Re: [kidsgames] Hey!

[William Kendrick <nbs@sonic.net>]

Regarding using the Barbie Digital Camera under Linux, I said:
> 
> Unfortunately, I can't suggest anything else. (I did some searching on
> Alta Vista and Freshmeat.)

I take that back.  There was one more Netscape window I didn't look at. :)

  http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980213S0010

On this page, it says a few interesting things:

    "Then, with a serial cord connection, girls can download the
     120 x 280-pixel images to their PC..."

and:

    "...the camera saves images in a proprietary compressed format,
     then converts them to one of five standard formats, including
     HTML, JPEG, and TIFF."

(Someone is a moron - HTML isn't an image format.  Unless of course it
creates an HTMLized ASCII version of the image.  That'd be cool. ;) )



So, it looks like you're _probably_ out of luck, unless someone has
bothered to reverse-engineer their proprietary format.  (Heck, it's
probably just raw data compressed using RLE or something.  I mean, the
camera only holds 6 images, and they're only 120x280 pixels.
Assuming they're 24-bit color depth, the thing only needs _1/2_MB_ of RAM
to hold all that, UNCOMPRESSED! :) )


Of course, you could always ask Mattel if they have a Linux drive available.
They'll say "no," of course, but you'll be one more vocal non-Windows user. :)

(Tell 'em you can't afford $100 for Windows - that's why you had to buy
a $60 digital camera. ;) )


-bill!
-
kidgames@smluc.org  -- To get off this list send "unsubscribe" in the
body of a message to majordomo@smluc.org