WindowsCE on the empeg

Has anybody ever tried to run WinCE on the empeg? It should be possible AFAIK. I was just wondering because then we could use many many applications.
Please, don't run me ragged!!!

cheers,
Thorsten

Hugo said it was possible back in 1999:

http://empeg.comms.net/php/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=hackers_prog&Number=4122&page=&view=&sb=&o=

It should be possible AFAIK.

Yeah, but why would you WANT to?

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

I would think that most applications for CE would be programmed for screens of other resolutions and so would not work very well. Just a thought.

-Zeke

I say go for it. You can do the reverse slashdot thing and instead of tying to get linux to run on a teddy bear, you can try and get windows running on a linux box =].

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Yeah, but why would you WANT to?

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Cos I'm a geek!

There are a lot of good programs already written for WinCE. Wouldn't it be great to have those goodies on the empeg?

The display drivers which need to be written could simulate a standard size and render it in something suitable for the empeg display.

I don't have the skills for doing all that driver development stuff...

The display drivers which need to be written could simulate a standard size and render it in something suitable for the empeg display.

I don't really see it happening, you'd lose the bottom line for the start button, and the top line for the menu bar. So you'd end up with a 2 line screen and a lot of scrolling. Besides all WinCE applications were designed around a 256 color screen, the empeg just doesn't have the pixels to render that reliably down to 4 colors, so a lot of things would become invisible.

And except if you happen to work at microsoft, you'd probably not even get close the the parts of the code you need to modify to use your display drivers. Just buy an iPaq.

You do realize that the empeg player application wouldn't run on the empeg if you installed that satan-spawn, right?

I think it would be more interesting to get Qt/Embedded running. From their platform support page:

Qt/Embedded (QtE) is supported on all major embedded Linux distributions (QtE/Linux). The basic requirement for QtE/Linux is a linearly addressable framebuffer device (with 1, 4, 8, 16 or 32-bit color depth) for the display. In addition QtE/Linux needs a decent C++ compiler such as a gcc.

QtE runs on many embedded processor architectures including ARM, MIPS, x86, PPC, SH. There are no specific hardware dependencies in QtE.

Unfortunately, we have a 2-bit color depth, but that shouldn't be too hard to fix.

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You do realize that the empeg player application wouldn't run on the empeg if you installed that satan-spawn, right?

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I knew it would be dangerous to ask something like that in this forum.
And *yes*, I know that the player application wouldn't run on CE. I'm not a schnook.

I'm not a schnook.

I can't assume that. After all, you want to run Wince on your empeg.

Oh please... Let's not turn this place into Slashdot. Linux is not the second coming of Christ. Microsoft is not the Devil at the crossroads.

So he wants to look into getting WinCE to work on the empeg. Let's see some of that Empeg community spirit we are so proud of and help him out...

(Besides, the one WinCE running car stereo I played with had Voice Recognition that worked! )

I don't know about you, but I actually looked at WinCE as a possible platform for the distributed filesystem I work on. The development kits are pretty much useless for kernel level hacking. Besides, one of the requirements for WinCE devices is to have at least 32MB of memory, and I'm sure that car stereo had more than that (voice recognition is a memory hungry app) and wasn't doing anything else at the time.

You'll probably end up better off running PalmOS in a m68k emulator (i.e. pose) on an empeg. The screen size and depth are much closer (160x160x1 or 4), the available amount of memory is in the same range (512K-8MB) and the ARM processor is about 10x faster which compensates for having to emulate the 68K CPU.

Thanks bootsy. I don't understand that. I didn't attack anybody.

@wfaulk: why do you slight me? Are you one of those people who judge somebody just because he wears not the same clothes you wear?
I asked politely if anyone had ever attempted to use wince on the empeg. And, to quote myself: 'Please, don't run me ragged!!!'. But, instead of trying to convince me that it is very difficult or something you get a face as long as a fiddle, your eyes plop out of your head only because you read the letters WIN. Take it easy wfaulk.

I think Bitt dropped a smiley. Besides, you can discount his opinion anyway -- he's a BSD zealot .

@wfaulk: why do you slight me?

I think he was slighting windows.

I certainly didn't mean to be a flame with my point about the display, I was just pointing out one ov several large issues that would have to be overcome. I think CE on the empeg hardware is an interesting idea, but it would be a long road to get to where it would be a useful device.

