from Hacker News

With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-Pad Slate, Everyone's a WiiN-Er

by goldenskye on 5/5/24, 5:42 AM with 28 comments

• by dfox on 5/6/24, 4:08 PM

  It is somehow weird to see MPC821 in this kind of device. The point of (Power)QUICC line is that the Communications Processor is some kind of RISC/VLIW core, that offloads various communications tasks and has firmware support for various serial telco protocols. I would not be too surprised if MPC821 and MPC860 are in fact the same hardware only with different firmware that somehow bitbangs the LCD interface by (ab)using the SCC channels (original m68k QUICC datasheet mentions that there is a way to make one of the channels behave like Centronics parallel port).

  In any case PowerQUICC with LCD interface is a device that is quite obviously meant for something like dektop phone with large LCD, not for tablets.

  Quite large usage of PowerQUICC were Cisco 17xx/26xx series routers (with 16xx using m68k QUICC) that were used by many telcos in early 2000's as "SHDSL modems". If you squint enough the m68k QUICC is an entire Cisco 2500 on a single chip (with the added benefit that the QUICC SCC can more or less do scatter gather DMA directly into IOS's particle buffer datastructure, which IIRC was not the case with the Z8530-derived USARTs in 2500).

• by WillAdams on 5/6/24, 11:04 AM

  As a person who really wanted the Sharp Mobilon TriPad PV-6000, this sort of thing makes me sad for what might have been.

  I almost returned my Samsung Galaxy Book 12 to Best Buy back when the stylus was crippled to scrolling by Fall Creator's Update --- even now, I constantly have to toggle its compatibility state in Windows 11 to use it with different programs.

  That said, my next tech purchase is a Raspberry Pi 5 and a Wacom One 13 w/ Touch --- hopefully it will work as well as the first gen. unit did w/ an rPi 4 and I can get off this software treadmill and just focus on using the machine as opposed to re-learning whatever UI update MS is inflicting this quarter.

• by mlhpdx on 5/6/24, 2:28 PM

  Wow. Maybe if WinCE had this kind of thorough documentation back then it would have done better. Excellent article and history lesson.

• by nubinetwork on 5/6/24, 9:38 AM

  The shape of that battery looks like it's got a pair of 18650s in them.

  > This machine came from the Atlanta, Georgia area (snip), and certain identifiers left on it trace it back to Patient Care Technologies, a home-care, hospice and telehealth software provider. It's not clear if this machine was actually in the field or only used internally for testing. PtCT was bought by Meditech in 2007.

  I'm sort of not surprised, the ancient winCE UI is about as ancient as meditech's UI.

• by sedatk on 5/6/24, 5:18 PM

  Wow, the author's gone above and beyond. Pages and pages of useful information, and this statement is just in the middle of a sentence:

  "turn this into a phony ELF binary"

  That would alone take me days to tackle (convert a PowerPC PE into a PowerPC ELF). He mentions it like it's similar to copying a line on a text editor.

  Totally amazed at the level of detail and amount of work went into this article. Thanks!

• by winocm on 5/7/24, 7:44 AM

  32-bit PowerPC implementations do support little endian mode, but not from power-on reset. You can have a little stub handler that basically does the switch to LE by setting MSR.{LE,ILE} via srr1 and then performing a RFI after loading the return address into srr0.

  It is notoriously difficult to write bi-endian code though. I really wish there were assembly directives to change the word swapping per instruction instead of doing it manually, for my own sanity.

  I think the 970 supports this too, but it’s a bit weirder with the MSR.HV settings.

  Note that little endian mode on PPC affects all memory accesses, including real mode when MSR.ILE is set.