Poll: What is a WM2003 compatibility layer worth to you?

How is that possible?

Have you ever purchased software for your iPaq?

it already has more than one killer app!

for example people have constantly been asking for IM software... IM+ works great i hear from RTFM!

then what about tomtom, etc navigation apps.

for my personal needs, neat irc clients,

and the list could go on and on


don't worry about thumb, easily solvable! it is already solvable without redgear, using the xscale to arm app (hosted on my site). but of course redgear will integrate a transparent solution for this.

Well, i was a little late in arriving at the 720 (2006), and by then PuTTY had been hacked to work, Geared2003 had packaged up TCPMP as HPC Media Player, and i had a few other free apps running on it (e.g Portrait for MSN). I was using the netfront trial for a while, but gave up the idea of Web Browsing on the machine entirely. Maybe a 728 would be better for this, i don't know. But if opera could run at the same time as TCPMP without running out of memory, that would be most cool.

As to the iPaq i've only had it a couple of months, and i mostly only use SJPhone and TCPMP on it.

Soz, cmonex you are absoultely right about the killer apps - should have looked at RTFM's screenshots first. Don't know if tomtom is CE3 or only 4.2, but if it runs, it runs, and that's great news. I did think there might be a way, as i read somewhere that thumb is the simpler arm instructions chopped into 16bits to improve code density - my thoughts were about exception handlers for the "to thumb" instruction invoking some kind of emulation, but i had no idea an app existed to thunk it to 32bit SA code prior to execution

But suffice it to say Redgear has a willing customer here...If the CE.net compatibility works out fine i'd probably flash my mp900c to HPC2000 (i don't think i own a single piece of hardware which needs 4.2 - ok Wireless cards will need their own config tool, but who cares!).

Actually, i don't suppose you could arrange something to make 2000/CE.net custom roms with Redgear integrated could you cmonex? I wouldn't mind keeping my key file (if that is how it is to work) on the Internal Storage drive.

Oh could one of you lucky beta testers give CE Mame a go? Last time i tried it the screen was all screwed up on mp900c (oh thats another point - if an app is incompatible with GAPI maybe an option to disable it for that one app would be good).

I would happily pay 25GBP for two licenses (one for the 720, one for the mp900c), maybe a bit more if some of the advanced features i was speculating on get implemented

as for thumb: no, the cpu does not need an exception handler to switch between arm and thumb. and if code has been compiled as thumb, it can't be run as arm, because the encodings (the actual code bits) are different.
but we are in luck because microsoft's compilers only use thumb code in some very limited way, which can be converted back to arm easily with a simple algorithm. on top of that they compile for armv4, not v5. (xscale is some sort of armv5t, strongarm is just armv4.)

custom rom can be made easily, of course can't be made public, unless isotherm thinks it's ok to have the exe in a public rom (of course without keyfile). but it's easy for the user to put their copy of redgear in the rom and configure the rom to run it on startup. (i can help with that, or maybe make some script that'll do it for you)

if a game has screen display problems, redgear probably can't do much, it's a gapi issue usually.



Edited by cmonex 2008-02-27 2:48 PM

really looking forward to buying this and having loads more choice in software!!



$ilver

Well, this ties into posts that i just put up here and here.

My main point of pain with my HPC right now is the lack of email/calendar/contact tie-in with Exchange, without using a wired activesync connection to a desktop host. PPC2002 and up has been able to ActiveSync against a server without anything more than a network connection, and I'm dying for the ability to do so with my 900c (using Cmonex's v2 rom).

Personally, pocketIE does what I need. Is Opera for the HPC neat? Yeah, but I haven't paid for it (i don't use it on my systems) and I'm not about to. And if a Wm2003 compat layer would /only/ allow for Opera or some other app that I don't really use that much, then no, i wouldn't find it worthwhile to purchase. But if a compat layer offered up full Exchange/Activesync functionality just like Wm2003, I'd pay between $50 and $100 for that in a heartbeat - especially if it allowed ANY Wm2003 apps to run.

I'd also beg that it also worked on my MP790 (HPC2000) and my IBMZ50. The Z50 could be more than my wife's classroom note taker then! (I use Exchange at work and at home). I also agree with someone's earlier post that it should be a site-license, rather than per-device. Per-device licenses tend to turn me away from purchase. If I buy $50 worth of software for my laptop or handheld, I want it to work on whatever laptop or handheld I'm using at the time, and I have several I use intermittently.

Personally, I'd rather the package itself be free with an option to donate, because I'd be way more likely to make a donation MORE than $50 or $100 for someone to put that together, rather than buying the software.

But please, keep this idea alive. A whole new level of functionality could come to fruition from these devices that are SO far from needing to be retired.

well, that'd be very major work to make a HPC2000 device 100% compatible with WM2003.
isotherm said to me that 90% is OK, but the remaining 10% is just too much work for the money.




then all apps would have to be written from scratch (or maybe the ARM to MIPS converter be developed further); WM2003 doesn't support MIPS.




this isn't a per device license as far as I know. you download the software with the license or whatever key allowing you to run it, then install it on as many devices as you like.




he wants money from this work; he only uses his own code (nothing is taken from microsoft's licensed WM2003 OS), to keep all this 100% legal, so he's entitled for that. also, donationware tends to turn up not much money. same software sold for a *low* price gets much much more money for the author than if it was donationware. this is experience.
I'm not sure I fully understood your lines, but if you said you'd be more likely to donate 100usd than pay 20usd for a payware software, then I'm a bit lost.

Edited by cmonex 2008-06-08 1:13 PM

PUBLIC PRERELEASE AT http://forums.alpaxo.com/viewtopic.php?pid=150#p150

this is so far HPC2000 only, cenet later. click the link to get more info

Edited by cmonex 2008-09-01 11:14 PM

Congratulations isotherm!

Altho I don't use HPC2000 anymore. We'll see if I will still be using CE4 when v1.0 is released If so I'll want to try it!

BTW this isn't on the news page yet...

Well, it is prerelease / beta. Is it newsworthy?

Geez, it took this to bring takwu around here again?

Nice to hear from you.

Edited by CE Geek 2008-09-02 2:07 PM

GREAT!!!! :-) :-) :-)

Just purchased.
Keep on the good work!!

Fernando

I'm sure it news worthy.....but there have only been 3 news postings over the last 2 months.

Patience!

I remember when this topic was made, . Great work!

Great work mate!