CE Runtime Foundation v2

A universal Windows CE emulator: a virtual ARM hardware platform that boots real CE and Windows Mobile ROMs on modern Windows.

Warning

Early stage. There are some bugs and boards are just MVP implementations. Some boards lack proper clocks, etc. - take into account. Today this is rather proof-of-concept. Contributions are welcome!

Usage

The easiest way to run CERF is launcher.exe — a GUI app shipped next to cerf.exe that downloads publicly available ROM bundles and boots them. Pick a device from the list, tweak launch options (resolution, quiet logs, network) if you want, click Launch CERF.

For direct invocation without the launcher:

Command	Action
cerf.exe	Boot default device (ce5_smdk2410)
cerf.exe --device=ce6_smdk2410_devemu	Boot specific device
cerf.exe --flush-outputs	Force-flush logs (avoid truncation on crash, extremely slow)

Logs are written to cerf.log next to the executable. On a fatal crash, every other thread's register state and a top-of-stack snapshot is dumped to cerf.crash.log next to it through a lock-free emergency writer (no ucrt, no mutexes). Run cerf.exe --help for the full CLI.

Tip

For fastest runtime, pass --quiet. Logging dominates the hot path; disable it for performance runs.

Supoprted boards

Board	Device(s)	OS	Bootable	MVP usable/status
Device Emulator (CE 5+)	ce6_smdk2410_devemu, wm5_smdk2410_devemu	Windows CE 6, Windows Mobile 5+	✅	Graphics, sound, touch, keyboard, NE2000 Emulator
ODO/Poseidon - Microsoft Internal 1996 NDA Board	ce3_poseidon	Windows CE 3	✅	Grayscale graphics, basic sound, touch, keyboard
Compaq iPAQ 3650 (Intel SA-1110)	ppc2000_ipaq3650	Pocket PC 2000	✅	Graphics, basic sound, touch
OMAP 3530	ce7_omap_3530_evm	Windows CE 7	🚧	WIP
Device Emulator (CE 4/WM 2003)	wm2003se_smdk2410_devemu	Windows CE .NET 4.2, Windows Mobile 2003 SE	🔜	Known to have different branch in Device Emulator itself, but not implemented in CERF
PB SMDK 2410 Sample	ce5_smdk2410	Windows CE 5	🔜	Not implemented

How CERF runs ROM images? (NK.BIN, etc.)

Each device under devices/<name>/ contains a Windows CE ROM image (*.nb0 or *.bin).

Each device declares a cerf.json describing itself and (optionally) overriding board / network / rom defaults:

{
  "meta": {
    "device_name": "Microsoft Device Emulator (Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC)",
    "board_name":  "Device Emulator",
    "soc_family":  "Samsung S3C2410 (ARM920T)",
    "os":          { "name": "Windows Mobile", "ver_major": 5, "ver_minor": 0 },
    "device_year": 2005
  },
  "board": {
    "configurable_screen_width":  800,
    "configurable_screen_height": 600
  },
  "rom": {
    "primary":    "NK.bin",
    "extensions": "EXT.bin",
    "recovery":   "Recovery.bin"
  }
}

meta is informational (device identification for the launcher / status displays — SoC and Board selection at runtime still come from BoardDetector heuristics on the ROM). board is only honoured by BSPs with a configurable screen resolution (today only Device Emulator boards). rom is only needed when a device ships more than one partition; single-ROM devices auto-detect the *.nb0 / *.bin.

See device_config.h for the full schema.

To determine what is the board, CERF looks inside of ROM and performs heuristic search by module names or binary blobs.

Building

Requires Visual Studio 2026 with the C++ desktop development workload.

Note

First build on a fresh machine takes 1+ hour. vcpkg compiles dependencies from source before CERF starts linking. This happens once per machine — subsequent builds reuse the cached vcpkg_installed/ tree and finish in a few minutes. Do not interrupt the first build.

Initialise source/dependency submodules:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Build via the helper script:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File build.ps1

Or invoke msbuild directly:

msbuild cerf.sln /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=Win32

Third-party

• JIT studied/inspired by Microsoft's Device Emulator (Shared Source Academic License, 2006)
• nlohmann-json — header-only JSON parser.
• libslirp — user-mode TCP/IP stack behind the virtual NDIS miniport (DHCP, DNS, TCP, UDP, IPv4, IPv6 via SLAAC). No admin or driver install required; pulled in automatically via vcpkg on first build.

Roadmap

See roadmap.md

What happened to CERF v1?

Note

CERF v1 reimplemented CE userspace + kernel in host C++ - coredll exports thunked, rehosted on Win32. It hit a hard ceiling: per-process host resources (GDI handles, atom tables, kernel handles) couldn't hold an entire guest OS, because v1 mocked CE at the user-API layer instead of below CE's own per-process isolation. v1 was overengineering hell that literally grew exponentially. v2 is a completely different project. v1's source lives at cerf-v1-obsolete.

AI-generated code

100% generated by Claude via Claude Code — no human-written code. Not production-grade.

Downloads