i386-wince

(WinCE only)

This page has been created to collect all information regarding i386-wince target.This page only describes usage of Win32 as a development Host. Although most of today's PDAs, Phones, Tablets use ARM CPUs - dealing with i386 version of CE might make sense as:

• There exists a certain amount of industrial controllers running under i386-wince. Some of them originally where XPe but have been migrated to CE. Some of them have been created by the Alliance SIEMENS/Microsoft.
• As Intel tries to regain market share in the embedded area (also Mobile/Tablet), it might be that more mobile/tablet will use X86 platforms (Atom 2460 for example) again.

Prerequisites

• A Windows-CE Emulator (i386 Version!)
  For example Windows CE 5.0 Device Emulator(V 8.2.160.0).Install this to a folder. Create a Shortcut to executable(to be able to call it with command line parameters). Edit command line of link to something like
  "{path to exe}Emulator_500.exe" /ceimage NK.cem /ethernet virtualswitch
  This will startup the emulator using the NK.cem image and creates a bridged ethernet connection(set IP in emulator to fit your network if you have no DHCP server running). Also this emulator allows a shared folder between Host-PC and emulator(This can be your Lazarus project's working folder)
• FPC Source code (I used fpcbuild-2.6.0.zip)
• Lazarus (I used a snapshot of 20120225 [ftp://ftp.hu.freepascal.org/pub/lazarus/snapshots/Lazarus-0.9.31-35595-fpc-2.6.1-20120226-win32.exe Lazarus-0.9.31-35589-fpc2.6.1-20120215-win32.exe). The daily shapshot I used has been removed, but that one in the link should work too.

Setup Lazarus/FPC for compiling i386-wince

1) Install Lazarus from above Link (just as for compiling Win32 apps)
We use PATH=C:\Prog\lazarus\931\ in the example {lazfolder}
2) Unzip the fpc sources to a convenient folder
We use C:\Prog\fpc\2.6.0src\ in this example
3) Create a batch file (mkCE.bat) with the following content:\

PATH=C:\Prog\lazarus\931\fpc\2.6.0\bin\i386-win32;C:\Prog\fpc\2.6.0src\fpcsrc\compiler
make clean all OS_TARGET=wince CPU_TARGET=i386 PP=ppc386.exe

Save this batchfile to C:\PROG\FPC\2.6.0src\fpcsrc. Start this batchfile by doubleclick. (It should run from the command line too, but in my setup, from the commandline there was an error message thrown (*** no libgdb.a found, supply NOGDB=1 to disable debugger support....) - but run from the Windows GUI this run just fine. The popping up console window will show compile progress for some time until it closes again. Then you will find a new file 'build-stamp.i386-wince' in the fpsrc folder. (In this case you can be happy that all worked OK)
4) Now there are lots of compiled subfolders in the fpc tree, that need to be copied over into (other positons) of the Lazarus folders.\

• packages\{packagename}\units\i386-wince goes to {lazfolder}\fpc\2.6.0\units\i386-wince\{packagename}
  where no units subfolder has been created during build, omit this folder\
• rtl\units\i386-wince goes to {lazfolder}\fpc\2.6.0\units\i386-wince\rtl
  the packages are: bzip2,chm,fastcgi,fcl-base,fcl-db,fcl-fpcunit,fcl-image,fcl-js,fcl-json,fcl-net,fcl-passrc,fcl-process,fcl-registry,fcl-res,fcl-web,fcl-xml,fftw,fpmkunit,fppkg,hash,hermes,httpd22,ibase,libgd,mysql,numlib,odbc,oggvorbis,openssl,oracle,pasjpeg,paszlib,postgres,regexpr,rtl,sdl,sqlite,symbolic,tcl,unzip,winceunits,zlib

(I will provide a batchfile soon for this...)

Test Applications

If your system is a core WindowsCE and not a Windows Mobile device, you might run into an error message:
Cannot find {your app name } (or one of it's components). Make sure the path and filename are correct...
In this case, this might be most probable a missing aygshell.dll (See WinCE Programming Tips). aygshell.dll might be found in the web, but most/all of them will be for ARM or MIPS. So to get hold of one, you will have to install the Windows CE 5.0 Trial version and build a sample device.

<work in progress, will be updated...>

Simple graphical Hello

As WinCE by default has no console, it's easier to try a graphical hello tesprogram.(for the console app you would have to install a console program or enable it first by a registry hack) <Sourcecode> <Screenshot> <prebuilt application>

• runs on WinCE 4.2 (YES/NO)
• runs on WinCE 5.0 (YES/NO)
• runs on WinCE 6.0 (YES/NO)

Useful 3rd Party Tools, Libraries, Links

• Check WinCE port Hints for more details on programming under Windows CE platform.
• lNet TCP/IP library seems to work fine (tested Visual/Nonvisual Lazarus packet and a Telnet client connecting from emulator to telnet host on Host-PC

From the Free Pascal wiki, page "i386-wince", as it stood on 2020-08-09 after a change by Trev, out of the wiki's dump of 2024-05-26. Copyright stays with the author who wrote it, according to the old wiki's Licensing page. If you have concerns about this material, message the admin.