Way cool project, but why are folks so allergic to putting screenshots of their work in the readme? There's a graph of how the internals work instead of a screenshot of the desktop running.
The youtube video covering it has an interesting run through of the desktop environment in the final section https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGS9su_inBY&t=2418s. But I agree a screenshot or two wouldn't hurt.
Tinfoil Hat Take: Avoiding screenshots on the project page drives eyeballs to YouTube, which the provides ad revenue, which then feeds back into the project.
The video that skipped to the actual content was neat, but the author saying "they don't know what they're doing" is very evident by the time you get to the end of the video watching them fumble to find architecture-specific MIPS binaries. Good grief.
He's clearly doing a bit where he pretends to be confused and incompetent, and the punchline of the video is that he ends up with a working Windows CE port. He did a bit of soldering on the N64 board in the video so I think he probably does know what he's doing to a certain degree.
That said, LLMs have gotten extremely good at this kind of thing and you'd be shocked what you can do with this kind of low level work.
This is one person's hobby project that presumably less than 100 people will actually install. Of course no one cares that it was made with AI and won't be maintained.
We had WiiMac a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47691730
Are we seeing a resurgence of interest in porting stuff to old consoles? AI is helping with these hobbies I guess.
We definitely are. Somebody is trying to build a PS2 exporter for Unity. Someone else ported Portal to the N64 before Nintendo slapped em with a C&D. There's been a lot of work on Dreamcast development, too
On the early alkaline / NiCd AA battery powered WinCE PDAs with as little as 2-4 MB of RAM and a very slow single core processor, having only 32 process slots wasn't really a limitation. You couldn't afford too many processes or to be doing much computation anyway.
Don't get me wrong by the way. For their time, the early PDAs were expensive, bleeding edge tech and the limited things that could be done with them was still unprecedented. They crawled so future smartphones could run.
WinCE had a load of weird issues (and looked consistently awful), but moving onto PDAs and even phones running it from a world of Psion and Palm was like stepping forward a century. This might be rose tinted recollections - and helps that it coincided with with the consumerisation of WiFi and Bluetooth - but fond memories. I still can't believe how Microsoft had a surprisingly capable mobile OS years before Android or Apple and yet managed to fail so badly.
A decade or so ago, my partner's cell phone provider was bought by AT&T and the old network was to be disconnected. AT&T's network was incompatible with their existing phone so they were required to get a new one.
The only smartphone they could get for free was a Nokia device running Windows Phone 8, so they picked that.
Their level of technical sophistication was not very high and this was to be their first pocket computer.
It had a fraction of the CPU grunt of my Galaxy S5 so I expected it to be slow and for them to hate it. I also expected to be asked to solve problems with it and help them along with some aspect of it or another.
But there was none of that. It just worked. They never had any questions. Like many people with a pocket computer, they came to use it all the time for things.
I poked at it myself a few times and found the user interface to be very different from Android and IOS, but it flowed well and was always instantly responsive. It was a neat little machine that seemed to perform extraordinarily well.
And despite finding a way to get this kind of positivity from me, a former OS/2 zealot and long-time user of free operating systems, they still managed to completely fuck up the entire operation. It remains the only example of a Windows Phone device that I'm aware of ever having seen someone use in the wild.
I certainly thought the c. 2001 PDAs under the PocketPC brand were absolutely sick. My hot take is that if the US telecom industry had by that year built out a network of good 3G coverage, those PocketPC devices would have of course had cellular capability, and would have sold like hotcakes, and would have become the basis, the ‘trope originator’ if you will, for Mobile computing. What iPhone was in our timeline.
I think what really held them back was that Wi-Fi was only starting to roll out, and outside a hotspot area, the universe of things you might do with one was necessarily quite self-contained. It limited what “killer apps” could be developed, as anything designed for the platform probably needs to be fully offline most of the time.
I don’t know, I remember them being great from a HW point of view (I had an iPAQ 514 and it was mindblowing even without touch and just a tiny screen), but UX wise…
I now have another iPAQ with a stylus and touchscreen, and I’m grateful back then I did not have it nor the mobile version of Age of Empires… it’s addictive stuff and a crazy good port. I don’t remember anything so good on PalmOS 5 (we had a Garmin iQue 3600, with integrated GPS and navigation… also very futuristic).
CE 6 doesn't get enough love. It was an amazing OS that had a tiny runtime and a tiny on device foot print (it could get under 16MB iirc).
Too bad the tooling around it was so bad. I should do a writeup of why, it is an interesting case study in how poor extendability of tooling can hurt an entire company.
Way cool project, but why are folks so allergic to putting screenshots of their work in the readme? There's a graph of how the internals work instead of a screenshot of the desktop running.
The youtube video covering it has an interesting run through of the desktop environment in the final section https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGS9su_inBY&t=2418s. But I agree a screenshot or two wouldn't hurt.
That video is very annoying and doesn't in any way replace just having a screenshot of it running.
Tinfoil Hat Take: Avoiding screenshots on the project page drives eyeballs to YouTube, which the provides ad revenue, which then feeds back into the project.
