7 ms·
WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64
- HumblyTossed 5mo agoWhy would you name a product wince?
- Uvix 5mo ago“It sounded good.” https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20211214-00/?p=106030 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20211214-00/?p=10...
- fragmede 5mo ago> Why every advertising agency needs to have a review panel of twelve-year-old boys https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080501-01/?p=22493 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080501-01/?p=22... Don't miss that link in the above!
- ranger_danger 5mo agoNot sure it's the brightest idea to pick a name based on what a 12-year-old thinks is cool, but ok
- fragmede 5mo agoBecause abbreviations end up how they end up sometimes. Windows: Compact Edition seems entirely reasonable until you spell it wince. Why did the South Lake Union Tram line get renamed?
- realjame 5mo agoWay 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- alpenbazi 5mo ago+1 I support this. Make Screenshots of your work and put it in the README.md
- acmiyaguchi 5mo agoThe 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGS9su_inBY&t=2418s. But I agree a screenshot or two wouldn't hurt.
- xattt 5mo agoTinfoil Hat Take: Avoiding screenshots on the project page drives eyeballs to YouTube, which the provides ad revenue, which then feeds back into the project.
- vardump 5mo agoWinCE was so weird. Didn't it have pretty insane limits, like maximum 32 processes?
- BuildTheRobots 5mo agoWinCE 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.
- xp84 5mo agoI 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.
- gattilorenz 5mo agoI 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).
- ieie3366 5mo agoThis 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.
- rspeele 5mo agoNew ground-up projects get a softer reaction than 100% rewrites to tools that people are already depending on.
- smith7018 5mo agoThis 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- koutakun 5mo agoBecause this won't subject me to endless crashes on a tool I use everyday at work
- afavour 5mo agoI 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.
- fragmede 5mo agoFirst they laugh at us...
- voidfunc 5mo agoI just like interesting stuff. I dont care of its written by a random token generator or artisinal crafted with love.
- oliver66677 5mo agoWe had WiiMac a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47691730 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.
- queenkjuul 5mo agoWe 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
- darksim905 5mo agoThe 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.
- superdisk 5mo agoHe'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.
- darksim905 5mo agoI 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- als0 5mo agoProjects like this is why I come to Hacker News. Well done.
- etaioinshrdlu 5mo agoI wonder if Windows NT could work? I think it had a MIPS port?
- EvanAnderson 5mo agoIt did, but the N64's maximum 8MB of RAM would be a heck of a lift for even NT 3.51.
- dmitrygr 5mo agoyes, but it was rather choosy with the rest of the hardware
- andix 5mo agoDoes it run Age of Empires Pocket PC edition? This was the only useful thing on those CE consumer devices. All the other stuff was mostly useless. :D
- satertek 5mo agoI loaded that on my T-Mobile Wing phone back in the day. Super impressive port. Would love to know the story behind it!
- ngcazz 5mo agoUnlike most other projects of this kind that show up, I'm not sure how to feel about this. What did the author learn about the N64? What quirks did they fight? What do you get out ot just pointing the AI at a problem until it optimizes the solution to an acceptable point? I'd wager not a lot.