A hobbyist developer has achieved the seemingly impossible: getting Windows CE 2.11 running on actual Nintendo 64 hardware. The project uses a custom Hardware Abstraction Layer that drops the unmodified nk.lib kernel onto the N64's VR4300 MIPS processor, bringing up the full CE 2.11 GWES desktop and shell environment.

The implementation includes drivers for the N64 controller (mapped as a mouse with A=left-click and B=right-click), SD card mounting via FatFS over the EverDrive-64 X7 cartridge, and wave audio output through the N64's AI hardware. A RDP-accelerated 3D demo demonstrates flat-shaded triangle rasterisation. Third-party CE 2.11 executables can launch directly from the SD card.

This is a pure reverse-engineering effort with no involvement from Microsoft or Nintendo. The developer built custom display, input, storage, and audio drivers from scratch, working around hardware quirks like the MI_INTR_MASK_AI bus stall that forced polling instead of interrupts for audio. Building requires the long-out-of-print Windows CE 2.11 Platform Builder and libdragon toolchain.

No prebuilt ROM exists or will be released—the project intentionally omits Microsoft's proprietary binaries, requiring developers to source the SDK themselves and build from scratch.