I recently picked up this thing that someone was giving away on a local group. It's a Casio Cassiopeia A-11 running Windows CE 1.0 (I think it must be one of the very first batch of Windows CE palmtops that shipped). It has the absolute *worst* screen I have ever seen in a handheld. The screen even has a backlight that doesn't help either.
I only got the palmtop; the original cables and so on were not included. Fortunately it runs on standard AA batteries. It chewed through the ones I put in in just over a week, during which time it was turned off and doing nothing (maybe it would have lasted longer if it had a backup battery in).
Fortunately I was able to pick up an original docking connector and power supply on eBay very cheap. But wait - what kind of RS-232 connector is that? That's not a DB-9 connector! Argh!
Fortunately I was able to find a copy of the service manual, which had schematics including the docking connector pinouts!
The board inside the dock had some convenient (hand soldered?) pads connecting up the serial pins, so it was relatively straightforward to patch in half of a serial cable.
My skills with a soldering iron are still abysmal. Don't look too closely.
@fraggle ooh! terminal access!
gosh, i wouldn't have even thought that you could get serial out of that port. that's rad as heck
@thingywott it's slow as heck as well lol
@fraggle i would honestly be amazed if it was anything besides, ahah
window ce ultraportables didn't exactly have a reputation for being able to easily do heavy, resource-intensive tasks like opening a folder or typing text
still though, this thing is pretty cute, and the fact you managed to get new io working with it is super-cool!
