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With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-Pad Slate, Everyone's a WiiN-Er

oldvcr.blogspot.com

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Re: With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-Pad Slate, Everyone's a WiiN-Er

#21

Post by kotaKat »

nubinetwork wrote: post #2

The shape of that battery looks like it's got a pair of 18650s in them. > This machine came from the Atlanta, Georgia area (snip), and certain identifiers left on it trace it back to Patient Care Technologies, a home-care, hospice and telehealth software provider. It's not clear if this machine was actually in the field or only used internally for testing. PtCT was bought by Meditech in 2007. I'm sort of not surprise…

Data General really gave it away. I was really thinking this thing was gonna be heavily a MEDITECH tie-in. DG was basically the platform MT was running on back in the day (before OSAL happened).

Re: With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-Pad Slate, Everyone's a WiiN-Er

#22

Post by IAmLiterallyAB »

Aloha wrote: post #10
dfox wrote: post #9

It is somehow weird to see MPC821 in this kind of device. The point of (Power)QUICC line is that the Communications Processor is some kind of RISC/VLIW core, that offloads various communications tasks and has firmware support for various serial telco protocols. I would not be too surprised if MPC821 and MPC860 are in fact the same hardware only with different firmware that somehow bitbangs the LCD interface by (ab)us…

We're still shipping hardware with PowerQUICC stuff in it, its used in a TDM/IP intelligent channel bank.

NXP still sells those? Wow, e500 will never die huh

Re: With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-Pad Slate, Everyone's a WiiN-Er

#23

Post by kjs3 »

Aloha wrote: post #10
dfox wrote: post #9

It is somehow weird to see MPC821 in this kind of device. The point of (Power)QUICC line is that the Communications Processor is some kind of RISC/VLIW core, that offloads various communications tasks and has firmware support for various serial telco protocols. I would not be too surprised if MPC821 and MPC860 are in fact the same hardware only with different firmware that somehow bitbangs the LCD interface by (ab)us…

We're still shipping hardware with PowerQUICC stuff in it, its used in a TDM/IP intelligent channel bank.

Where are people still using TDM channel banks? As someone who spent far too much time with TDM networks (mostly replacing them) in the late 80s, genuinely curious.

Re: With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-Pad Slate, Everyone's a WiiN-Er

#24

Post by Aloha »

kjs3 wrote: post #23
Aloha wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're still shipping hardware with PowerQUICC stuff in it, its used in a TDM/IP intelligent channel bank.

Where are people still using TDM channel banks? As someone who spent far too much time with TDM networks (mostly replacing them) in the late 80s, genuinely curious.

It's TDM internally, but converts to IP at the edge of the device.

It can still operate over TDM for legacy, but yeah, thats the answer.

Re: With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-Pad Slate, Everyone's a WiiN-Er

#25

Post by WillAdams »

ukuina wrote: post #20
WillAdams wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, for folks who can stand NTrig, that works --- Wacom EMR or bust here.

Why would you prefer one over the other?

Hover distance is the big thing for me, and I mislike jitter when drawing slowly in NTrig, and I need more batteries to charge/manage like I need a hole in my head.

I have:

- Galaxy Note 10+

- Kindle Scribe

- Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360

- Wacom One

plus two spare styluses in my EDC bag, two more spares at the coffee table in the living room, and 3 more in a box on a shelf --- that they don't have batteries/capacitors and "just work" when I need them is an aspect of my life which I rely on.

Re: With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-Pad Slate, Everyone's a WiiN-Er

#26

Post by winocm »

32-bit PowerPC implementations do support little endian mode, but not from power-on reset. You can have a little stub handler that basically does the switch to LE by setting MSR.{LE,ILE} via srr1 and then performing a RFI after loading the return address into srr0.

It is notoriously difficult to write bi-endian code though. I really wish there were assembly directives to change the word swapping per instruction instead of doing it manually, for my own sanity.

I think the 970 supports this too, but it’s a bit weirder with the MSR.HV settings.

Note that little endian mode on PPC affects all memory accesses, including real mode when MSR.ILE is set.

Re: With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-Pad Slate, Everyone's a WiiN-Er

#27

Post by crest »

winocm wrote: post #26

32-bit PowerPC implementations do support little endian mode, but not from power-on reset. You can have a little stub handler that basically does the switch to LE by setting MSR.{LE,ILE} via srr1 and then performing a RFI after loading the return address into srr0. It is notoriously difficult to write bi-endian code though. I really wish there were assembly directives to change the word swapping per instruction inste…

Given that PowerPC supports indexed load/store instructions with reversed endianness it's doesn't cost extra cycles or code size to access little-endian peripherals. The real problem is how fragile drivers are these days.

Re: With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-Pad Slate, Everyone's a WiiN-Er

#28

Post by qingcharles »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #14
sumtechguy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WinCE was an interesting beast. The ones we made were MIPS (picked over an ARM system). Running a wildly patched 2.12. Also your PCMCIA issues? Trust nothing. It could be anything. But my guess is it is the driver, as getting that type of flash card to work consistently and correctly takes a steady hand. Your flash could also be slightly corrupt. We had almost that exact same chipset and found it would randomly stop…

We had the ODM. Had to rewrite critical pieces of it to make it work at all. The timer service had races - we fixed it and offered the fixes back, but arrogant Microsoft wouldn't take them, they were smarter than us and didn't need our help. So we had to repatch every release as they shipped the same broken code again and again. Had to rewrite the DHCP code, theirs was one run-on procedure written by some intern. Did…

I hate that attitude. I found a bug, fixed it, offered back to the company and they said "Don't worry, we'll find it ourselves eventually." Er, OK?

Re: With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-Pad Slate, Everyone's a WiiN-Er

#29

Post by qingcharles »

classichasclass wrote: post #12
sedatk wrote: post #11

Wow, the author's gone above and beyond. Pages and pages of useful information, and this statement is just in the middle of a sentence: "turn this into a phony ELF binary" That would alone take me days to tackle (convert a PowerPC PE into a PowerPC ELF). He mentions it like it's similar to copying a line on a text editor. Totally amazed at the level of detail and amount of work went into this article. Thanks!

(author) Thank you! But this was actually not very difficult. The PE format is well-documented, so I just extracted the code segment addresses, then generated an ELF by emitting code like this with a hacky Perl script: .globl main main: trap .byte 0xfc .byte 0xff ... etc. Assemble, run that in gdb, it traps immediately, and just disassemble from PC.

The entire article was like 100X what anyone deserves. It was an awesome amount of detail. I absolutely love when random lost pieces of hardware/software history end up right where they belong with exactly the right person to know what to do with them.
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