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Home / Web Pads / Epods One General Post Windows CE 3.0 Would like to know...

Windows CE 3.0 (modified 0 times) MrAdun Profile | Email Hi, I have an epods, and have had one for a while. Thanks to Glitch and jkgamer's posts I've completely hardware and software hacked this thing. But the support these days for Windows CE 2.11/2.12 is very limited, but 3.0 seems to be the most supported of the archaic OS's. So is there any way to pop 3.0 on here in the same way the 2.11 interface was put in? Or would that require a complete recompiling of the OS with drivers and hardware recognition to do so. I saw in another topic that Glitch (surprisingly still hangs around here) said there were other tablets. Glancing around the other pads on their site, they have one (the one he mentioned) is running the 32-bit MIPS based RISC... and almost all of the same set of hardware the ePods contains... except it's running CE 3.0 Is there any way I can get a set of CE files to play with hacking this thing up to make it CE 3.0? Also as a side note, I was also wondering about IE 5 or something compatible to use. Sites that can obviously load on 4.0 still have the browser verify scripts and won't let me access them. Thanks, MrAdun 08-04-2005 17:24:38

RE:Windows CE 3.0 (modified 0 times) MrAdun Profile | Email oh yeah, also as a side note, maybe others had this problem too. From removing my CF and putting it back in (Carefully every time), pins 1,2,15,16,19,25 fell out inside the ePod. Gosh that was a nightmare... had to resolder the pins back in place and then just for peace of mind, resoldered the rest of the pins to make sure they wouldn't fall out either. That is some seriously bad design, and now I'm afraid to remove my card and put it back in as frequently as I used too... looks like I'm stuck at 115 kbs.. 08-04-2005 17:27:50

RE:Windows CE 3.0 (modified 0 times) marko Profile While it probably can be done, replacing CE 2.12 with CE 3.00 will be difficult and require the hardware to flash the doc chip (I think). It's easier to 'hack' the software you are trying to run. Modifying the PE header in the exe's and dll's of a ce 3.0 program to ce 2.12 will allow some programs to work. Have you tried BeePod? http://members.netjunkies.net/epods/ 08-09-2005 13:09:31

RE:Windows CE 3.0 (modified 0 times) MrAdun Profile | Email http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/usewinemb/ce/bsp/supbsps/default.aspx#mips anyone care to try this with me? Heh... Oh and I'd rather not tinker with BeePods. Though I'm not entirely clear as to what it is, I want to stick with strict Windows CE enviroments. 08-09-2005 17:46:44

RE:Windows CE 3.0 (modified 0 times) Glitch Profile As far as putting CE3 on an ePods... Some of it depends on your particular ePods. There are several variations of the flash daughterboard. Most store the core OS in Intel flash ROM. Others store it in masked ROM. If you have the flash ROM variant, then it may be possible to update the core OS by reflashing the ROM. The "customized" ePods files are stored on a Disk-on-Chip (DOC) device on the same daughterboard. All the ePods daughterboards (that I've seen) have the DOC. You may be able to "overlay" the OS files on the DOC to achieve the desired results. We know that an OS "enhancement" (i.e. add features to the current CE2.11 build) can be done by this overlay method. I'm not sure if an OS "upgrade" (i.e. update to CE3.0) can be done by simply overlaying files. I have an eZex equivalent version of the ePods with CE3.0 on it. The daughterboards are interchangeable with the ePods. FWIW, by doing this I've actually run CE3.0 on a ePods platform. Unfortunately, the eZex CE3.0 build is not much better than the ePods 2.11 build as far as being able to add new software to the machine. The base software included with the build is about the same. I also have a Intermec 6651 (Sharp HC-7000). This has similar CPU, etc. to the ePods. It has a much better base CE3.0 build on it. IMHO, this would be a better donor machine for an ePods OS upgrade. The way I see it, there are two methods to updating the ePods. The first is to "lift" parts of a better OS off from a donor machine. To date, this has been done with very limited success. The main problem is copying files from ROM. This is something the CE OS doesn't allow. The second method is to do a real build using CE Builder. I would love to get a fully functional version of this software. The closest that I've come is a demo version. Enough ramblings for now... Glitch Electronics run on smoke, if you let the smoke out they won't work 08-10-2005 13:04:33

