How did my native code experiment go with wp7

I have been pretty much spending all my free time during the winter for snowboarding and ice climbing. Now that the winter is nearly over at northern Europe, I got some time to come back to my hacking hobby. This is also to remind me how did my wp7 experiments go, if I want to come back to this stuff at some point.

Native code

At January I got the native snes9x library build and I was even able to call it from the managed code side. The native code usage has been well documented by XDA developer Heathcliff74 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1299134

What was strange that on January I didn’t need the ID_CAP_INTEROPSERVICES capability to my application, it worked anyway. I guess that Nokia had some bugs in their first Mango firmware to allow native code without proper capabilities. Yesterday I got back with the code, and I noticed that I can not run the code anymore without the capability.

Callbacks from the native code to the managed code

My biggest problem back then was that I could call LoadROM function from the managed code side, but I didn’t have any tools to debug what went wrong in the native side, so I couldn’t figure out what went wrong after calling the loadROM. My first idea was to set up debug callbacks into the managed code side that I could still call from the native side like

void DEBUG(string debugMessage){
console.debug(debugMessage)
}

But I newer found a way to a way how to do this. So I’m really stuck with this one without any plans to continue. I might get back to this if someone finds some ways of making the callbacks, or debugging the native code.

InteropUnlock

Currently Nokia devs can hack their Lumias, to get full control, and the InteropUnlock is available, if you like to continue native development. Thanks to XDA-developer suzughia http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1599401

What’s next

I guess that I’ll be coming back to the windows phone when the wp8 is available, since it should have the native code support build in, and I don’t need to use 10 years old ARMV4 architecture and lots of hacks to run native code on it.
I have some really cool ideas what I want to try on Meego. I’ll share the progress with you again, if I ever get anywhere with the new stuff.