So, to come to the point, I have the driver and software CD - for Windows XP or earlier.
It apparently supports TWAIN and WDM (??). It worked fine back in the day, with a very vintage user interface to pull images out of the camera over a special USB-to-unknown cable.
It has no card slot, just internal, and, best of all - wait for it… if you leave the battery out more than 30 seconds all the images are lost!
I don’t know what kind of storage that is…
I ran the installer on my Win 11 PC and while it appeared to complete and told me to restart, when connecting the camera nothing happens. The app works, but can’t connect to the camera. In device manager it does show up, with an error message of no driver available.
Any ideas? It seems TWAIN is just packaging/API for manufacturer specific code, basically. But I don’t know a lot about about it.
Obviously not much point to all this, but it’d be fun to make it work.
The world needs a public archive of old tech protocols.
What an awesome design! You can swap batteries!
My first digicam was an Aiptek Pencam II … take out the batteries and all the images were gone. So you very carefully had to plan when and where to take pictures and getting them into a computer quick enough. But it was already photographing in VGA with 640x480.
To be fair I bought it as a webcam for videocalls and it did that very well.
I’ll have to dig it out and see what is needed to get it to work more than 20 years later …
WTF…no card slot. I thought the first digital camera I used in a school for teaching purposes was bad enough because it run on a 3.5 inch floppy. Apologies to any of those readers who who don’t know what a 3.5 inch floppy was. But it was not a male appendage after too many beers.
Me suspects, the app and its driver is basically for 16 or 32 bit systems only:
System Requirements:
Pentium I and above Personal Computers
Windows 98/ 2000/ ME/ XP Operating Systems
32 MB or above Memory (64 MB or above is recommended)
64 MB Hard Disk Capacity
CD-ROM Drive
Colour Monitor (Not lower than 800 x 600, 24 Bit)
(copied from an ebay.at - shop)
I am not sure, if a VM also can emulate the connections for 16 or 32 bit, if not, you could try to find an old Windows ME hardware
I remember those – had a floppy drive built in. Never owned one though. My first digital was a Kodak DC5230 (or some number). No raw, 5mp jpg, no card, USB connection.
Well, I’m happy to say that it’s working!
I installed VirtualBox on my Debian based laptop, which was a bit of a learning excercise in itself, but went fairly smoothly apart from a fuss about signing kernels for EFI secure boot. I ‘solved’ that by disabling secure boot in the BIOS - don’t suppose I need it, although if you know otherwise you could let me know.
Then installed Win XP Pro SP3 from an ISO image on archive.com, booted it up. (XP has a lovely startup sound!). Then I found USB passthrough wasn’t working - install Guest Additions on XP and added my Linux user to the vbox-somthing group. Voila! I could install the ‘DSC’ software for my camera, plug it in and it worked!
It came free with a Bosch power tool. (electric drill I think).
But it’s interesting innit?
