The next time you spot someone earnestly fiddling with a DSLR camera at an event, sneak up behind them and take a look at what’s going on onscreen. They could be deep in the settings menus—or potentially, blasting through a demon horde in Doom.
Yes, it’s time to chalk another device up on the “anything can play Doom if you try hard enough” board (via Tom’s Hardware). Github user Lauris-nl has built a module capable of running the game inside the open source Magic Lantern firmware, which in turn runs on the Canon EOS 550D digital SLR camera.
The camera itself is an older model, originally released in 2010 and sometimes known as the Rebel T2i. The image processing hardware inside is apparently powerful enough to run Doom at a smooth frame rate, while the image adjustment and menu controls have been co-opted into what looks like a very playable configuration.
You get your traditional up, down, left, and right buttons on the radial controls, while the Set button handles “select” and “fire” duties. You can also use the Menu button to, you guessed it, open the menu. It’s like DSLR cameras were built for this.
Okay, maybe not quite. Lauris-nl says the port is not intended for other cameras, and warns against installing it on any other model, or using Canon firmware other than the 1.0.9 version—lest terrible things happen to your expensive photography machine.
Still, if you happen to have one knocking around (there must be some DSLR collectors reading), you’ll need to transfer a Magic Lantern 550D.109 build to an SD card, copy in the Github-provided module, and then paste compatible Doom .wad files into a custom folder.
The Github page doesn’t feature any commercial Doom files, of course—although Lauris-nl suggests that Doom, Doom II, and Final Doom: TNT Evilution (among others) will work. Alas, Heretic, Hexen, Strife, and Doom64 are unsupported.
Still, the original Doom games are some of the best ever made (fight me), so I reckon there’s more than enough to go on here. Plus, this would make for a perfect covert gaming device at boring weddings.
Sorry hun, I can’t talk to the groom’s father right now. I’m going through the photos and I can’t get past this clutch of cacodemons. Go on without me, would you?