Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️my roommate got me something fun from ewaste: A parallel port webcam!
It's the VIP Camera, which is supposedly "Simply The Best"
System requirements are "Windows 95" fullstop, so I'm guessing this thing is from 1995-1998?
okay, the CD-ROM says April 1998. So this thing is ONE MONTH before Windows 98.
okay, the CD-ROM says April 1998. So this thing is ONE MONTH before Windows 98.
So here's the fun part: It's not just parallel, it's parallel and (sorta-)keyboard!
See, it's gotta get power from somewhere, and the parallel port isn't a reliable source of it (especially on laptops), so... it has a keyboard pass-thru to steal some 5v
Interestingly, on that previous page it says it can capture still images of up to 1600x1200!
but this side says it has a 508x492 sensor, so I don't know about that chief.
the box just has the camera, cables, a CD-ROM, and a tiny manual, so I'm skipping to the good stuff: OPENING IT UP.
It's got a surprisingly big board for a webcam, but it IS a webcam from 1998, so...
So the camera daughterboard has only one chip on it, a Sanyo LC89901.
That's a CMOS Driver IC for 1/5" and 1/6" sensors.
Here's the top of the main board, with camera daughterboard and parallel connector removed.
Our Sanyo part on the left is an LC99067MA0.
No datasheet, but I did find a mention that it's a color digital signal processor.
No datasheet, but I did find a mention that it's a color digital signal processor.
Then we've got two of these Samsung ram chips.
Each are 512 kilobyte CMOS DRAMs, so an entire megabyte of RAM.
I love this, so I@foone that’d be the frame buffer