Also, I think you have (as we say in these parts) been 'Bitted'.

I assume you know about the Auto PC by Clarion? I don't know if they're still selling or not but I have heard some good things about that device's capabilities, which are certainly different from that of the empeg.

-Zeke

Besides, the one WinCE running car stereo I played with had Voice Recognition that worked

If you consider the AutoPC voice recognition to "work" then maybe we set our targets for empeg VR a bit too high! The AutoPC was pretty much exactly what we were trying to avoid becoming.

Rob

I wanted half-a-smiley, but that didn't exist.

Thorsten: Dude, you've gotta take life less seriously. I was (mostly?) joking. You can do what you want with your empeg. I think that you'll be seriously underimpressed with Wince if you get it installed (although it's about a million times better now than in its FCS). But, really, I'm just ribbing you.

At the same time, if you do get it installed and doing something useful, I'd like to see it.

And I'm not a BSD-zealot. I'm a right-solution-for-the-problem zealot. I just happen to think that Linux has gotten so fractured in the last few years that it's very hard for it to be the right solution out-of-the-box for pretty much any problem. IMO, this is mostly RedHat's fault in that everything has to be their way. And that's not even their fault. It's the fault of all the people that glommed onto it and think that it's the best thing ever, despite the fact that it's mostly just copying things that had been done before.

Case in point: on the comp.unix.solaris or comp.sys.sun.admin newsgroup, someone recently asked a question that had a codecil of something like ``I've done this under Linux using dd. Does Solaris have a command like that?''.

I also have a problem with bandwagon-jumping, which is what Linux has mostly turned into these days. Not that it's not a useful-for-certain-applications OS or that it's not better than pretty much any Microsoft OS.

Edit: Also notice that I'm a little annoyed at Windows right now because I was at another office last week helping some morons set up some Solaris servers and I was endlessly ribbed by the Windows ``admins'' (I use the term loosely here) that Windows was better because it was pretty. I kid you not.

Did you let them know that the OSX is prettier, so its even better than Windows?

If pretty means better, I know a lot of people who are terrible

I was just wondering because then we could use many many applications.

Actually, no you wouldn't. If somehow you got WinCE to run properly on the empeg, you would still have to then develop or port applications to it. Basicially a programmer for WinCE has to make the program specificially for a few devices. When I bought my iPaq handheld when they first came out, I ran into this problem. Even though in theory WinCE 3.0 could run 2.0 programs, no 2.0 devices ran StronARM processors. I had to wait for programmers to specificially port their applications to WinCE 3.0 PocketPC edition for StrongARM processors (IE, just the iPaq at the time).

MS has since realised the freedom to choose whatever CPU was actually hurting the WinCE PDA market, thus all PocketPC 2002 devices are StrongARM running devices.

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Also, I think you have (as we say in these parts) been 'Bitted'.

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"Bitten"?

LOL

empeg.comms.net/php/showthreaded.php?Board=offtopic&Number=110797

I never looked further, but it basically means to have been admonished pubicly by Mr. Bitt Faulk.

-Zeke

(admin edit to stop the thread from scrolling sideways.)

basically means to have been admonished pubicly by Mr. Bitt Faulk

I didn't mean to admonish him. I meant to be a curmudgeonly old fart.

That's ok, I think you got that part across!

-Zeke

I meant to be a curmudgeonly old fart.

Hmm, I think thats too big for a custom user title... :-)

He could be the C.O.F. of the board, that would fit

I already suggested ``gadfly''.

basically means to have been admonished pubicly by Mr. Bitt Faulk

Ooo, uhh, I'd hate to be admonished publicly, but I would really not enjoy being admonished pubicly.

Anyway... I realize this thread is about running WinCE on the Empeg, but is it possible to do the reverse? Well, maybe I need to rephrase that question... maybe not to necessarily run the Empeg app on an iPaq, but I think it would be awesome to use just such a device as a remote. Passengers in your car would be able to choose music on the device. I'm sure its been discussed here before.

If you've got a wireless LAN onboard empegVNC would work well (assuming a wlan card on your PDA). I've done the same, albeit in my house as I've not invested in the WLAN for the car.

-Zeke