Hi friends,
After seeing so many posts here about monochrome HPCs and Windows CE 2.00 I decided to give it a try. My first HPC was actually a Cassiopeia A-11 with WinCE 1.0 when I was a kid. However, once I switched to the Jornada 72x I never went back to those earlier machines.
Now that one of my kids broke my dear J720 by throwing it down the stairs
(he is 2, but it still made me a bit mad
) I decided to go with a different device. So I bought an HP 320lx with the WinCE 2.0 upgrade ROM. I found a really good deal on eBay, the device is in perfect shape, not even a scratch!
While I waited for it to arrive, I started researching what to do on a monochrome Windows CE 2.0 machine with an SH3 processor. It turns out that there is a lot to do with it. My Aironet 340 card that I was using with my J720 is compatible with the 320lx, great! Then I found this quite interesting piece of software called PC Anywhere. This could enable me to do awesome things with my new toy. I could use it to connect to a Windows NT 4 box, and then VNC in to a modern Linux box, and from there the sky is the limit. I got really excited with this but then... my device arrived and it didn't seem that straightforward.
First, I had a lot of WiFi issues. Turns out that WinCE2.0 doesn't know TCP/IP very well. Got me a bit of fiddling around on the forum to find the awesome HPC Factor network service pack for CE 2.0. After installing that, it was a breeze, I was online with my Aironet. Of course I had to create a guest open WiFi just for the Aironet, but that's fine.
Then the next step was installing PC Anywhere on my device. I did my first try on a Windows NT 4 virtual machine, just because I find Windows 95 too buggy. The install went fine, but in the end it was asking for H/PC Explorer. I don't want to install that, so I skipped. I was hoping to find a .cab file somewhere on the install dir, but all I could find was a bunch of .exe and .dll with the CPU architecture at the end of the file, like pcaw.exe.sh3 or pcaw.exe.mips. I copied all the sh3 files over to my compact flash card, removed the .sh3 extension at the end, placed all the DLLs on the /windows directory and boom, PC Anywhere was running on my HP 320LX just fine. Last step was installing PC Anywhere Host on my NT box. Installation went fine, I launched the host application, it was listening on 192.168.0.46. I launched the CE version on the HP 320lx, created a new connection, selected TCP/IP, put the 192.168.0.46 IP address on the box, hit connect and... it didn't work!
At first the connection seems to go right, it finds the host, and I get a quick notification on the Windows NT 4 that someone is connecting
(so I know it is not a connectivity issue
), but then after a while I get a message on the CE saying "Incompatible host program". I tried different versions of Windows
(Windows 95, Windows 2000
), and different versions of PC Anywhere. I started with the PC Anywhere CE Host that came on this link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161230152341/http://velo.8k.com/ . Then I moved to PC Anywhere 32 both versions 7.5 and 8.0 on the PC. I couldn't get it to work on any combination of those. Ultimately I downloaded PC Anywhere from here
(HPC Factor downloads
) which comes only with the CE software, not the host. I hard reseted my device and installed this one as a last try, and still the same problem persists.
Has anyone had any success in setting up PC Anywhere? Any hints? I would really like to use this program!
Thanks!