Mavica 411

At Bette’s school, the classroom digicam is a Sony Mavica MVC-FD200, circa 2002, very old school with a FLOPPY drive or Memory Stick media.

…Memory Stick card slot and can store up to 128MB of images

(from Steve’s Digicams) We found a compatible Memory Stick on eBay, but this time she did not have it, so used the floppy disk drive. I shoved the disk it, and all I found was a series of .411 files.

Huh? Would not open in Paint Shop Pro, ThumbsPlus or renaming to .jpg did not help. After a bit o’Googling I found they are thumbnail files for the camera, made to go along with an HTM file which the camera produces. The only way I could find to show the images are with an old-school Java 1.1 app, Javica.

So I downloaded the Java 1.1 JRE from Sun and installed it. Tried to run the javica.jar file, would not start. Reset JAVA_HOME and the PATH environments.

Test it:
C:\devtools\Java\jre1.1\bin>jre -cp .\Javica.jar
Java(tm) Runtime Loader Version 1.1.8_010

Opened the JAR with WinZip, read the Manifest. Nothing. Looked thru the class files. Found com.javica.Javica.class. Very sensible.

Take 2:
C:\devtools\Java\jre1.1\bin>jre -cp .\Javica.jar com.javica.Javica
Bam! The GUI comes up and shows horrible lo-resolution thumbnails. Basically unusable. But I could tell they were pictures of our house. Huh?

Then I noticed the files were from 2006. I found that I used the wrong disk. All jpgs were on the ORANGE floppy! These were thumbnails from older 2006 pictures, of which I had the jpgs.

At least I can say I ran a 1.1 JRE. Now I need to repair the registry:
Registry key 'Software\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment\CurrentVersion'
has value '1.1', but '1.6' is required.
Error: could not find java.dll
Error: could not find Java SE Runtime Environment.

These cameras are $988 on Amazon why?