Wine For Windows Ce

[benjymous]

I found a thread on the Wine mailing lists that said that experiments in the past concluded that it would be possible for Wine to run on an Arm machine and wrap WindowsCE api calls, in the same way that it wraps Win32 calls on an x86 machine:

http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel...ber/040185.html

It doesn't look like it really got off the ground past initial prototyping, but it could be a useful thing to get working - it wouldn't give us the ability to run Windows games, but it'd open up all the Windows Mobile software library (such as decent satnav software, pocket office, etc)

 

[CCmachined]

you want to run Windows CE apps on a Pandora? why?

 

[kanzlr]

well that would be interesting, in fact.

why? there are thousands of excellent applications and games. but many don't support 800x480, so you would have to be able to select 640x480 as alternative.

there are great games, like Orions, Azgard defence, Palm Heroes, warfare inc, argentum, and many others. not to speak of some very nice applications, like kinoma, softmaker office, etc.

 

[benjymous]

Exactly - and as I said in the original post, you could use off-the-shelf satnav apps, which are (currently) far superior to anything OSS can offer (since they've got the official up-to-date licensed map data)

 

[Balzac2m]

A proper navigation software would be an absolute killerapplication for me. Although a mailinglist entry dating back to 2005 and a working satnav-software are very far apart.

edit: This thread is the fourth google result when searching "WinCE Arm Wine" now. Well...

 

[conso]

Exactly - and as I said in the original post, you could use off-the-shelf satnav apps, which are (currently) far superior to anything OSS can offer (since they've got the official up-to-date licensed map data)

Roadnav can use commercial up-to-date map data AND osm...


Well, as far as I got it, wine doesn't even compile on arm, neither winelib. A discussion on their mailing-list said if that would be done, a second step could be to build a wrapper for qemu, to not emulate a computer, but only a x86-processor and one would have the probably highest efficient windows-emulator for arm currently feasible.

Still, that's very much speculative, since no one seems to really have that much interest in porting wine to arm.

 

[Kyo]

That's an excellent idea, let's hope this happens someday

 

[benjymous]

Well, as far as I got it, wine doesn't even compile on arm, neither winelib. A discussion on their mailing-list said if that would be done, a second step could be to build a wrapper for qemu, to not emulate a computer, but only a x86-processor and one would have the probably highest efficient windows-emulator for arm currently feasible.

Still, that's very much speculative, since no one seems to really have that much interest in porting wine to arm.

That was talking about porting the regular build of Wine to be able to run X86 (Windows 9x, Win2k, XP, Vista) executables on an Arm system.

That wouldn't work, since overhead for emulating the x86 cpu would be too much.


What I'm talking about is adapting Wine to wrap the Windows CE / Windows Mobile APIs (which already run on Arm Processors) to allow Arm-built WinCE binaries to run on the Arm-based Pandora.

That is entirely feasible, and wouldn't require any CPU emulation, meaning Apps would run at full speed on the pandora (or even faster, since the Pandora's CPU outstrips that of most current Windows Mobile devices)

 

[conso]

Well, as far as I got it, wine doesn't even compile on arm, neither winelib. A discussion on their mailing-list said if that would be done, a second step could be to build a wrapper for qemu, to not emulate a computer, but only a x86-processor and one would have the probably highest efficient windows-emulator for arm currently feasible.

Still, that's very much speculative, since no one seems to really have that much interest in porting wine to arm.

That was talking about porting the regular build of Wine to be able to run X86 (Windows 9x, Win2k, XP, Vista) executables on an Arm system.

That wouldn't work, since overhead for emulating the x86 cpu would be too much.


What I'm talking about is adapting Wine to wrap the Windows CE / Windows Mobile APIs (which already run on Arm Processors) to allow Arm-built WinCE binaries to run on the Arm-based Pandora.

That is entirely feasible, and wouldn't require any CPU emulation, meaning Apps would run at full speed on the pandora (or even faster, since the Pandora's CPU outstrips that of most current Windows Mobile devices)



I did get what you were talking about, just wanted to add this info from the wine mailing list about regular wine on arm. I don't know how far they have got with winCE/WinMobile APIs, yet, but my impression is, it will still be a hole lot of work.

About qemu-performance: yes, it will produce a lot of overhead, still I'd bet it would offer a lot more possibilities, then a dosbox/win3.x-combo could offer. People are a lot interested in emulation in this community, so why not emulate windows? Using qemu for x86-emulation and wine for HLE of all the rest, is probably the most efficient bundle we can get. Still wine would need a oGL-ES-backend for 3d-stuff and I see no way we will get this in short range, but windows isn't only 3D-games .

Damn, I'm a linux-only user for 5 years now and all this palm-, win- and winCE-emulation-stuff for applications doesn't bother me at all - linux has everything we can wish for and there are enough linux-embedded-projects going on to offer us perfectly integrated apps. Still there are some nice games from the win95/98-age, such a qemu-wine bundle could offer - some even with pandoras native resolution instead of the low resolutions, other emulators would give.

 

[Blah]

It would be easier just to port Windows CE to the Pandora like Firefly did for the GP32. You'd have to pay for it, of course.

 

[Exophase]

Sounds like a cool project, but given how much time and energy it took to get Wine to a useful state for Windows proper, I imagine this one will be a ton of work (unless WinCE is more similar than I realize)

 

[Pleng]

It would be easier just to port Windows CE to the Pandora like Firefly did for the GP32. You'd have to pay for it, of course.

I think it's be really cool to have WinCE as an option for the device. It would be great to be able to pop in an SD card and boot into WinCE and make use of the variety of apps already out there.

 

[nubie]

Why not just run WinCE on the Pandora instead?

Get a developer version and build it for the OMAP that we have.

All things being equal it probably would be less trouble (but probably more $$).

I am just thinking about all-out compatibility and simplicity. If it reboots in a short time you could move between Wince and the pandOS without much trouble. Personally I don't see any good reason for wince, but I have used too many crap wince handhelds (and a lot of them as very expensive commercial automobile diagnostic tools), and they are very poor.

 

[Blah]

Then again, contradicting myself here, WinCE support in Wine would be a huge boon for the FOSS community, let alone the Pandora.

 

[Lorkile]

All this topic makes me think about is how cool it would be if I could play MapleStory on a Pandora, no matter how unlikely that seems.

 

[ljones]

The idea of having to run WinCE on a pandora makes me want to wince.... x.x I must admit if the pandora was a windows machine, I definately wouldn't be getting one. Isn't the whole idea behind pandora is to be open, and wince definately is not.

*Sighs. I must admit I'm getting sick of all these will it run window$/will it play video/will it go on the internet threads.

ljones

 

[cb88]

I asked a long time ago about this but ... how many OSs can ARM run simultaneously? ie x86 has xen which allows realtime switching between OSs .... im not even sure that is possible with ARM though since the processor rings are different

 

[icurafu]

I would prefer to start on a clean slate.... but if it was to happen.... I do have a dozen good Windows Mobile games that I can't play anymore.

WM gaming has been floundering for a long time. There are only a few really good games released in the last couple of years and a lot of the WM gamers of age (myself) have moved on to other platforms.

Anykind of WINE for WinCE would be nice as a way to play WinCE games that we may already have, but it wouldn't extended the funtionality of Pandora. (It would feel like another emulator that runs a few good games at QVGA and one or two at VGA)