windows mobile emulator

[cscho0415]

me and nick got ahold of cmoski


cscho0415: ok so we are trying to get winmo on iphone
cmoski|sle: Windoes Mobile 7 on the iPhone? It seems a slight counterproductive
cscho0415: winmo 6
nickmc01: i was thinking like a shell
cscho0415: we are trying to either dual boot, emulate, or shell
nickmc01: like pocket linux
cscho0415: i was sent to u for helop
cscho0415: http://www.modmyi.com/forums/3rd-par...-new-post.html
cscho0415: thats our thread
cscho0415: so what do u think?
cmoski|sle: Sorry give me one second, network type issue
cscho0415: ok
nickmc01: i think that this will be easier after 2,0 is released
cscho0415: sdk is sdk... its for 2.0
cscho0415: and i have 2.0
cscho0415: any way thats monday
cmoski|sle: I think it's a cool idea if you can convince a few good developers to be involved
cmoski|sle: I'll help where I can, but I can't be involved personaly due to my pre-existing contractual obligations with microsoft
cscho0415: hints why im talking to u
cscho0415: really?
cmoski|sle: Yeah . I can give you hints, and even contribute some code, but as a major contributor, probably not
cscho0415: ok??? can u point us in a direction of who to talk to... brando sent us to u
cmoski|sle: I agree that an emulator would probably be the first step in getting windows mobile to run, more appopriately, a virtualization envrioment
cscho0415: can u help us by give us some dev names so i can contact them
nickmc01: yeah i was looking into porting mono to et anemulator started
cmoski|sle: Hmm, I'd try to convince natetrue/nervegas, zodttd
cmoski|sle: Really just convincing zodttd to do it would help a lot, he has a lot of connections in the scene
nickmc01: agreed

basically he said its possible... we need a team... an emulator is the start... also we are now trying to get zodttd... we will keep u posted and show up in irc.moofspeak.net #winmo to chat about it... give views and ideas and help and such..

[JedixJarf]

Man, that just seems like a bad idea. Every phone Ive had with winmo just sucked. The os is ok but is terribly slow and not really designed for mobile use.

[cscho0415]

ok... thats not stoping me from getting this to happen... it is a good idea cause it just expands on the iphones abilities... i dont really care if u like or dis like winmo

[Nicholas Knight]

just watch this video and you will see why

[ame=http://youtube.com/watch?v=2Z38Esh-wek&feature=related]YouTube - Windows Mobile 6.1 WWE By Elia[/ame]

[GnatGoSplat]

Just a few thoughts...
You might try recruiting devs from xda-developers.com, in particular there are some people there VERY knowledgeable of the CE kernel, the name that comes to mind is cmonex. Funny thing is some of the people there are as anti-iPhone as some people here are anti-WinMo. I'll never understand the fanatics on either side, but whatever.

Also, Blackjack ROM won't be desirable because it's for Smartphone. Buttons could be emulated, but we'll want to use an image for Pocket PC (touchscreen device), not smartphone. No biggie though, I can help with dumping and extracting any base ROM we want since I "cook" WinMo ROMs for fun. Actually, no device ROM will be particularly useful for our emulator because the drivers will be useless as they are device-specific. We'll need to take the core OS, add our customized virtual drivers, and rebuild the image. I think the best model for how this should work is the WinMo emulator for XP. The image they use has custom drivers written specifically for an emulator. I don't know if we can use the emulator image drivers, but we can follow that driver model. The latest WM6.1 images are specific to that emulator, I recommend we use an IMGFS binary image which is closer to the native file system and for which existing tools can easily disassemble and rebuild the image when needed.

I guess I'd better get to learning that SDK if I'm going to be useful for anything.

