view/use WP7 emulator from TP2 or HD2 - Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking

I was thinking while I had a long drive today about the "demo" of WP7 on an HD2 that ended up being done by remote desktop view of the emulator.
Given that the emulator roms have been hacked and the kernel there is based on CE -- how hard would it be to make an emulator rom that directly links to a program running on a TP2/HD2/etc to display the emulator image as well as allow touch screen input, g-sensor data, etc, to go from the device to the emulator.
With a sufficiently fast connection -- eg, USB -- this could probably be done with a low enough lag time so that you could fairly realistically experience the wp7 interface on an actual device (with multi-touch in the HD2 case, too).
Seems this would be a much nicer way to develop wp7 apps at the moment...
--randy

Amazing work !

Related

[Request] GNU Boy CE updated

GNU Boy CE is a GameBoy/GameBoy Color emulator for the Windows CE platform developed. As a result, this is the first and only emulator I have been able to run on my Omnia 2 for these consoles that have fully working sound with frame skipping set to 0. Believe it or not, this aging application already supports a touch screen based virtual controller.
Here is the link (where you will also find the source code for the newest version:
http://gnuboyce.berlios.de/
The only problem is that this application has not seen an update in about 7 years. So, the source code is assuming your screen size is tiny. The native resolution for the GameBoy games is 160 pixels wide. The emulator does have a x1.5 stretch in it which pushes that to 220 pixels. It would be nice to replace the 1.5 times stretch with a 2.5 times stretch (400 pixels wide and ideal for a WVGA resolution screen.)
From what I can tell the following files appear to deal with the screen output:
lcd.c
lcd.h
lcdc.c
The truth is that I am only a novice programmer. So honestly, I am only guessing at this. I am hoping someone would be so kind as to make the revision to the application and make a new CAB since everything else about it is ideal. It uses next to no system resources on a WM device and allows for true sound.
Thank-you ever so much to anyone who takes the effort. By all means, feel free to take this program further if you like because I imagine that with this simple change that this will quickly become the most sought after GameBoy/GameBoy Color emulator for WM devices.
This website has some more recent sources (another mod).
In there are also sources for other emus however they don't have direct draw display nor onscreen buttons. If anyone could add those feature it'd be really cool (maybe using PocketSnes source at least for the onscreen controls).
The source for that application is definitely newer. Unfortunately, no touch screen controls (I have an Omnia II which has no buttons to play the game with.) Same problem with this update as the last. The emulator needs to be updated to have a 2.5x stretch instead of a 1.5x stretch to take advantage of the resolution.

[Q] Why Microsoft decided not to build NT-based OS?

