I wonder if Windows NT could work? I think it had a MIPS port?
yes, but it was rather choosy with the rest of the hardware
WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64
31–40 of 65 posts
Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I’d be interested in reading that.
Tl;dr wince team forked visual studio 6 (I think it was 6, I don't recall it was long ago) to make a custom UI and a tool called platform builder.
This was needed because VS didn't have the extensibility needed to do this without source access.
The fork got more and more out of date and it is hard to justify spending resources on an internal tool like that. WinCE was incredible but what was shipped to customers was a tiny sliver of what the OS could really do.
WinCE was also source available, which let it sneak into some really cool places, but the license didn't allow a community to be built up around it. MIT licensed WinCE would have easily gone toe to toe with embedded Linux.
Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64
#33This 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.
Because this won't subject me to endless crashes on a tool I use everyday at work
Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64
#34This 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.
I don’t really think that’s weird. Hobbyists, just for the sake of it projects always get judged much less harshly than projects people’s work depends on.
Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64
#35WinCE 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…
All tech enthusiasts at the time remember how amazing WinCE looked on the shelf. The thing that held it back was that it was just a cool technology, but wasn't an actual solution for any problem regular people had.
Regular people didn't need to carry around a pocket calendar or phone book. And most of the people who did -- carried paper ones that were easier to use didn't need charging.
Smartphones didn't get any traction until email started to take off, and Blackberry and Windows Mobile solved a problem by bringing email to handheld phones. And then they remained email devices for people who needed email on the go (business and tech-forward people)
Feature phones at the this time were catering to the two things people did want on the go: music and text messaging. Apple then started the smartphone consumer market by making a music-phone out of an iPod, and the rest is history.
Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
They somehow kept failing, too. A decade or so ago, my partner's cell phone provider was bought by AT&T and the old network was to be disconnected. AT&T's network was incompatible with their existing phone so they were required to get a new one. The only smartphone they could get for free was a Nokia device running Windows Phone 8, so they picked that. Their level of technical sophistication was not very high and thi…
> And despite finding a way to get this kind of positivity from me, a former OS/2 zealot and long-time user of free operating systems, they still managed to completely fuck up the entire operation. Indeed. I've ranted on this a bunch, but tldr; all they had to do was keep making cheap phones that worked surprisingly well and building the install base; but they wanted to focus at the top of market and wm10 was a disas…
> Lower income countries where something that was very inexpensive and worked enough had legs
As a lower income country citizen who had a Lumia 635, that's exactly how they got me. It was something like 150-160 U$S and at the time, in my country that would've bought me a Galaxy J2 or some other bottom of the barrel phone with a laggy Android UI. In contrast the Lumia 635 was just as compute/memory-starved but Windows Phone could handle it way, way better. My dad even used it into 2019 after I upgraded because it was just there and worked better than any cheap Android phone.
The developer experience of the platform was weird. As someone with (a bit of) C# experience I found XAML+C# way easier to get into than Android's kludgy layout system, but as expected the ecosystem of libraries was just not there, and while it was easy to get a free developer account as a student it was a bit pretentious of Microsoft to expect normal people to pay 25(?) USD for the privilege of publishing in a marketplace of between 0 and 5 users.
Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64
#37The 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.
He's clearly doing a bit where he pretends to be confused and incompetent, and the punchline of the video is that he ends up with a working Windows CE port. He did a bit of soldering on the N64 board in the video so I think he probably does know what he's doing to a certain degree. That said, LLMs have gotten extremely good at this kind of thing and you'd be shocked what you can do with this kind of low level work.
I suppose the repo is more telling than the video and shows some of the work put into it. The 'bit' he does in the video is jarring to me and makes me think of your typical crypto bro/AI bro/someone who may not know the inner workings of things, but the repo shows that isn't the case. I personally am not a fan of behavior like that for engagement/likes sake.
Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64
#38WinCE 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…
Not having the hardware vertical integration until buying Nokia was a big limitation. As was the use of resistive touchscreens, which usually requires a stylus to achieve any accuracy.
CE wasn't too bad. It was nice having mostly the same API as desktop windows, so you can easily cross-test.
Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d be interested in reading that.
Tl;dr wince team forked visual studio 6 (I think it was 6, I don't recall it was long ago) to make a custom UI and a tool called platform builder. This was needed because VS didn't have the extensibility needed to do this without source access. The fork got more and more out of date and it is hard to justify spending resources on an internal tool like that. WinCE was incredible but what was shipped to customers was a…
Ah that's what platform builder was.
I remember at the CE shop we had to copy around a WinXP VM to do the building in, because Platform builder wouldn't install on Win10 or something.
Re: WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64
#40Way 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.
Windows CE? Stock? With custom drivers? Running on real N64 hardware?
— Yes.
May I see it?
— No.