[Nicholas Knight]

sounds good. The vid I posted was for a touch device. But I will look into the WinMo emulator for XP/Vista

[cscho0415]

Just a few thoughts...
You might try recruiting devs from xda-developers.com, in particular there are some people there VERY knowledgeable of the CE kernel, the name that comes to mind is cmonex. Funny thing is some of the people there are as anti-iPhone as some people here are anti-WinMo. I'll never understand the fanatics on either side, but whatever.

Also, Blackjack ROM won't be desirable because it's for Smartphone. Buttons could be emulated, but we'll want to use an image for Pocket PC (touchscreen device), not smartphone. No biggie though, I can help with dumping and extracting any base ROM we want since I "cook" WinMo ROMs for fun. Actually, no device ROM will be particularly useful for our emulator because the drivers will be useless as they are device-specific. We'll need to take the core OS, add our customized virtual drivers, and rebuild the image. I think the best model for how this should work is the WinMo emulator for XP. The image they use has custom drivers written specifically for an emulator. I don't know if we can use the emulator image drivers, but we can follow that driver model. The latest WM6.1 images are specific to that emulator, I recommend we use an IMGFS binary image which is closer to the native file system and for which existing tools can easily disassemble and rebuild the image when needed.

I guess I'd better get to learning that SDK if I'm going to be useful for anything.

thank you i will check into those devs... also once i get zodttd on board we should be golden... but two teems are better than one... i will confront both teams my self as soon as possible

[geekyipod]

Hey Guys..
Im Really interested in
this stuff.
And I would really enjoy having a WM6 emulator on my
iPhone...Have you guys started yet or not[not trying to be rude or anyhting]

[cscho0415]

i am still trying to get zodttd on board we have not yet talked on irc

[phoneaddict]

can't wait to have the emulator as i want to be able to listen to xm radio and mlb gameday audio and so far can not do that with the iphone only on wm6

[zodttd]

Sadly this idea may be out of reach.

First the rule of thumb of emulation, some say, is you need 10x the performance of the emulated machine. The iPhone is slower than most PocketPCs from my field testing. It's by far not 10x faster than a 612MHz Dell Axim for instance.

THere are techniques such as static recompilation that give much faster emulation, but not only may it be near impossible due to self modifying code, you still must understand it will be slower than "fullspeed" or what you will see if running on the actual hardware.

Also, you can't dual boot a WinCE/WinMo rom on the iPhone and expect it to work, since you will need an emulation/hardware abstraction layer to handle all the differences in hardware between PocketPC's and the iPhone.

Lastly, you will not be able to distribute the WinMo rom, as it is licensed by Microsoft. And in a worse case situation you would need to build your own WinMo rom using Microsofts Platform Builder with your own BSP.

So my verdict on this one is: Yes it's possible to do. But after tons and tons of work, you will find the iPhone to be too slow for this task.

[MattMac]

I got onto zodttd for ya's all, but his answer is probably not what was expected...

But he's going to ask around with other emulation devs for you, but no promises...

[cscho0415]

thank you a lot mat... that was a lot of help... thank you too zodttd... but if we get enough devs will it be feasible enough to launch the project...

[Rosbaughcr]

You can't argue that something wouldn't be worth porting to the iPhone because something newer is coming out. If this held true why would anyone download an NES emulator?

[GnatGoSplat]

Sadly this idea may be out of reach.

First the rule of thumb of emulation, some say, is you need 10x the performance of the emulated machine. The iPhone is slower than most PocketPCs from my field testing. It's by far not 10x faster than a 612MHz Dell Axim for instance.

THere are techniques such as static recompilation that give much faster emulation, but not only may it be near impossible due to self modifying code, you still must understand it will be slower than "fullspeed" or what you will see if running on the actual hardware.

Also, you can't dual boot a WinCE/WinMo rom on the iPhone and expect it to work, since you will need an emulation/hardware abstraction layer to handle all the differences in hardware between PocketPC's and the iPhone.

Lastly, you will not be able to distribute the WinMo rom, as it is licensed by Microsoft. And in a worse case situation you would need to build your own WinMo rom using Microsofts Platform Builder with your own BSP.