Hello,
one question bothers me since the first time I have heard about WP7. Why Microsoft have decided to create a whole new OS without thinking of OS that would ne NT-based so any program made for normal PC would run on our phones. Just imagine, how many developers could easily port their programs to new OS, just changin the screen size, leaving all core components just the same... All classic PC games, like Blood, Duke Nukem workin flawlesly on a phone without the need of any port. I believe, that it is the only real way to compete with Android and Iphone OS. What do you think?
Wolfas said:
Hello,
one question bothers me since the first time I have heard about WP7. Why Microsoft have decided to create a whole new OS without thinking of OS that would ne NT-based so any program made for normal PC would run on our phones. Just imagine, how many developers could easily port their programs to new OS, just changin the screen size, leaving all core components just the same... All classic PC games, like Blood, Duke Nukem workin flawlesly on a phone without the need of any port. I believe, that it is the only real way to compete with Android and Iphone OS. What do you think?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
if the app was created in siverlight/c# which alot of newer apps are then it can be ported to wp7.. For sometime now microsoft has been pushing their silverlight for devolpers to use so if the games you mentioned is bult in silverlight there should be no problem...
NT on a mobile phone would be a usability nightmare...look how far windows mobile got with the masses. Microsoft is not catering towards the hackers, but the masses.
And to be honest, I would not touch any mobile device running NT...LOL.
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emuneee said:
NT on a mobile phone would be a usability nightmare...look how far windows mobile got with the masses. Microsoft is not catering towards the hackers, but the masses.
And to be honest, I would not touch any mobile device running NT...LOL.
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Click to expand...
Click to collapse
me eather!!! i am so done with wm 6.0, 6.1, 6.5 and its many problems having to flashing rom after rom, restarting the device cause it has no memory left, this list goes on... wp7 is like a breth of fresh air...
Why so negative? WM always had problems, but the level of freedom and customization made me love this platform more and more. And I wouldn't be so sure about unpopularity of this kind of new OS, as NT-based Windows OS platform is the most popular in PC world, stable and nice-looking enough, so why it couldn't be that popular in mobile phones, especially with wide variety of programs already designed for this platform, only waiting for small fixes of resolution? Those games are from dos era, with no good port on any mobile platform...
wolfas said:
why so negative? Wm always had problems, but the level of freedom and customization made me love this platform more and more. And i wouldn't be so sure about unpopularity of this kind of new os, as nt-based windows os platform is the most popular in pc world, stable and nice-looking enough, so why it couldn't be that popular in mobile phones, especially with wide variety of programs already designed for this platform, only waiting for small fixes of resolution? Those games are from dos era, with no good port on any mobile platform...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
dont get me wrong i not trying to say 6.5 is not for some people just not for me... I think the fact that smartphones moved to a more touch enviroment it seems that the old wm is not as finger friendly and made more for the use of an stylist, to me this type of os seems to not work well on mobile devices for long peorids without a reboot maybe its the way its design or maybe it just have too many things of the desktop enviroment not sure but it gets to be a problem for me, others my not mind. As far as customizing goes well guess you cant have everything.. i personaly would prefer a more stable os than customization, and i am sure additional pc like options will come as well as more customization in the future..
I think the main reason why NT would not make a good mobile OS is simply because it was never designed or meant to run on a mobile device. Your phone is not a computer, so your phone needs an operating environment to suit it's purpose.
The "phone as a computer" approach has been tried by Microsoft, it's called Windows Mobile. While I love Windows Mobile, I have to say, having "Windows NT" on a phone just doesn't make sense.
While it would be cool to play Duke Nukem on your Windows NT mobile device, at the end of the day, you are going to put down your Windows NT phone and just sit at your computer and play Duke Nukem on that. It's just a better overall experience, and Windows NT was designed for that sit-down, productive, huge screen experience. So it wouldn't make sense to invest in a platform that no one would use at the end of the day because their desktop computer does it better.
What you have to do is create an entirely unique and different experience designed for the phone and "on-the-go" life, to complement the Windows NT desktop experience. That is after all, what your phone is for. That's what Windows Phone 7 is.
Can't wait to get my hands on a Windows Phone 7.... phone.... XD
Well, I guess you are right, but I will try once more to support my idea, if you don't mind. I still see some reasons why NT- based mobile OS would be a good idea:
1. There are plenty of popular netbooks, tablet PC's and other relative small devices with full XP, Vista or Win7 OS. All of them are made for on the go experience and still having NT OS. Not even talking about miniature UMPC's. We also often leave these devices unused when we turn on our normal PC's at home, but doesn't prevent them from having huge popularity.
2. Of cource, I do not want to suggest porting normal WinXP to mobile phones (but win98 on my touch pro didn't look half that bad ), but rather something with an UI suited for small screens, but still capable to run any application made for normal Windows.
3. I also think about the interest of developers to this kind of OS. Theorically, there would be no need to learn OS-specific programming, just the things used on any NT OS. Most of the developers who makes programs for PC would be able to make a version for this OS just by changing the resolution, leaving engine just the same.
Please, say your opinion about these things I've pointed out
1. Netbooks and tablets still operate outside of the smartphone arena of capabilities and requirements for most users. There is a reason why there isn't a successful phone running Windows XP. You can write the drivers and software for phone functionality, but at the end of the day NT was not produced with phones in mind.
2. Applications written for desktops are written for desktop processors and memory capacities. Its not a simple change of just resolutions. What if an app request memory that doesn't exist on the mobile device? Chances are the mobile device can't even address that amount of memory. So you design a mobile focused NT kernel...well now all apps can't run on both platforms..so what's the point.
3. Yes you do, because all the capabilities available on a desktop aren't available on a smartphone. Developers still have to keep that in mind when their app is in development.
I sit here looking at my Windows XP work workstation and I would kill myself if I had to use this on a phone. Windows Mobile was hard enough.
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I forget the name but there was a secret (ish) project inside Microsoft to make the NT kernel more portable and sorta combine it with the CE kernel. They were basically building off the MinWin work.
But remember, native code still wouldn't be cross platform. x86 and ARM are not binary compatible. Just look at "OSX" on Mac desktops and "OSX" as the base of "iOS". Nothing crosses back and forth.
The NT kernel doesn't scale down that well yet. The kernel land is still full of bidirectional vertical dependencies. The current lowest profile incarnation called MinWin needs like 40MB RAM to boot to a text console and offer next to no APIs and is still shock full of missing dependencies (apparently boot loader magic makes it not break on boot).
Once they're really done despaghettifying, you might see it on mobile devices. But that'll still take a while, because right now, slimming down involves tons of aliasing dependencies to nothing.
Absolutely no reason why they could not run NT on a smart phone but why would they? They already have Windows CE (aka pocket PC) and if MS had been serious about Pocket PC IMHO they would be in a much better market position now.
One of the biggest messups with Pocket PC is the inconsistancy of the user interface and MS failed to revamp the 6.5 completely for touch.... They have a lot of good things going with WM 6.5 but it was an incomplete effort and it shows.
well, I see you are right... That NT is much more complex monster than I thought, thanks for clearing that out Yesterday, I found information about device called xpPhone, I wonder what would you say about it ? http://www.xpphone.com/en/product/specification.html

