Running ARM based wince apps

[doobiest]

Hi,

 

Has anyone had success getting arm based windows ce apps to run on their unit. I'm talking about apps intended for pocketpc. I haven't seen any obvious forum posts about this.

 

I am aware of the 3rd party gps apps but havent really seen anything else.

 

In theory any wince exe's compiled for the arm processor should run, but I'm guessing a lot of required libraries could be missing.

 

Currently I'm trying to get pocketsnes to run and I'm going to see if I cant get a usb gamepad to detect. Pocketsnes complains about missing libraries and google isnt bringing up the help im looking for.

 

Anyway it's be great if we could have a sticky list of tested/supported apps if any exist at all.

[formare]

I am interested as well.

[emulamer]

I haven't yet, but one of the things you'll probably need that may not be part of the firmware, especially for games, is a GAPI driver. Not sure what kind of ARM chip this thing uses, but if you can find another device with the same processor and/or video chip (if the video isn't driven from the processor), you may be able to use that. It is going to be very difficult to get anything running visually acceptably though, since almost all devices out there are 240x320 and the pinoeer unit is most definitely not that. After I get one to tear into and get developing on, I'll take a look at the hardware and see how difficult it would be to write a GAPI driver for it.

[FourG]

So the HP iPaq 310 has the same CPU (SiRf Titan, ARM instruction set), OS (Win CE 5.0), Navi software (NavNGo 8.0) and screen resolution (800x480) as our AVIC Fs. I picked one up refurb from eBay for a decent price (~$120 US after Live cashback). The iPaq's OS image seems to have more of the system DLLs than the AVIC so apps that work on it may not work on the F series. That being said, the iPaq has been pretty educational to hack on.

 

In my opinion HP's NavNGo interface implementation is much better, I plan to study their .ui files for porting ideas. Also trying to get HaRET (handheld reverse engineering tool) working on it to gather info about the Titan/OS/memory map/interrupts, etc which is the first step towards booting something other than Win CE. Like leetcoder's pointed out though, we'd need to reverse engineer a lot of the interface DLLs that talk to the radio, iPod, HD/Sirius/Xm if we ever wanted to try to get Linux going on the AVIC.

[thomashohl]

My brother works at ARM as a extreme programming and design guy. I sent him a note to check out this thread. Maybe he could help you guys.

 

Tom

[doobiest]

I'm really interested in getting pocketsnes going and usb drivers for a gamepad.

 

I've tried a few things with no success. Until I got lazy I was going to get at the developer for help and compile a build for this unit. I'll likely get around to that after the newyear.

 

I think for the most part the main issue in getting things to run will be lack of libraries and drivers.

 

Does anyone know if using the windows mobile emulator is a good test bed for stuff like this, or is it just useful for skinning the UI? meaning, if the WM emulator includes libraries that wouldn't be on the avic it's probably not a good place to verify compatibility.