RE:Windows CE 3.0 (modified 0 times) MrAdun Profile | Email well, I found these... Handheld PC Professional 3.0 SDK http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b75db4fb-1aed-4b45-af62-3c38ac8a1ea7&DisplayLang=en Handheld PC 2000 SDK - USA Version http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=aeaa7f4c-1331-46f1-bc4f-cc909333261a&DisplayLang=en Windows CE: Standard Software Development Kit (SDK) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=a08f6991-16b0-4019-a174-0c40e6d25fe7&displaylang=en The first one is for Windows CE 2.11 (or higher) and the second one, I think, is for Windows CE 3.0. I'm pretty sure that's the one you're looking for. As for the third link, I don't know if that would be any help at least for accessing the ROMs or DOCs, but it's for Windows CE 4.12 which is the .NET (Pocket PC 2003) You can also download the source code now for Windows CE 2.11 and 3.0 from MSDN. If anyone wants it I can get a hold of that but that would require complete recompiling and rewriting of code and that could get messy and time-consuming. I personally would rather see what you're thinking of, Glitch. Borrowing the core from a similar MIPS architecture device. Is there any way I can get a hold of any of these devices you keep referencing? I would love to toy around with it. For bragging rights only, I came across an Intel Web Tablet at a thrift store, new in its box. Came to find out it was never put into production and I was actually holding a developers version. There's only a couple hundred in existence and the only other one I know of is in a museum! It has no internal caching and uses a host PC for wireless internet and file storage and the GUI runs entirely off of an Apache web server of HTML files. Handy for rewriting and using for other things. :) Anyway, that was just a side thing, but I would like to know how to get other tablet PC's of the CE variety. Ebay is not a great place for such rarities. 08-10-2005 15:41:38

RE:Windows CE 3.0 (modified 0 times) Glitch Profile MrAdun: The software that you mentioned are all software development kits (SDKs). What I've been looking for is the "builder" software. As I understand it, the difference is that the "builder" software let you create and configure the OS, whereas the SDKs allow you to develop applications to run on the OS. Another way of looking at it is that "builder" is used to create the image that is stored on the machine's ROM. The SDKS are the applications that are stored in flash or RAMDISK. They also has driver development kits (DDK) with which to develop new hardware drivers. I have SDK's and DDK's, but not the "builder". I believe that the missing functionality that we are looking for with the ePods lies at the basic OS level, thus the need for "builder". Unfortunately, this is where Microsoft make ther money by licensing the CE OS. I'm not sure of how they handle the licensing. I've worked on projects with other embedded OS's and the licensing always seems to be the worst/hardest part. Maybe someone else can elaborate on the subject of CE licensing. It seems that if Microsoft has released the source code for older versions of CE that they may have opened-up the builder product. If anyone has info in regards to this, please let me/us know. As far as obtaining web pads... I either know what I want and wait patiently for them to turn up on eBay or just happen to stumble across them. Glitch Electronics run on smoke, if you let the smoke out they won't work 08-13-2005 09:21:33

RE:Windows CE 3.0 (modified 0 times) MrAdun Profile | Email http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/prevver/ce3/howtobuy/licensing/details/default.aspx There's the licensing :( Bad, bad Microsoft... I can't find that platform builder ANYWHERE. So your best bet might be to find the eval and crack it, or something like that. And yeah, I know those others were SDK but I was hoping they could at least access the ROM. Have you looked around for programs specifically designed for reading files off of the ROM's? I poked around for about 5 minutes and ran into 2, maybe you can find one that would suit what we're looking for... 08-13-2005 14:03:36

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