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WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64

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Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64

#11

Post by BuildTheRobots »

vardump wrote: post #5

WinCE was so weird. Didn't it have pretty insane limits, like maximum 32 processes?

WinCE had a load of weird issues (and looked consistently awful), but moving onto PDAs and even phones running it from a world of Psion and Palm was like stepping forward a century. This might be rose tinted recollections - and helps that it coincided with with the consumerisation of WiFi and Bluetooth - but fond memories. I still can't believe how Microsoft had a surprisingly capable mobile OS years before Android or Apple and yet managed to fail so badly.

Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64

#13

Post by smith7018 »

ieie3366 wrote: post #6

This is written entirely by claude right? I can tell just by the comments in the source code. Weird how HN upvotes projects like these but seemed to hate the Bun Rust swap done with Claude.

This is one person's hobby project that presumably less than 100 people will actually install. Of course no one cares that it was made with AI and won't be maintained.

Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64

#14

Post by ssl-3 »

xattt wrote: post #9
acmiyaguchi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The youtube video covering it has an interesting run through of the desktop environment in the final section https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGS9su_inBY&t=2418s . But I agree a screenshot or two wouldn't hurt.

Tinfoil Hat Take: Avoiding screenshots on the project page drives eyeballs to YouTube, which the provides ad revenue, which then feeds back into the project.

Or it might just be a sign of the times. Many folks seem to prefer video as a way to convey and use information.

Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64

#15

Post by com2kid »

my123 wrote: post #12
vardump wrote: post #5

WinCE was so weird. Didn't it have pretty insane limits, like maximum 32 processes?

Windows CE late in its lifetime (CE 6.0) had that go away with per-process address spaces.

CE 6 doesn't get enough love. It was an amazing OS that had a tiny runtime and a tiny on device foot print (it could get under 16MB iirc).

Too bad the tooling around it was so bad. I should do a writeup of why, it is an interesting case study in how poor extendability of tooling can hurt an entire company.

Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64

#16

Post by queenkjuul »

oliver66677 wrote: post #8

We had WiiMac a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47691730 Are we seeing a resurgence of interest in porting stuff to old consoles? AI is helping with these hobbies I guess.

We definitely are. Somebody is trying to build a PS2 exporter for Unity. Someone else ported Portal to the N64 before Nintendo slapped em with a C&D. There's been a lot of work on Dreamcast development, too

Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64

#17

Post by darksim905 »

The video that skipped to the actual content was neat, but the author saying "they don't know what they're doing" is very evident by the time you get to the end of the video watching them fumble to find architecture-specific MIPS binaries. Good grief.

Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64

#19

Post by xp84 »

BuildTheRobots wrote: post #11
vardump wrote: post #5

WinCE was so weird. Didn't it have pretty insane limits, like maximum 32 processes?

WinCE had a load of weird issues (and looked consistently awful), but moving onto PDAs and even phones running it from a world of Psion and Palm was like stepping forward a century. This might be rose tinted recollections - and helps that it coincided with with the consumerisation of WiFi and Bluetooth - but fond memories. I still can't believe how Microsoft had a surprisingly capable mobile OS years before Android o…

I certainly thought the c. 2001 PDAs under the PocketPC brand were absolutely sick. My hot take is that if the US telecom industry had by that year built out a network of good 3G coverage, those PocketPC devices would have of course had cellular capability, and would have sold like hotcakes, and would have become the basis, the ‘trope originator’ if you will, for Mobile computing. What iPhone was in our timeline.

I think what really held them back was that Wi-Fi was only starting to roll out, and outside a hotspot area, the universe of things you might do with one was necessarily quite self-contained. It limited what “killer apps” could be developed, as anything designed for the platform probably needs to be fully offline most of the time.

Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64

#20

Post by drum55 »

acmiyaguchi wrote: post #7
realjame wrote: post #2

Way cool project, but why are folks so allergic to putting screenshots of their work in the readme? There's a graph of how the internals work instead of a screenshot of the desktop running.

The youtube video covering it has an interesting run through of the desktop environment in the final section https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGS9su_inBY&t=2418s . But I agree a screenshot or two wouldn't hurt.

That video is very annoying and doesn't in any way replace just having a screenshot of it running.
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