Hobby reverse-engineering project boots unmodified Windows CE 2.11 nk.lib on a real Nintendo 64 via a custom HAL, display driver, and EverDrive-64 X7 SD card stack.
Key Takeaways
Everything below nk.lib is custom: HAL/OAL, VI framebuffer + RDP fill display driver, SI Joybus kbd/mouse PDD, FatFS-backed SD FSD, polling-mode AI wave PDD.
N64 controller maps to mouse cursor; A = left click, B = right click; official N64 mouse also decoded via Joybus.
The CE 2.11 SDK ships no desktop shell; bsp/shell/ (taskbar, file browser, Win9x-style desktop) is entirely original code against the GWES API.
Build requires the out-of-print Microsoft Embedded Toolkit for VC++ 6.0 (CE 2.11 Platform Builder) plus libdragon toolchain; cross-compilation runs under Wine on Linux in ~30s.
No prebuilt ROM will be published; linking nk.exe, coredll.dll, gwes.exe from the SDK’s static libs would redistribute Microsoft binaries without a license.
Hacker News Comment Review
Discussion flagged the absence of screenshots in the README; the YouTube video linked in the repo does show the desktop running, but commenters agree a still image would help.
One commenter claimed the source comments read as AI-generated (Claude); a reply distinguished community tolerance for new ground-up projects vs. AI-assisted rewrites of widely-used tools.
Notable Comments
@vardump: Raises WinCE platform constraints, e.g. the 32-process limit, as context for how constrained the CE 2.11 target actually is.