Or it might just be a sign of the times. Many folks seem to prefer video as a way to convey and use information.
+1
I support this. Make Screenshots of your work and put it in the README.md
The video that skipped to the actual content was neat, but the author saying "they don't know what they're doing" is very evident by the time you get to the end of the video watching them fumble to find architecture-specific MIPS binaries. Good grief.
He's clearly doing a bit where he pretends to be confused and incompetent, and the punchline of the video is that he ends up with a working Windows CE port. He did a bit of soldering on the N64 board in the video so I think he probably does know what he's doing to a certain degree.
That said, LLMs have gotten extremely good at this kind of thing and you'd be shocked what you can do with this kind of low level work.
This is written entirely by claude right? I can tell just by the comments in the source code.
Weird how HN upvotes projects like these but seemed to hate the Bun Rust swap done with Claude.
This is one person's hobby project that presumably less than 100 people will actually install. Of course no one cares that it was made with AI and won't be maintained.
New ground-up projects get a softer reaction than 100% rewrites to tools that people are already depending on.
We had WiiMac a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47691730 Are we seeing a resurgence of interest in porting stuff to old consoles? AI is helping with these hobbies I guess.
We definitely are. Somebody is trying to build a PS2 exporter for Unity. Someone else ported Portal to the N64 before Nintendo slapped em with a C&D. There's been a lot of work on Dreamcast development, too
I wonder if Windows NT could work? I think it had a MIPS port?
It did, but the N64's maximum 8MB of RAM would be a heck of a lift for even NT 3.51.
Projects like this is why I come to Hacker News. Well done.
WinCE was so weird. Didn't it have pretty insane limits, like maximum 32 processes?
On the early alkaline / NiCd AA battery powered WinCE PDAs with as little as 2-4 MB of RAM and a very slow single core processor, having only 32 process slots wasn't really a limitation. You couldn't afford too many processes or to be doing much computation anyway.
Don't get me wrong by the way. For their time, the early PDAs were expensive, bleeding edge tech and the limited things that could be done with them was still unprecedented. They crawled so future smartphones could run.
WinCE had a load of weird issues (and looked consistently awful), but moving onto PDAs and even phones running it from a world of Psion and Palm was like stepping forward a century. This might be rose tinted recollections - and helps that it coincided with with the consumerisation of WiFi and Bluetooth - but fond memories. I still can't believe how Microsoft had a surprisingly capable mobile OS years before Android or Apple and yet managed to fail so badly.
They somehow kept failing, too.
A decade or so ago, my partner's cell phone provider was bought by AT&T and the old network was to be disconnected. AT&T's network was incompatible with their existing phone so they were required to get a new one.
The only smartphone they could get for free was a Nokia device running Windows Phone 8, so they picked that.
Their level of technical sophistication was not very high and this was to be their first pocket computer.
It had a fraction of the CPU grunt of my Galaxy S5 so I expected it to be slow and for them to hate it. I also expected to be asked to solve problems with it and help them along with some aspect of it or another.
But there was none of that. It just worked. They never had any questions. Like many people with a pocket computer, they came to use it all the time for things.
I poked at it myself a few times and found the user interface to be very different from Android and IOS, but it flowed well and was always instantly responsive. It was a neat little machine that seemed to perform extraordinarily well.
And despite finding a way to get this kind of positivity from me, a former OS/2 zealot and long-time user of free operating systems, they still managed to completely fuck up the entire operation. It remains the only example of a Windows Phone device that I'm aware of ever having seen someone use in the wild.
I certainly thought the c. 2001 PDAs under the PocketPC brand were absolutely sick. My hot take is that if the US telecom industry had by that year built out a network of good 3G coverage, those PocketPC devices would have of course had cellular capability, and would have sold like hotcakes, and would have become the basis, the ‘trope originator’ if you will, for Mobile computing. What iPhone was in our timeline.
I think what really held them back was that Wi-Fi was only starting to roll out, and outside a hotspot area, the universe of things you might do with one was necessarily quite self-contained. It limited what “killer apps” could be developed, as anything designed for the platform probably needs to be fully offline most of the time.
I don’t know, I remember them being great from a HW point of view (I had an iPAQ 514 and it was mindblowing even without touch and just a tiny screen), but UX wise…
I now have another iPAQ with a stylus and touchscreen, and I’m grateful back then I did not have it nor the mobile version of Age of Empires… it’s addictive stuff and a crazy good port. I don’t remember anything so good on PalmOS 5 (we had a Garmin iQue 3600, with integrated GPS and navigation… also very futuristic).
Windows CE late in its lifetime (CE 6.0) had that go away with per-process address spaces.
CE 6 doesn't get enough love. It was an amazing OS that had a tiny runtime and a tiny on device foot print (it could get under 16MB iirc).
Too bad the tooling around it was so bad. I should do a writeup of why, it is an interesting case study in how poor extendability of tooling can hurt an entire company.
I’d be interested in reading that.