WM 6.5 emulator for WP7 ? Possable ?

Just a discussion came up and made me wonder if this is even possable. This is the place to ask, so here we go.
All WP7 models seem to run at 1ghz or higher, thinking the concept that WM 6.5 runs pretty well on hardware that runs at 400-528mhz range. Would it be possable to have a emulator that runs on the platform so you can run 6.1/6.5 on a WP7 phone ? This would allow you to be able to run some older apps with still having WP7.
I would not expect intense games (maybe a card game ok) to run at full speed or anything but, things like Remote desktop and other base apps might be ok with this.
This type of thing would run on any phone (with 1ghz+ hardware) just depending on if all the hardware is supported.
Or I guess there might be a way to "shut down" 7 and open 6.5 kind of how Android runs on the TP2.
The emulator idea came up because it might be able to run on any model with minor updates vs. a boot up just for one phone.
Just some ideas...even if it is possable.
Thanks for reading and dreaming (well I am still waiting for a Verizon WP7 phone)
No sorry, the emulator runs on the x86 architecture, not on ARM.
Dave
DaveShaw said:
No sorry, the emulator runs on the x86 architecture, not on ARM.
Dave
Click to expand...
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Maybe I'm misreading the original question, but it sounds like he is asking if it were possible to have an app that would run old Windows Mobile apps, kind of like Classic on WebOS.
well at present we (3rd party) developers wouldn't be able to make something like this as all the APIs don't actually exist. someone with knowledge of the whole code base of windows phone 7 could probably do it but i doubt we'll see it happen. if there are programs you need on windows phone 7, it is definitely faster to just have it redone. it's really only the UI that needs redoing, if it was written in VB or C#, a lot of the code will still work.

[Q] Windows Phone game emulators

Hey everyone. Ive been using windows phone for about 7 months now. And i love it. But there is won glaring problems with the platform. Lack of homebrew support. Particularly in the game emulation section. On android, you can grab a GBA emulator or SNES emulator of the market in about 10 seconds. They even help you find roms. No offense to the current projects, but all we have is a GB emulator and a NES emulator. Im no expert programmer, but is there something about the windows phone that just doesnt allow people to make more advance emulators? I would love to see a GBA emulator on windows phone. Even the iTouch has one. Anybody have some answers?
Well first off, most emulator projects are written in C/C++ making it very hard and tedious to port it to C#/XNA, not to mention the performance loss u get from having to run in a VM and running an interpreted emulator is very CPU intensive. The new devices should help with the speed though.
I suppose you could use Heathcliff74's way to run a modified C/C++ emulator project in a roundabout way, but it's a lot of work to get an emulator up and running on a new platform and it might require a fully interop-unlocked phone.
The WP7 homebrew community is still quite small compared to android/iphone, I'm sure once more people gets on board, u will start to see a lot more emulators.
Just because emulators on android helps u to find roms, doesn't make it legal. Although MS are accepting a lot of legally questionable apps these days.
Just saw a post where Rafael Rivera is decompiling newly released Tango & Spotify. Spotify has native C++ access via SpotifyCore.dll. Hopefully looking as these can get us more and better access.
There is an NES Emulator in Windows Phone Market if you want to try
http://www.windowsphone.com/en-US/apps/3d8e51b8-1884-4aa7-bb2c-2eda47745a27
Comes along with 2 demo and you can add more.
there is an atari emulator that was recently released as well http://www.windowsphone.com/en-US/apps/dc8b13c0-a0cc-4a67-87db-7a2f37965b0c
we have put up a page where we will be listing the various windows phone gaming system emulators

