What to do with my Mobilepro 900

Hi everyone,

I got a NEC Mobilepro 900 a couple years ago and I have hardly been using it as I am not sure what to do with it.

I am looking for some suggestions - how to make good use of a Mobilepro 900 (or any HPC under win ce 3.0 for that matter) in 2020?

What are the apps/games you use the most on yours?

Would greatly appreciate your ideas here, really keen to get it out of its box.

Thanks!

If you’re into DOS programs and games, PocketDOS is a must! MorphGear is also a very decent multiplatform emulator. It can emulate SNES, Genesis, NES, and some other game consoles.

I have exactly the same question as you.

Negatives:
-Upgraded it to CE .net 4.2, found WiFi to be almost useless, downgraded to HPC2000, upgraded to CE.net again as I also have a Jornada.
-It still appears to play (converted) movies slower than the Jornada, despite a much faster processor.
-Screen is worse than the Jornada, less vibrant, worse touch-feel, but larger
-I can't get Doom or Quake running, which really are the games that I miss most on PCs of this era.
-PocketDOS doesn't appear to run for me, but this could be a CE .net 4.2 thing

Positives:
+Keyboard is excellent for typing. IMO the best of any HPC
+Battery rebuild was easy, now it lasts for hours
+Chunky, industrial feel - comparing it to J720, which to me feels like a fisher-price toy

Despite always searching for reasons to sell one or the other, and focus on / stick to just a single "newer" HPC, it's really difficult to justify selling this one. I still have no real-world/rational use for it, excepting perhaps writing, which can obviously be accomplished much more efficiently on a desktop / larger laptop. I can't see myself ever taking this as the only device on a trip away, due to limited use cases. It feels as if the only thing that might change it is sudden, new development or porting of modern Linux or Windows apps to suit these machines, but it feels as if this is also a pipe dream. My personal opinion is the joy of Nostalgia & a few minutes down memory lane appear to be my best use cases. Sometimes this is satisfying, and other times it makes me want to throw the MP900 away.

hpc12, I wonder if PocketDOS can run also on MP900 using ntware's trick: https://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=18952

First off get rid of the stock rom and upgrade ONLY to the Cmonex ROM: FYI...
http://repository.hpcfactor.com/public/cmonex/ has the cmonex 4.2 Rom you want. You may need to upgrade your boot loader, see the readme text. If you have trouble I can help you out. The stock roms are rather lacking...Cmonex, put together all kinds of great programs and fixes and wonderful utilities making the 900 or 900c quite powerful and useful.

I agree that the keyboard is the closest thing to computer /hpc sex I have encounted (please touch me here...oooh...now here...etc!)

Next buy one of these ambicom wifi cards on ebay...price is less than 8 dollars : https://www.ebay.com/itm/AmbiCom-WL54-CF-802-11g-54Mbps-Wireless-Wif...

Then download the driver from hpcfactor downloads : https://www.hpcfactor.com/hcl/detail.asp?hcdid=659&pn=1&categoryId=%... and install. Configure it to use WPA-TKIP encryption with a long complicated password and it should be quite safe from hacking...set your router to use wpa2/wpa or use a 2nd router behind a router that you can turn on and off if you like for internet access. RDP to a windows 7 computer works quite well right out of the box with this card.(As an alternative you can use a wired NEC 2000 compatible network card if you like if you want absolute wpa2 security on your network).

Next download the miniOpera browser on our site: https://www.hpcfactor.com/scl/709/Opera/Opera_Mini/version_5?page=do... and install it. You use key 8 for page up, key2 for page down. Always open your other apps before opening opera , say pocket word or battery monitor, explorer, etc before starting opera, that way you can access the other apps by using the alt-tab combo and toggle through your open apps. You can browse to wikipedia, hpcfactor, news, searches...you can't log into the sites requiring googles capcha but you can access https:// sites. You can't do video or audio with that browser but more often than not those things are a distraction and any tablet would serve that use better...or use RDP.

If you have a network share NAS on your network you have to use the registry editor in the utilities programs to edit the local machine key/com and look for the 2 security keys and delete them (edit...delete ) and reboot/soft reset. Then you can access them through windows explorer...it takes a minute or so for a log in popup appears...just hit ok without filling in credentials and it will work. More details later if needed.

I recommend downloading and installing TCPMP media player ( to listen to audiobooks from your local or network storage) and Alreader2 ( reads offline html files from local or network sources) as well.

For example I am learning Javascript HTML 4 and CSS basics on my NEC900c...writing in pocket word and saving as a text file with .htm suffix then opening it in IE4? browser...at the same time I have opera opened onto the W3Schools.com coding site and I can toggle between the two check my work or review example (I can also check my battery usage from time to time as battery life is shortened to an hour or so...but if you go into smalltweaks in control panel (thank you Cmonex) under power tab check the "on battery power "option... you can turn off the Wifi card until you need it by simple hitting the on/off button and after a few seconds the cf card popup shows up and hit yes or no to control power use while you read an article, etc).

So, I am quite happy to be browsing the web with my MP900 and MP900c's in this manner...while doing something productive in the other apps...and feeling secure at that with wpa...allowing me to save my files to the network to be accessed by my other hpc's elsewhere around the house.

Whew! There you have it. Enjoy!

Edited by joval 2020-11-16 5:57 PM

Thanks all for your replies!

Are we sure PocketDOS and MorphGear can run on it? Do I need to upgrade to 4.2 for this to work? It would be fun to run some Game Boy games on it.
It is really hard to see what type of games can run on the MobilePro, I am struggling to find info online.

I might try to upgrade from HPC2000 to 4.2 to get the WiFi and miniOpera.
Actually I used to have a Sigmarion III back in 2007 (with 4.1 and I was using WiFi with Opera), I really enjoyed using it at university for taking notes during classes (even though I also had an asus eee which probably did a better job - the Sigmarion III certainly had a wow factor in the lecture all...).

If you have other software suggestions that would be great.
I was told SunVox might run on it, even if I am not too keen on music softwares.
Is there a list of softwares available for HPC2000 somewhere?

I have recently had success installing & running PocketDOS on the MP900, running CE 4.2. It is colossally slow, but there is a patch which allows you to run 386/486 code - used this to run Doom at 1 frame every 5 seconds.

Haven't tried MorphGear yet, but ScummVM works perfectly for some old-school LucasArts adventuring, if you're into that.

There is actually a port of (edit) DosBOX that *should* run on this architecture. (http://n0p.tonych.info) I was thinking of making a separate post for it as have been tearing hair out for a week trying to get it going.

I have managed to get it running, however no matter which GAPI used, it displays the graphics on their side, cloned 5x. Clearly you're able to change directories etc., but there must be a key setting missing to flip and/or scale the graphics in GAPI or Dosbox conf.

Edited by hpc12 2020-11-22 7:12 PM