Old Hardware Emulated : Windows Mobile 2003 Device Emulator Part 2

 

Third Party Apps

3rd Party Programs Running On The Pocket PC 2003 SDK

Windows CE had a very decent-sized software library by 2003/2004. The platform was populated by various devices sold by many OEM's. It only made sense for software developers to target the platform. While WinCE's library was never as large as Palm's or J2ME, it was large enough where their users could make worthwhile use of their devices.

As mentioned in previous articles, WinCE brought multimedia capabilities to the PDA. Handhelds like the Compaq iPAQ demonstrated that audio and video playback was possible on a small handheld. While the early Sony Clie handhelds running PalmOS had video playback, the video had to be encoded to gray-scale color depth in the PDB format. The video couldn't be that large. You weren't going to be watching that episode of Friends on your Palm anytime soon. While video encoding occurred with WinCE as well, their were far more options and far fewer compromises.

Expectations changed. People wanted more than just an appointment keeper now. The Windows Mobile devices continued the trends with its port of WMP. Windows Media Video version 7 was the default codec on the CE 2003 handhelds. However, why should WMP have all the fun for. The ARM processor is very capable. Let's throw in some DIVX support in their too! PocketMVP became a popular media player as it supported DIVX along with MP3, which was standard by this point. For the first time (and after re-encoding a video to conform to the screen-specs of that particular device), it was now possible for handheld users to take their movies with them on the go. This development happened when file-sharing was exploding. Many would download DIVX movies from Kazaa, eMule, and later on, BitTorrent. Combined this was how dedicated MP3 players like the Apple iPod were demonstrating that people could carry their massive music libraries with them on the go, people now expected that jukebox in their pocket. PocketMVP and WMP did not disappoint.

Multimedia On PocketPC

Many PPC2003 devices came with RealOne Player as well. This was the mobile version of the RealPlayer that was common on desktop PC's at the time. This version allowed mobile users to watch video encoded in the RM (Real Media) format. Back in the late 90's/early 2000's, many online videos were in the RM format. The video was popular on the Internet due to their small size and low-bandwidth. While I got the RealOne Player working on WinCE, I wasn't able to test it out as I don't know how to encode in the RM format. It's one of the few video formats that I'm not able to convert video too. As a media player though, it's actually quite limited as it only supports RM. One can't play MP3's through it like WMP and PocketMVP, greatly limiting its capabilities as a general-purpose media player.

I could not demonstrate the video playback capabilities on PocketWMP because the emulated ARM processor wasn't fast enough to support such features. However, MP3 playback was smooth. As noted in the previous article, the device emulator included the PocketPC 2003 SDK is a true emulator in that it emulates a complete handheld, including some of its peripheral devices, plus the complete ARM processor. As such, the instructions have to be translated line-by-line as the ARM CPU uses an entire CPU instruction set than Intel processors. No on-the-fly passing here. The trade-off is higher-compatibility, but slower performance, verses less compatible but better performance. Despite the somewhat sluggish nature of the device emulator, Microsoft made the right choice is pushing compatibility over performance. Back in the day, most would have ran the PocketPC SDK on Pentium 4 systems. Nowadays, one could run it on a virtual machine equipped with a multi-core processor, and that CPU will still probably be much faster than that P4 back in the day. As such, the emulation in the PPC2003 device emulator is good enough to test programs.

Getting these programs take trial and error, depending if the program was compiled for that particular processor. I've copied the setup programs into the shared folder and executed them using WinCE's file manager which had no issue accessing the folder. Finding these programs were something else. One would be given a false impression that their was little software for CE now when this wasn't the case. However, like with the case with Symbian, the vast majority of the software/shareware sites that were very prominent back in the day are now offline. As such, finding such apps is hard. CE had a very decent-sized software library back in the day. Several of these programs can be found on Archive.org. Their are still a few shareware sites that have a decently-sized library of WinCE-compatible software. 

Programs like these were quite representative of the software that one would have regularly encountered on CE.

Most of the applications that did exist for PPC2003 were simple applets like calculators, currency converters, appointment keepers, scheduling utilities, file explorers, and simple financial programs. Many of the PPC2003 handhelds came with Pocket Word and Excel as well. This allowed mobile users to edit their Office documents on the go.

Image viewers were popular on the platform as well. The CE handhelds were among the first devices that shipped with full-color displays. People wanted to put those displays to good use. XNview, a popular image viewer for Windows PC's, got a WinCE port that worked reasonably well on the device emulator. It supported images in thumbnail view, along with full-screen support. While one would think that viewing images on a handheld would be trivial by modern standards, this was still a selling point for many CE devices. These handhelds had gone full-color several years before their Palm counterparts.

Games!!!!
Games
What good is a platform if their are no games for it. Luckily, PPC2003 didn't disappoint in this department either. One has to realize though that even though handhelds have come a long way, they were still quite limited. Don't expect Doom II to run on most of these handhelds (even though it would eventually get a CE port as well!). However, WinCE would be THE platform for casual gamers. WinCE would be populated by simply puzzle games. Their would be plenty of fun to be had. One major title was ported to CE. Ziosoft, who handled the Palm port of SimCity, ported SimCity 2k to PPC2003. This game is much more feature rich than the original, and thus, larger. One would think that it would have been wiser to port the original as it wouldn't have been as demanding on hardware as SC2k. However, Ziosoft was up to the challenge, and they made a very good port of the game. Now granted, this game ran very slowly in the device emulator. However, this was to be expected. I would image that the game would have performed much better on real hardware. However, all the features were their. They were no compromises.

Conclusion
Windows CE was at a very sweet pot in the early/middle 2000's. The OS was finally getting a very large software library. The WinCE devices were in the hands of millions around the world. WinCE users had a mobile entertainment system in their pockets. Palm showed no signs of regaining the upper hand. The WinCE ecosystem would only get more diversified with time.

SimCity 2000 For Windows CE

Articles of Interest

Wikipedia : Windows Mobile 2003 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile_2003

Wikipedia : Form factor (mobile phones) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_factor_(mobile_phones)

TechRepublic : Get up and running with Windows CE - https://www.techrepublic.com/article/get-up-and-running-with-windows-ce/

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