Sierra digital cameras on the Apple II

After successfully adding support for the Kodak DC-50 camera in Quicktake for Apple II, I investigated what else was there that had vastly overblown “System requirements”. The Epson PhotoPC user manual page with their System Requirements Based on libgphoto2’s source code, I chose to give a closer look to what I (and they) call the “Sierra-class” cameras. There are a lot of cameras sharing the same class of protocol there, more than 80 models are referenced. Not all of them will be usable on Apple II, as my JPEG decoder is hardcoded to 640×480 images (de-hardcoding it would be possible, but memory and CPU expensive, and it’s already slow enough as is that I don’t want – yet – to even try decoding and scaling down 800×600 or 1024×768). Even limited to 640×480 cameras, this will open a number of options. I bought a pair of very cheap Sanyo cameras on eBay (a VPC-G1 from 1995, also sold as Epson PhotoPC PCDC001 and Sierra Imaging SD640, and a VPC-G200 from 1997), and started my 2026…