Interview: Porting Windows CE .NET to the Xbox

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Jan. 07, 2004

According to its website, the "xbox-windows project" is an effort to bring Microsoft Windows operating systems to the Microsoft Xbox hardware platform. Members of the project recently announced that Windows CE .NET is now booting on the Xbox . . .

"Currently, we have a partial BSP for CE .NET 4.20, and working PCI, USB, Display, and Mouse drivers. Most of the "important" parts of the BSP are done, however some features are still lacking or bug ridden. We also have a simple, preliminary bootloader based on xbeboot from the xbox-linux project. With these in place, CE loads and runs properly, but is not yet very useful."

Additionally, the project has adopted the following guidelines:

Open Source; All of our works will be LGPL and readily available. (Note: GPL is NOT an option in most cases, as we are STATICALLY linking against closed, copyrighted code from Microsoft)
Legality; All of our works must remain legal, and not infringe upon anyone's copyrights or binding licensing.
Community; Anyone may contribute to the project in any area they choose, and anyone may use the project for whatever purpose they see fit, within the limitations set forth by "Open Source" and "Legality"

Intrigued by this open source community effort of porting Windows CE .NET to a popular and readily available consumer device (the Xbox), WindowsForDevices contacted the project's originator, who prefers to be known by the pseudonym "Artifex", to gain insight into the project's origins, goals, and plans for the future.

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