Another day, and another resourceful gearhead has managed to shoehorn classic 1993 first-person shooter Doom onto an old camera, but that’s not all. Daniel Cook has also managed to port Tetris onto another camera to boot! The news, by way of Fuji Rumors, involves porting the software onto a Fujifilm X-A2 and Fujifilm XF1, with Doom running on the former and Tetris on the latter.
According to the Doom video's description, Cook states: "This was not an easy feat, it took days of debugging bare-metal ARM assembly, not to mention the year of reverse engineering leading to this point."
The Tetris port is particularly interesting because rather than using the d-pad, the positioning of the blocks is performed by physically twisting and turning the camera to make use of its internal movement sensor. You can watch both the Doom and Tetris videos above.
As an avid gamer myself, this entirely useless process tickles my nerdy soul, but it’s not for the fainthearted. Any time you stray from a manufacturer’s official firmware, you risk doing serious damage to your camera and voiding any warranty. This is why these sorts of experiments are almost exclusively carried out on older tech, like the aforementioned Fujifilm cameras.
More useful firmware incoming?
It’s not just video games that are making their way onto older Fujifilm cameras, though. Fuji Rumors also referenced a Reddit post from justice-jake, regarding custom firmware for redundant Fujifilm cameras, in a bid to introduce a plethora of modern features including new Film Simulations, a Film Simulation editor, highlight-weighted metering and more. The Redditor even mentions creating custom firmware for newer Fujifilm cameras such as the Fujifilm X100VI and Fujifilm X-M5.
Again, this carries the exact same risks as any other form of unofficial firmware, but rather than being an exercise in futility, I can certainly understand the appeal of unlocking modern Film Simulations on an older Fujifilm camera.
The news comes following a spate of similar instances, where Doom has been ported onto a Hasselblad X2D 100C camera and a slightly more suspicious claim of the video game running on a Nikon Zf.
If you’re wondering why there’s so much interest in the practice, it’s become a little bit of a techie rite of passage to port Doom onto random consumer electronics, from calculators to pregnancy tests. Yes, you heard that right!
You might also like...
Want more? I just bought a Fujifilm X-T1. Am I mad? Now you can play Doom on this 16-year-old DSLR! Plus, here's the latest camera news.
