that music again. All that was left were the controls, and with a few quirks, this thing becomes a playable DOOM console. It’s probably better at that than it is at being a camera.

If you’re hungry for more, we’ve taken a look at similar devices before.