Posted 2023-10-24 | Back to blog index
Imagine it's 1997 and you're a Japanese businessman. You're traveling the country for work, and want to update your personal web page with photos of interesting things you see. You have an early digital camera you bought, and you have your work-issued PDA, but obviously without a PC such a multimedia task can't be completed? You're going to have to wait until your get back home...
But that's where you'd be wrong! As long as you were fully in the Casio ecosystem, all you needed was this little cable, and a world of integration opens up!
Software built-in to the Cassiopeia supports transferring photos directly from a Casio QV-series digital camera, letting you view it in 4 shades of grayscale glory!
Interestingly enough, when you select a photo to import, the preview of what image you're about to import is shown on the camera screen, not the PDA screen. This is obviously because the actual serial transfer of the photo is way too slow for preview purposes, but it's kind of odd in practice.
Now this included software doesn't just transfer photos. In fact, it doesn't even have a "just transfer photos" function.
Enter Casio Argo-Builder. It's a program for Windows CE that lets you make websites. It has templates for all kinds of databases - recipe collections, favorite restaurants, and one option is called "QV Album".
Within QV Album it lets you import fotos, add a title and some metadata, and when you save it, you get a little gallery website!
Now you can put this on your PCMCIA flash memory card and pop it in your PowerBook 540c, but you're a Japanese businessman, so stick a PHS card in the bad boy and FTP your site wirelessly!
OK so I can't do this anymore since those networks are dead, but there *are* Orinoco Wi-Fi drivers for this thing which I am going to have to try. And I found a Buffalo Ethernet card in the bin of PCMCIA cards at HARD OFF where their driver page for Windows CE is still online… https://www.buffalo.jp/support/download/detail/?dl_contents_id=60424
Now this digital camera also supported being hooked up to bunch of other stuff in Casio's broad range of products. You could import photos into their word processors, they had printers, and even a special floppy drive so you could save photos to floppy without a PC in the mix!
BTW the image quality of this camera is absolutely atrocious
