Where can I download a copy of Windows CE?

Videogamer555

Windows CE (aka Pocket PC and Windows Mobile) is the cellphone and PDA version of Windows, and I don't know where to find a copy of it. I think there's 2 variants of it, one for devices with x86 (or x64) type CPUs, and one for ARM (or ARM64) CPUs. I'm particularly interested in the x86 variant of some of the older versions of this (back when it actually had names like Windows CE, Pocket PC, and Windows Mobile, before it just got called Windows when Windows 8 came out). Now I assume there's ISOs of this floating around somewhere, because in order for a phone or PDA manufacturer to make their phone work, they'd need to install an OS on it, and so I'm sure MS had to sell CDs or DVDs with the OS to device manufacturers (even if it never was sold to the general public like normal Windows was). So I'm sure there's ISO disk images of these CDs or DVDs around somewhere, but I don't know where.

Since WinWorldPC is based on archiving old and beta versions of OSes, I assumed maybe they'd have beta versions of Windows CE (or Pocket PC, or Windows Mobile), but there don't seem to be any when I look in the library section of the WinWorldPC website. Is there another place I could find this?

ctrlc

With a quuck search, I found:

https://archive.org/details/windows-ce-disk-images

https://archive.org/details/wince_x86

https://archive.org/details/CE6R3

Windows CE is not going to come as a bootable installation CD like Windows for x86 does, because embedded devices never standardized... Instead there's custom work needed to make each platform boot up and run an OS, and what are essentially all the "drivers" for each device need to be included in there. For Windows CE, "Platform Builder" was the software needed for a developer to compile the Windows CE sources, with all of his own customizations into a bootable image.