Saturday, May 22, 2004
Running Windows 95/98 On A Pocket PC
Posted by Janak Parekh in "SOFTWARE" @ 10:00 PM
Believe it or not, it is theoretically possible. Due to a successful port of the Bochs x86 emulator, a few enterprising Pocket PC users managed to get Windows 98 running inside a Bochs session on their Pocket PC.
The full details are in a post on PocketGamer (and you can get more screenshots from the original thread on PDAi, and more discussion on PocketMatrix). Kudos to the guys who figured this out, but before you think this is a practical application, be forewarned: Bochs is very slow. Slow even on a desktop PC, and bound to be quite a bit slower on a Pocket PC. Emulating a CISC processor (i.e., the x86/IA-32 instruction set) via a small RISC processor (i.e., the ARM instruction set) is a very heavyweight task. While there is some interest in speeding it up, the Computer Scientist in me hints that we're not going to see this implemented practically anytime soon. Still, it's eye-opening as to how much processing power Pocket PCs have nowadays. 8)
The full details are in a post on PocketGamer (and you can get more screenshots from the original thread on PDAi, and more discussion on PocketMatrix). Kudos to the guys who figured this out, but before you think this is a practical application, be forewarned: Bochs is very slow. Slow even on a desktop PC, and bound to be quite a bit slower on a Pocket PC. Emulating a CISC processor (i.e., the x86/IA-32 instruction set) via a small RISC processor (i.e., the ARM instruction set) is a very heavyweight task. While there is some interest in speeding it up, the Computer Scientist in me hints that we're not going to see this implemented practically anytime soon. Still, it's eye-opening as to how much processing power Pocket PCs have nowadays. 8)
