Hacker runs Doom on an $8,200 Hasselblad medium format camera

Developer Radium Wang decided that an Hasselblad X2D 100C—a Swedish luxury medium-format body costing over eight grand without a lens—was simply an overpriced gadget until it proved itself in the fires of hell. The legendary shooter now runs natively on the camera's internal hardware, turning the physical shutter button into the trigger to blast demons while swiping the touchscreen steers the player around.

Digging into firmware 4.2.0, the developer uncovered a 64-bit ARM core running an Android API 28 base beneath a Qt 6.4.1 interface wired up through Wayland. Since the manufacturer never planned for rogue apps, there was no nice SDK waiting around. The solution was tearing apart the QML logic in active memory, splicing an independent game loop into the camera's stock UI without re-flashing the operating system.

The build relies on the lightweight doomgeneric port compiled into a static ARM64 binary with Zig. Frames swap through RAM via temporary bitmap files every 30 milliseconds, tricking the native viewfinder into stretching the classic 320x200 pixel carnage across the sharp 3.6-inch screen. Touch coordinates feed back into the engine in real time to let players strafe and turn simultaneously.

Sound effects stream directly out of the camera's built-in speaker at 16-bit 48 kHz by piping raw audio chunks from the game's original WAD file through shared memory buffers, even if the soundtrack music did not make the cut. The open-source code sits freely on GitHub for anyone willing to treat high-end studio gear like a vintage game console.

Engineers spend decades pushing sensors to a hundred megapixels just so digital purists can play a thirty-year-old shooter at three hundred pixels wide. The hardware industry keeps trying to build exclusive luxury, but the developer community will always reduce it right back to a demon-slaying toy.

Source: reddit