Researcher ports Doom to $8,000 Hasselblad X2D

An independent camera researcher experimenting with the firmware for expensive camera brands like Hasselblad and Ricoh just built software that lets photographers play Doom directly on the X2D. This feature is part of the Hasselblad-X-System-CIM-Firmware-Research-Feature-Extensions repository on GitHub, which also experiments with capabilities that factory units don’t come with. The creator, Radium Wang, says that this only contains source code, offline tools, tests, and sanitized research findings, and it seems that it’s not meant to “level up” the expensive camera.

This isn’t the first time that someone installed Doom on a camera, as we saw another GitHub programmer do the same on the other end of the price spectrum a couple of months ago. That project brought the game to an entry-level DSLR from 2010 with an 18-megapixel sensor. This makes that camera the polar opposite of the Hasselblad X2D series, which costs thousands of dollars and is designed for professional photographers with its 100-megapixel resolution. Both projects highlight just how powerful embedded systems have become, to the point where even digital cameras can now run a complete game.

When id Software launched the game in 1993, its minimum system requirements were an Intel 386 processor, 4 MB RAM, and a VGA graphics card. These requirements often meant a desktop PC that looked like this Retro95 beige PC from Maingear, with its massive footprint and accompanying 13-inch CRT monitor. However, technological advances have made it so that even the most unlikely gadgets are now capable of running the landmark FPS title. In fact, “Can it run Doom?” has now become a meme and a running joke among tech enthusiasts, with programmers taking up the challenge of porting the game to the weirdest of devices. Some of the weirder examples that we’ve seen recently include an electric cooking pot, an orbiting satellite from the European Space Agency, and even an Apple Lightning-to-HDMI dongle.

Playing Doom on a tiny 3.6-inch touchscreen isn’t exactly fun, especially as the medium-format camera form factor does not lend well to gaming. However, gaming on cameras isn’t actually the point of this and other similar projects; instead, it’s the achievement of making something run somewhere unexpected. Now, if you happen to have an extra Hasselblad lying around in your house and don’t mind experimenting on your expensive equipment, you can take part in the joke by downloading this repo and following Wang’s instructions to reproduce the “research.”

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