The N64 has always been my favourite console. It's always been the workhorse in my family, giving us endless fun on the likes of Mario Kart 64, Mario Party, and GoldenEye 007. And it's become even more of an impressive force in my mind now after seeing it running Windows CE.
I spotted a video by Throaty Mumbo showing him getting Windows CE running on the console that brought us Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64, and Star Fox 64. He was messing around with an IVM Workpad Z50 and realised that the CPU is pretty much the same as the N64.
As Throaty says, the Workpad shows a MIPS 4000 Family CPU. He also explains that the N64 has a MIPS CPU, backed up by the fact of MIPS the rabbit in Super Mario 64. Windows CE is the kind of device that could be powered by a slow Hamster on a broken wheel; it only needs 1MB of RAM, which is what the N64 is packing.
Can you see where I'm going with this? Everything looks like it's aligning perfectly, right? It's the project that no one knew we needed, and it's probably not the best way to experience Windows in 2026. But hey, it's impressive nonetheless.
Throaty has documented the entire process on his YouTube channel, showing you how he's even put apps on the SD card in the Everdrive and managed to run them from within the Windows CE graphical user interface. You can also check out the entire project on GitHub and instructions on how to give it a go yourself too!
I love projects like this - can you remember when I covered Windows for the Game Boy? How about putting a radio into the Analogue Pocket? Anything that takes old software or tech and transposes it into a different medium fascinates me, and I love how Throaty has taken this project on. We see N64 games running on Windows often enough, so it's pretty poetic that we've seen the process running the other way around!
