Windows CE Dreamcast Community Edition (wince-dc) | Hacker News Reader

Windows CE Dreamcast Community Edition (wince-dc)

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115 pointsmsephton31 comments

I'm guessing this is a vibe coded shell + some apps over the CE kernel? Never seen any version of CE that looked like that.

it might be dumb but it really breaks my heart seeing cool hack projects like these being vibe coded. Like they've thrown away some opportunity or something i can't really articulate why

i think even the icons are drawn by claude which explains why they look so strange https://github.com/maximqaxd/wince-dc/blob/c929784ba13226cc3...

Yeah, I skimmed the code, it's all vibes all the way down. I wanted a slice of history, I got slop.

Well, it's at least interesting in the sense that the user doesn't have to dig up a copy of Windows NT to run the toolchain, which is what was required for the original Windows CE for Dreamcast SDK and Platform Builder. I seem to remember that it wasn't forward compatible with Windows 2000 or any later OS, which was an annoyance.

"One cmake invocation goes from source to a bootable disc.gdi. No Platform Builder, no SDK install, no CD key." It's like the new emdash.

AI loves to sell the words they are saying like a QVC salesperson with a knife set.

It doesn't just cut cans, it cuts tomatos too. You would think you have to sharpen it, but you don't.

Not just this, but that.

Sounds nothing like a normal succenct engineer.

I had Claude do a "short, succinct summary" of two bugs I found in someone else's Python code: one was missing parentheses around subtraction (x = a - b - c instead of x = a - (b - c)) and one was `SomeException("asdf")` instead of `raise SomeException("asdf")`.

Both explanations were a paragraph of text, each about six lines long, which I replaced with a single sentence each.

When it spits out 4 pages of explanations, when I'm asking it what's better postgres locks or redis locks (two dbs I already have in my project), I sometimes tell it to keep it shorter than a few sentences. We don't need an essay for every decision.

I think I wrote this in an HN comment before, but knowing what I do about linguistics and people, I think some of the AI writing styles will be re-enforced and organically more popular even for human authored writing over the next few years. We're all being unconsciously exposed to those language structures and they will feel comfortable, normalized, and we'll be inclined to repeat them.

I don't like it necessarily, but that's the way it works. Repeat exposure creates that.

Unfortunately, I suspect this phenomenon will not be limited to rhetorical style.

To pick a proximate example: It’s often the case that the assertive, confident LLM LinkedIn-ese is obscuring an invalid argument.

It would be surprising if repeat exposure to nonsense across billions of people—and indeed the particular nonsense embedded in the LLM world models—didn’t have some real bad effects in aggregate on humanity’s ability to cogitate reliably.

If you're going to throw AI at the problem, couldn't you get it to port the real Windows CE shell ?

You’ve nailed the core of the smoking gun.

I've got the shape of it.

I now have the full picture.

The changes are in.

I am guessing because the version of Windows CE (the Dreamcast SDK version) didn't have the source to it; and for whatever reason they didn't want to find that source. Copyright reasons perhaps?

it's because it never had a GUI to begin with, so just porting it from another WinCE version would have been unfaithful and a massive pain I guess, vibing it is no better just more convenient on a hobby project

I find it's a shame the article is absolutely littered with AI-isms, again, like another cool hack project the other day here on HN. It is incredibly jarring to read a line like "No Platform Builder, no SDK install, no CD key.".

Sounds like a cool project but I find it a bit offensive that the article author doesn't value the article reader's time enough to edit the AI-isms out.

On the other hand, trying to point this out usually results in downvotes, so maybe it's useless to complain about this trend?

Years ago, when poor English in spam emails was a signal, I was always puzzled why spammers didn't spend the smallest amount of money to have a fluent speaker write their copy.

because they cost money

> so maybe it's useless to complain about this trend?

It's not. Please don't stop pushing back against this deluge of crap.

I actually love this because the entire time I owned a Dreamcast I used to look at the windows CE logo on the front and think, does it have windows CE in ROM? How can I boot it?

Windows CE isn't in ROM, the binaries are loaded from GD-ROM disc for games that chose to use it. And booting it wouldn't do you much good anyway since there's no graphical or text shell. It's intended to launch straight into the game.

What's the point of it then?

It was supposed to make porting PC games easier - Windows CE had DirectX, I'm not sure if it was a subset.

Windows CE for Dreamcast ran a custom port of DirectX 5 and subset of Win32 so developers could create a game that supported both desktop Windows and Dreamcast more conveniently.

For games that didn't need to be cross platform, it was still less of a hassle to develop on Windows CE because you got all of the services that having an OS provides you instead of having to write to the bare metal, which is what the Sega SDK required. Many developers chose the Sega SDK anyway because bare metal was what they were used to but IIRC that generation was the last console generation where bare metal was an option for developers.

It seems that the original plan was to create the first game console with an operating system, something happened at some point and the ROM only contains a BIOS, just like a PC. Maybe it was cost issue or maybe devs demanded bare metal or maybe something else.

Game devs in general did have issues with multithreading and OS scheduling interfering with game logic until mid-late Vista era; games used to be all big single threaded main loops with some interrupts for peripherals that struggled to adapt to multi-core/multi-threaded CPUs. DC was between PS1 and PS2, so games were still quite deep in that phase.

DC not having the OS in the ROM is IMO a big shame considering that Dreamcast could have been basically the Xbox. Makes me wonder if Gates' push on "bringing back games to hands of Americans" was partially driven by that "incident", if it had been one, on top of having the market dominated by Nintendo and Sony.

There were some Microsoft Systems Journal issues with articles on how to program for Dreamcast, the non NDA part of it.

Here is one of such articles, take it while still exists,

https://jacobfilipp.com/MSJ/directx.html

The sibling comment already has the other info, everything was bundled together.

Same, especially because at the time of Dreamcasts’s release - Windows CE was everywhere in the handhelds and PDA market.

Adding on to everyone else. Games that did run wince included the wince logo on the dreamcast splash screen.

Very few games used WinCE.

I see this project as simply fun, like running NT on a Wii.

Super Runrabout was one I remember that ran in Win CE

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