These gadgets are fun to collect. One place to get them is ShopGoodwill.com. So far I’ve bought an HP 95LX and an HP 200LX. Those two are palmtops running MS-DOS. I’ve also gotten an HP 320LX (B&W; takes batteries; runs Windows CE 1.0), an HP Jornada 720 (color; built-in battery pack; runs WinCE 3.0), and the curious Dutch Railways model. You can find them on eBay more easily but they’ll be more expensive.
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Wasn’t the Dreamcast CE?
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Speaking of quirky portable keyboarded devices, apparently freewrite is doing an alphasmart clone/reboot?
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Exactly.
(IIRC, the Dreamcast could run two operating systems: a somewhat customized version of Windows CE that could handle DirectX and SEGA’s own Katana. The division ran roughly between games that were ported PC-games and games that were developed for the Dreamcast. The OS was on the same GD-ROM as the game. A neat trick, and the the “Game Drive” could also read CD-ROMs. But this couldn’t last long. The time for stuff that is too proprietary in consumer electronics was over at the turn of the millennium.)
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Ehhh, kinda. It didn’t like boot into the CE shell or anything, but it did allow developers to use the CE SDK and a version of Direct X. As CE APIs were basically stripped down versions of “big Windows” APIs the thinking was that it would be easier for devs to write games using the tools they were familiar with. In practice only a tiny handful of Dreamcast games ever used it. (You would know because they had a “Powered by Windows CE” splash screen.)
Also worth noting, early Dreamcast (née Katana) dev kits looked like small tower PCs with GD-ROM drives.
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I took the point for development to be about how there’s a Linux distro you can run on them. Instead of WinCE. So you could develop for other platforms.
Is there even any real WinCE ecosystem still alive today?
The cool thing about WinCE in the day was how you could pull something out of your pocket that looked and acted a lot like Windows. And it could sync files compatible with Windows apps.
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Don’t some POS terminals and the like still use it?
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