Emulators for old versions of Windows CE

POSE, the Palm OS Emulator, provides an environment capable of running a surprising number of versions of Palm OS (the HandEra 330's giant screen is fun, and support for the Treo 90's color screen was unexpected); it's even sufficiently backward-compatible enough to work with Palm OS 1.0, which is VERY awkward to use but still awesome to look at, learn about and go "wow, I can run it on my PC."

Is it possible to do this with older versions of WinCE? I kind've get the impression (from some surface-scratching Googling at least) that emulators for this kind of thing doesn't exist. :/ (How on earth did people develop for WinCE 1.0?!)

Thanks in advance

-i336

Against real hardware is the answer.

The Windows NT 4.0 days, were very much pre-emulation/virtualisation.

The first official emulator was for 2.11 and you can download Virtual PC images for 3.0 -> 5.0 from this site.

Wow, real hardware would've been... interesting to debug

Ah. So Platform Builder 2.11 isn't a CE 2.11 emulator (unless I'm very very confused); where would I start poking around for this kind of thing? (Or is this more of a "came with $7k dev package" extra? )

-i336_

No, PB is the Windows CE package manager. It is where you build a Windows CE OS image from the CE package repository, customise it and create the release and debug images.

The 2.11 emulator is part of eVT 3.0 + the H/PC Pro SDK.

Debugging is done through a serial line protocol

Ah, EN_WINCE_EMBDVTOOLS30.exe

(Wait, what's PB for? You can "build a Windows CE image"? *gets lost in sea of mysterious directories* )

(As an interesting bit of trivia, the DOS 6.20 source code includes an "oak" directory too. Huh. Maybe Microsoft engineers spent too long looking at directory *trees* )

-i336

Edited by i336_ 2014-02-19 10:07 AM

OAK is the OEM Adaption Kit, effectively CE's hardware abstraction layer upwards. OAK was the name of Platform Builder before it became Platform Builder.

Those MS guys did like their trees. Check out the "Trivia" section near the bottom of this page:

http://www.hpcfactor.com/support/windowsce/wce2.asp

lol, wow.. Cool!

Yeah, DOS was a bit weird. I've always thought it interesting that QBasic (1.0 at least) lived in the directory "45\", when QuickBASIC 4.5 later went on to become the most popular version of the language (for DOS anyway).

-i336