Frost Sheridan endeavored to see what could be done to make a vintage Kodak MegaPlus 4.2i usable by implementing the communication interface and building his own frame grabber gadget.

The first digital camera that I can recall seeing was 0.4MP Kodak that stored 24 images on its built-in memory. This was in the mid-90s, but apparently they were already making megapixel devices almost a decade earlier in the form of the Kodak MegaPlus 4.2i. The $849 1995 Kodak DC40 ($1800 in 2025) already seemed expensive, but the MegaPlus went for as much as $40K in 1986 ($118K today!).

The 68-pin D-sub connector seemed to imply that the missing frame grabber card required for use might use SCSI, but in fact it was custom signaling which just used the same connector. As such, Frost went about creating a Teensy 4.1-based solution, in order to end up with a portable device, unlike the tethered use that the required capture card and computer would have forced in its 80s incarnation.

Despite being nearly four decades old, the MegaPlus transfers images at 100Mbps, requiring a fast microcontroller like the Teensy 4.1, and one with enough RAM to buffer the resultant images, which the Teensy has after an 8MB SPRAM upgrade. The built-in mSD slot also provides a handy place to store images. An ICL3232 serial transceiver chip enables RS-232 communication between the Teensy and MegaPlus, and a 128x160px LCD acts as viewfinder.