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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the early alkaline / NiCd AA battery powered WinCE PDAs with as little as 2-4 MB of RAM and a very slow single core processor, having only 32 process slots wasn't really a limitation. You couldn't afford too many processes or to be doing much computation anyway.
Don't get me wrong by the way. For their time, the early PDAs were expensive, bleeding edge tech and the limited things that could be done with them was still unprecedented. They crawled so future smartphones could run.
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.
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.
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 this was to be their first pocket computer.
It had a fraction of the CPU grunt of my Galaxy S5 so I expected it to be slow and for them to hate it. I also expected to be asked to solve problems with it and help them along with some aspect of it or another.
But there was none of that. It just worked. They never had any questions. Like many people with a pocket computer, they came to use it all the time for things.
I poked at it myself a few times and found the user interface to be very different from Android and IOS, but it flowed well and was always instantly responsive. It was a neat little machine that seemed to perform extraordinarily well.
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. It remains the only example of a Windows Phone device that I'm aware of ever having seen someone use in the wild.
> 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 disaster.
> It remains the only example of a Windows Phone device that I'm aware of ever having seen someone use in the wild.
They had some placement in Scandal or House of Cards, I think. Was pretty weird for me as a WP user to hear the ringtones and see the UI on the shows I was watching. Not a whole lot of market penetration in the US, but pretty decent in lower income countries where something that was very inexpensive and worked enough had legs.
> 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.
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.
I don’t know, I remember them being great from a HW point of view (I had an iPAQ 514 and it was mindblowing even without touch and just a tiny screen), but UX wise…
I now have another iPAQ with a stylus and touchscreen, and I’m grateful back then I did not have it nor the mobile version of Age of Empires… it’s addictive stuff and a crazy good port. I don’t remember anything so good on PalmOS 5 (we had a Garmin iQue 3600, with integrated GPS and navigation… also very futuristic).
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.
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.
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.
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.
+1
I support this. Make Screenshots of your work and put it in the README.md
probably cause it is just CE 2.11?
either you have seen it and seeing it again is pointless, or you do not know what CE is, and the headline means nothing to you
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
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.
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.
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.
Because this won't subject me to endless crashes on a tool I use everyday at work
New ground-up projects get a softer reaction than 100% rewrites to tools that people are already depending on.
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.
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.
WinCE was so weird. Didn't it have pretty insane limits, like maximum 32 processes?
On the early alkaline / NiCd AA battery powered WinCE PDAs with as little as 2-4 MB of RAM and a very slow single core processor, having only 32 process slots wasn't really a limitation. You couldn't afford too many processes or to be doing much computation anyway.
Don't get me wrong by the way. For their time, the early PDAs were expensive, bleeding edge tech and the limited things that could be done with them was still unprecedented. They crawled so future smartphones could run.
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.
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.
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 this was to be their first pocket computer.
It had a fraction of the CPU grunt of my Galaxy S5 so I expected it to be slow and for them to hate it. I also expected to be asked to solve problems with it and help them along with some aspect of it or another.
But there was none of that. It just worked. They never had any questions. Like many people with a pocket computer, they came to use it all the time for things.
I poked at it myself a few times and found the user interface to be very different from Android and IOS, but it flowed well and was always instantly responsive. It was a neat little machine that seemed to perform extraordinarily well.
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. It remains the only example of a Windows Phone device that I'm aware of ever having seen someone use in the wild.
> 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 disaster.
> It remains the only example of a Windows Phone device that I'm aware of ever having seen someone use in the wild.
They had some placement in Scandal or House of Cards, I think. Was pretty weird for me as a WP user to hear the ringtones and see the UI on the shows I was watching. Not a whole lot of market penetration in the US, but pretty decent in lower income countries where something that was very inexpensive and worked enough had legs.
> 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.
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.
I don’t know, I remember them being great from a HW point of view (I had an iPAQ 514 and it was mindblowing even without touch and just a tiny screen), but UX wise…
I now have another iPAQ with a stylus and touchscreen, and I’m grateful back then I did not have it nor the mobile version of Age of Empires… it’s addictive stuff and a crazy good port. I don’t remember anything so good on PalmOS 5 (we had a Garmin iQue 3600, with integrated GPS and navigation… also very futuristic).
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.
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.
I wonder if Windows NT could work? I think it had a MIPS port?
It did, but the N64's maximum 8MB of RAM would be a heck of a lift for even NT 3.51.
yes, but it was rather choosy with the rest of the hardware
Projects like this is why I come to Hacker News. Well done.