Windows 10 on RPi 2

I decided to start a new topic 'cause previous one was a complete mess.
So, finally I ran Windows 10 on my RPi 2 and was really excited by the job that MS did for this low cost computer. It was a really easy to run your UWP app on RPi with a little changes; now I'm trying to run my "DOSBox" app on this computer (but DOSBox isn't a simple and straight UWP app, some difficulties still exists).
I still have no idea about practical implementation of the RPi-based Windows 10 computer but, I believe so, it should exist (BTW, I do have very good sample of practical usage of RPi - my another one - it run self-moving web camera (former robot app ), it controlling my X10 lights and switches via web interface (yes, I do have Apache server running on this RPi), this RPi also serving my huge OPDS library.
By the way, it's a really cheap and exciting gadget (you can get it for about $22 on eBay), and the "Last of the Mohicans" UWP developers definitely should take a look to this gadget and platform! Fun guaranteed!
I.ll like to use this with cortana in the car, just for music and vocal commands.
JHey cortana, play voodoo people..... skip song, send message to Sensboston...good job buddy
Or.... https://9gag.com/gag/ad9LqQB
sensboston said:
I decided to start a new topic 'cause previous one was a complete mess.
So, finally I ran Windows 10 on my RPi 2 and was really excited by the job that MS did for this low cost computer. It was a really easy to run your UWP app on RPi with a little changes; now I'm trying to run my "DOSBox" app on this computer (but DOSBox isn't a simple and straight UWP app, some difficulties still exists).
I still have no idea about practical implementation of the RPi-based Windows 10 computer but, I believe so, it should exist (BTW, I do have very good sample of practical usage of RPi - my another one - it run self-moving web camera (former robot app ), it controlling my X10 lights and switches via web interface (yes, I do have Apache server running on this RPi), this RPi also serving my huge OPDS library.
By the way, it's a really cheap and exciting gadget (you can get it for about $22 on eBay), and the "Last of the Mohicans" UWP developers definitely should take a look to this gadget and platform! Fun guaranteed!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Great project i have about 50 low performance laptops and mini laptops its so good for them
I will try this in next year and I will tell you the result
can you port and install ppsspp on that and tell us the results ?
@augustinionut, yeah, Cortana is cool but you can do this on your handset (never tried but it should work, I believe so). I'm thinking about RPi specific scenario. Yes, I can make a blinking LEDs, it's fun but not very practical
@Ferrybigger, I can try. But I'm unsure about overall performance; it looks like RPi CPU is less powerful than L-950 (and has less memory).
P.S. I also ordered this LCD TFT touch screen on AliExpress, it will add more fun for development
sensboston said:
@augustinionut, yeah, Cortana is cool but you can do this on your handset
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Only that hey cortana dont work on lumia 640xl, and my media bluetooth button dont have win+c command.
I need an app in the background to launch listening cortana.
I found something equivalent: snowwy.
Tried to rebuild and run ppsspp: no luck at all, always getting error 0x800402200 before app's code get execution.
I prefer using Linux for such devices. It's lightweight and flexible. It's easy to use: you can draw on any display with just Bitmap and FileStream. LOTS of drivers! LOTS of programs.
Win10 IOT is not on the same level yet. But it will be someday.
P.S. RPi hardware is garbage.
Yeah, Raspbian is pretty stable and with some configuration tricks (to reduce file I/O access on sd-card) it can work seamlessly for a years (as mine), even with Apache server running on it.
However here I'm talking from the UWP developer position: ability to run your existing UWP app on the extremity low cost (mine costs me $22), portable computer is cool, I believe so.
I can't compare development difficulties for UWP and Linux but some MS public APIs are still ... maybe, not unique but really good, such as map services, easy integration with Azure, speech API and many more. Of course you can find similar packages on Linux but with UWP you already have it out of the box.
P.S. I'm still thinking about "real life" implementation of RPi with W10 but can't find any...
Windows 10 iot core is the os that runs on the raspberry pi. It started out with windows on devices edition on the intel galileo (x86) (2013). The windows on devices edition was probably microsoft's smallest os since windows 95 (only 185mb). The windows iot os has come a long way since then as they have been refactoring the os to include more and more of the apis windows developers know. You can use gdi to paint windows on raspberry pi, and i think directdraw (but have not tried it myself). Porting apps to windows iot core is difficult, but using the remote debugger you can see apis that fail because they aren't included. Once you get around the missing apis issue, you can easily create apps that work directly with hardware, which is something thag's always been difficult with windows ( you used to have to buy a development board ). Using visual c++ to remotely debug drivers is really convenient, as windbg is too difficult.

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