That sounds pretty awesome then! Although I keep reading that the new Surface Go should have been an ARM64 instead of this Intel gold CPU but apparently Intel strong-armed (lol) Microsoft.

Kind of funny how easily they could throw off IBM, but they just cant shake Intel.

It has native dev tools. The latest VS2017 has full ARM64 support and will run on the ARM64 machines directly.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/

Of course the biggest problem these machines have is competing with full x86 equipped machines. Many ARM64 machines have Intel equivalents on the market.

I would imagine if IOT has a GDI/USER/KERNEL then it may be possible. I haven’t gotten beyond the boot screen as it didn’t like my USB hub, and the hour+ to boot on the Surface RT really was a killer.

I guess its talking to the schizophrenia that is Windows 8. It wanted to be a tablet, with the Surface RT I presume, but instead of some ‘Windows powered device’ they instead thought that Windows RT should simply be everywhere. Just as Windows phone was at the time still running on Windows CE, which then resulted in an new environment on CE, then replacing CE all together with so many ecosystem purges it’s no small wonder nobody was basically left.

It just goes to show just has fragile these software empires are. From the fall of IBM, Digital, HP and now Microsoft, the rise of Google and rebirth of Apple will only eventually result in their demise. It’s always been the death of a platform, from the mainframe, mini computer, and as recently the microcomputer, the mobile phone too one day will be replaced by something more powerful and easier to interface with . Maybe we’ll get Elon’s new solution to bridge the bandwidth gap between people & machines.

I’ve been seriously thinking about getting one. I though the RT was a little fun to try ‘Win32/ARM’ now, but then transition to a real one later on.

If it gets native dev tools that’d be nice, although I’m sure it’ll be yet another one of those ‘do everything in the cloud’ type things.

But when it comes to apps, Android sure has a renaissance of creativity with all kinds of media production apps, even big named ones with offerings for a fraction of their ‘big brother PC prices’.. Things like Photoshop, FL Studio etc…

Granted it seems interest in RT dropped off a cliff back in 2013, with some of the stuff I’m finding now is crazy old, but it’s still kind of cool to see Aliens vs Predator GOLD on the surface. I almost wonder if it’d be possible to port it to the DEC Alpha, but I’m currently lacking one.

Other thing of interest in thie win86emu is that with it being Win32 on Win32, it ought to be possible to replace the 80386 core with another one, say MIPS or PowerPC and run other platform binaries on the x86 processor. Initially it may seem counter productive, but it may be faster than full system emulation ala Qemu. Although in late 2018 I can’t imagine anyone all that interested in Visual C++ 4.0 RISC cross compiling stuff for Windows NT 4.0 of all things.