...but rather through bochs! Just a recompile of the debian arm port of bochs. Because Win98 works, any DOS-based windows should work (95, 3.x, ME), as well as plain dos, and several small Linux distros.

The good:

• It runs! - although this isn't a major surprise, since I did this on a Zaurus several years ago.
• Bluetooth keyboard presses are transferred through to win98. Can navigate menus using arrow keys, etc.
• Mouse can be connected, but is very skittish with the touchscreen. Maybe a bluetooth mouse? Maybe a bluetooth mouse connected to the virtual COM port in bochs?
• CD (ISO image) can be mounted, as can floppy images.

The untested:

• Networking - although it should be possible to set up some sort of outbound network on the device via kernel modules and routing/bridging. Bochs docs tell how to do it, but I haven't checked whether the kernel modules are available.
• Sound - no interest in slowing it down further!
• COM & Parallel ports - should work via a file just like on any other Linux.

The bad:

• SLOOOOWWWW! over 30 minutes to boot win98, with no apps installed. (See the statusbar clock in the screenshots below!) And this is the ARM port, so it should have some optimizations from upstream - compare this to about 1-1.5 minutes to boot on a core duo laptop.
• No virtual keyboard support.
• Uses 100% CPU - this could be solved by running dosidle, cpuidle or wqghlt inside win98.
• No Hildonization so don't minimize it or you'll have to kill it, leading to a lengthy scandisk the next time you try it!

This was just a test to see "what if". I'm not really interested in pursuing this, nor do I have skills to profile assembly code. In fact, I can't even get a proper package to build in the SDK at the moment, so I'm posting a 1.8MB tarball that has the bochs, bximage, and bxcommit binaries, the bios and vgabios files, a blank 512MB sparse disk, and the config file. Just untar it in on your PC, fdisk and format the disk, install an OS, and move the binaries, config file and BIOS images to your n800 home directory. The config file expects the disk to be /media/mmc1/c.img, adjust as needed. You'll need to install the OS on a laptop or desktop first, see the bochs documentation on how to connect a CD or ISO image. Takes about an hour to install on my laptop.

And finally, the obligatory screenshots.

Booting:


Running (menus opened via keyboard):


Video corruption as control panel loads!:


Edit: This needs libXpm4. I had to comment out the vbe extension line in the config file. You may want to change the cpu IPS value - I haven't tested it with other settings.