WinCE port

The WinCE port is under development. Currently only WinCE on ARM and i386 (WinCE emulator) is supported.

Status

The 2.1.x compiler has compiler support for arm-wince and a partial working system unit.

TODO

• Converting PocketPC SDK headers to Windows unit is needed. It is main show-stopper now.

Building

• You need cross binutils for arm-wince, get them from ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/contrib/cross/arm-wince-binutils.zip for Win32.
• Extract them to some dir in the path on your machine.
• Prepend the executable from the archive with a arm-wince- i.e. as.exe becomes arm-wince-as.exe.
• Get the 2.1 source repository from SVN: http://www.freepascal.org/develop.html#svn
• Go to fpc/compiler and execute make cycle CPU_TARGET=arm OS_TARGET=wince

At a certain point this breaks when the native compiler is compiled. This doesn't hurt, because you usually don't need the native compiler.

You should end with the units compiled to fpc/rtl/units/arm-wince and a ppccrossarm.exe in fpc/compiler. Copy them to locations fitting your fpc installation.

Documentation

WinCE port notes

• chdir always produces an error (WinCE does not support setting of current directory).
• All file/dir paths must be absolute (started with \).
• WinCE is unicode OS. All string parameters to API calls must be PWideChar.

First tests

• There is a writeln pb : text to std output give a runtime error 103. So trying the same code with evc -> result: nothing appear.
• In fact cmd.exe is not installed by default on pda's ie not text console, no CON: device but this can be installed with external

tools (ms provide one with PowerToys,there are others on the net)

• After that cmd.exe is installed, running the previous simpliest printf progs, show the expected text in a text window, existing of console.dll in \windows dir have been detected and stdout configured at runtime.
• The only difference is that a new console is opened every time, even if hello.exe is run from a console !

Links

• Useful WinCE info http://www.rainer-keuchel.de/documents.html