Unlike 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
The big issue with Wince was mobile IE was just an awful browser. I probably was not alone in wanting some 'webtop' gadget, but these weren't it. (In other words, iOS safari really was a killer app.)
The main problem was, that barely any useful apps existed. In the early 2000s internet connectivity was working well on those devices at some point (Wifi, via bluetooth phone, or integrated). But there was nothing to do with it, except syncing Outlook and some very limited mobile websites.
The only thing those Windows Mobile 2003 era devices were good for: Playing Age of Empires. There was a full featured port of Age of Empires I, and it was really awesome! It worked really well with the pen input.
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.
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.
WinCE 6 Platform Builder was based on Visual Studio 2005 I think.
Building applications for WinCE 6 was also only supported with Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, which put a hard cap on available language features and development OS support. I had the thankless job of trying to port C++ code from Linux to WinCE 6 in 2014, and even then VS2008 felt way behind.
Part of the reason CE 6 didn't get much love is that everyone had been burned so many times by all the previous CE releases -- not to mention that CE 6 was far too late!
In the end, though, it was better than Mobile, but hindsight is 20/20.
Parent poster is probably conflating Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone.
Windows Mobile 5 was tremendously popular with over 100 phones from various manufacturers. But that was also around the time iPhone was released and by the time Windows Mobile 6 rolled out, the iPhone 3G/3GS was taking the world by storm. Windows Mobile 6.5 had a partially revamped UI but not enough to be competitive. From there we go to Windows Phone 7, 8, and 10 and that story is well known.
We all dumped Windows CE for Windows Mobile. It was a lot of work and in the end it was an inferior product for pretty much every use case imaginable. The certification was not difficult but costly. Porting practically every application was a huge waste of time and money when they already worked well enough on WinCE.
Windows Mobile, built on WinCE, effectively cannibalized itself. We had Microsoft PMs and engineers tell us WinCE was a dead end. I moved onto to greener pastures before WinCE 6 but my understanding is that it triggered a crisis of faith within at least a few engineering organizations.
There were a number of things Windows Mobile excelled at compared to its predecessor but in particular it excelled at wasting corporate resources.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Because 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?
Does 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
I loaded that on my T-Mobile Wing phone back in the day. Super impressive port. Would love to know the story behind it!
Unlike 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.
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.
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.
WinCE 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 or Apple and yet managed to fail so badly.
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).
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.
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.
The big issue with Wince was mobile IE was just an awful browser. I probably was not alone in wanting some 'webtop' gadget, but these weren't it. (In other words, iOS safari really was a killer app.)
The main problem was, that barely any useful apps existed. In the early 2000s internet connectivity was working well on those devices at some point (Wifi, via bluetooth phone, or integrated). But there was nothing to do with it, except syncing Outlook and some very limited mobile websites.
The only thing those Windows Mobile 2003 era devices were good for: Playing Age of Empires. There was a full featured port of Age of Empires I, and it was really awesome! It worked really well with the pen input.
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.
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.
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.
WinCE 6 Platform Builder was based on Visual Studio 2005 I think.
Building applications for WinCE 6 was also only supported with Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, which put a hard cap on available language features and development OS support. I had the thankless job of trying to port C++ code from Linux to WinCE 6 in 2014, and even then VS2008 felt way behind.
Part of the reason CE 6 didn't get much love is that everyone had been burned so many times by all the previous CE releases -- not to mention that CE 6 was far too late!
In the end, though, it was better than Mobile, but hindsight is 20/20.
Parent poster is probably conflating Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone.
Windows Mobile 5 was tremendously popular with over 100 phones from various manufacturers. But that was also around the time iPhone was released and by the time Windows Mobile 6 rolled out, the iPhone 3G/3GS was taking the world by storm. Windows Mobile 6.5 had a partially revamped UI but not enough to be competitive. From there we go to Windows Phone 7, 8, and 10 and that story is well known.
Me? Conflating? I think not.
We all dumped Windows CE for Windows Mobile. It was a lot of work and in the end it was an inferior product for pretty much every use case imaginable. The certification was not difficult but costly. Porting practically every application was a huge waste of time and money when they already worked well enough on WinCE.
Windows Mobile, built on WinCE, effectively cannibalized itself. We had Microsoft PMs and engineers tell us WinCE was a dead end. I moved onto to greener pastures before WinCE 6 but my understanding is that it triggered a crisis of faith within at least a few engineering organizations.
There were a number of things Windows Mobile excelled at compared to its predecessor but in particular it excelled at wasting corporate resources.
I worked on WM6, 6.5 and WP7.
WP would've had a better chance if the windows org hadn't murdered CE to move everything over to the Windows Kernel.
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.
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
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.
+1
I support this. Make Screenshots of your work and put it in the README.md
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.
Or it might just be a sign of the times. Many folks seem to prefer video as a way to convey and use information.
Many folks also do not and prefer docs
Indeed. And I prefer documentation, myself, if given a choice between some words and pictures on a website or a video.
However, not everybody shares these proclivities.
That video is very annoying and doesn't in any way replace just having a screenshot of it running.
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
Windows CE? Stock? With custom drivers? Running on real N64 hardware?
— Yes.
May I see it?
— No.
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
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.
New ground-up projects get a softer reaction than 100% rewrites to tools that people are already depending 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
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.
First they laugh at us...
I just like interesting stuff. I dont care of its written by a random token generator or artisinal crafted with love.
Projects like this is why I come to Hacker News. Well done.
Why would you name a product wince?
“It sounded good.” https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20211214-00/?p=10...
> Why every advertising agency needs to have a review panel of twelve-year-old boys
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080501-01/?p=22...
Don't miss that link in the above!
Because 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?