So my verdict on this one is: Yes it's possible to do. But after tons and tons of work, you will find the iPhone to be too slow for this task.

Does the 10x rule apply even if the device to be emulated uses the same type of CPU? The iPhone is ARM11 as are many WM6 devices. Most WM6 phones I come across are either TI OMAP850's running at 195-200MHz or Qualcomm MSM7200/7500 running at 400MHz. The Dell Axim is much faster than your average WM6 device. How do VMWare or Parallels pull it off without too much performance degradation? Parallels even claims XP on OS X is "near-native performance". Surely a WM6 emulator can use similar techniques?

Yeah, this project definitely won't be legal... neither are any of the "cooked" ROMs on A, but to date Microsoft has not forced them to cease and desist. There have been a few minor things MS has taken issue with the A site, but for the most part they've been looking the other way as far as distribution of WinMo ROMs goes.

I completely agree this would take tons and tons of work, it'll require a pretty good sized development team with developers from both sides of the fence.

[cscho0415]

zod... this guy has a good point... based on what u told me last night this makes it kinda possible... or at least disproves your rule of thumb... So maybe your friend would be able to do it... i do know it will take along time but come on...

[zodttd]

Exophase and I went over virtualization with you. Exophase mentioned virtualization may be possible using some of the features of the ARM11 on the iPhone. I believe he threw out the TrustedZone feature when talking about it. But the point is:
- a WinMo PocketPC generally runs faster than an iPhone. Even with 1:1 instructions, clock for clock the iPhone loses when at 412MHz compared to a 612MHz Axim.
- Virtualization, whether possible or not due to technical reasons, requires very low level hardware access that just currently isnt available on the iPhone when running it's current Mac OS X OS. I just barely was able to be able to clear the instruction cache for my emulators, and thats with a syscall! Oww!

I agree that virtualization would be your best bet at performance, but good luck trying to get that on top of Mac OS X. If you can, that will definitely be amazing to see. I just dont see it happening, nor do I see the end result being pleasant for running WinMo games and apps.

You'll be stuck with an iPhone that runs too slow even at it's theoretical fastest, be limited by how you can emulate things by the Mac OS X running behind the scenes, have to distibute a OS ROM copywrited by Microsoft, and still be left short of buttons.

If iPhone Linux is having a hard time... that project is easier than what you propose. If iPhone Linux was up and running, I'd have a bit more hope for this project.

[flattop95]

why you would want to put windows on the iphone, that ruins the whole point of having mobile osx, which is amazing

[GnatGoSplat]

why you would want to put windows on the iphone, that ruins the whole point of having mobile osx, which is amazing

Who says you have to give up Mobile OS X? If a WM6 emulator/VM were possible, all you'd have to do is press MENU and there you have your Mobile OS X. This would just let you touch an icon and play with WM6 much like Parallels or VMWare Fusion lets you play with XP/Vista without leaving Mac OS X.

zodttd, you keep mentioning the Axim, but the Axim is in the upper echelon of PocketPCs. I don't consider it a reasonable performance reference. Of all the WM6 devices out there, the Axim is probably not even 1/10th of 1%. The vast majority are 200MHz and the higher performance devices are 400MHz. HTC makes over 50% of all smartphones and almost none of the current models are over 400MHz.

A few of the most popular WM6 phones:
HTC Herald (TMO Wing) - TI OMAP850 200MHz
HTC Wizard (TMO MDA, Cingular 8125) - TI OMAP850 200MHz
HTC Titan (Sprint Mogul/PPC6800) - MSM7500 400MHz
HTC Vogue (Sprint Touch/PPC6900) - MSM7500 400MHz
HTC Kaiser (AT&T Tilt) - MSM7200 400MHz

PPC devices > 400MHz are very few and far between.

[flattop95]

why you would want to put windows on the iphone, that ruins the whole point of having mobile osx, which is amazing