[Windows Phone 8 Development and Hacking] moonlits:
Having failed to install the whole SDK a couple of days ago I went poking around in the installer and found the VHD myself, and I thought just for laughs I'd try booting it natively on a couple of netbooks I had to hand. Here's an eeePC 701SD and a Samsung NC10 booting the image:

[YOUTUBE]7Vs2zTq9iQ4[/YOUTUBE]

[YOUTUBE]UBBMYp6wB4s[/YOUTUBE]

Note: WP8.1 does not appear to be able to boot from USB, at least this particular image of this particular build, it must be booted from a non-removable drive. The eeePC I have booting from a CompactFlash card installed internally via the miniPCIe-style SSD slot, and the NC10 has a SATA HDD.

Neither of these machines have touchscreens, so navigation requires the touchpad, which is a little awkward. Worse, there's no indication of where the mouse is pointing, so significant guesswork is needed. The NC10 in particular is pretty smooth, although it's not obvious in the video, one-handed touchpad use makes it difficult to get the kinetic scrolling to kick in.

Just for fun, I tweaked some reg values to correct the model name etc.

View attachment 2597381

Edit:

Interestingly, the power button on each netbook performs exactly as the power button on a real phone would, at least as far as a single short press will turn off the screen as if it's going to sleep, and a single power button press after that will wake it back up. F12 also appears to serve the same function. The back button, which is mapped to Esc, seems to be flaky or non-functional after waking it back up, though. None of the other keyboard keys seem to do anything at all, except F5 or F6, I forget which, and I forget what it did, might have sent me back to the Start Screen, I don't remember.

I have no idea if it's possible to cram any Windows 8.1 drivers into this thing, my knowledge doesn't run that deep, but I'd be interested to hear of possible ways to make this more functional, most of the hardware stuff seems to have dummy drivers which do nothing. Unfortunately neither of these netbooks have Windows 8 compatible graphics chipsets, and the eeePC's Intel GMA915 isn't even capable of running Aero, there were no Aero-capable drivers released for Vista/7. I don't know whether the resolution in Windows Phone 8.1 can be forced, but I did try tweaking some registry keys regarding resolution but it didn't appear to do anything. In the About page under Settings however it does show that the resolution of each netbook is 640x480 and 800x600 respectively, which are the highest standard 4:3 resolutions they're capable of without the correct driver. App resolution is still 480x800.

eeePC:

View attachment 2597395

NC10:

View attachment 2597394

I also found a shortcut to cmd.exe in the image, but no cmd.exe binary, is it possible to get this kind of access? I didn't expect it to work, but I did try copying cmd.exe from Windows 8.1 32bit into the Calc7 folder, replacing Calc7.exe so I'd have an easy place to try launching it from, but unsurprisingly this long shot didn't do anything, the Calculator button in the apps list simply did nothing at all when pressed.

I also tried booting in VMWare with different RAM settings, below 128MB it gets a bit hairy, 112MB will get it to the Start Screen but it fails to run Office, at 92MB it fails to arrive at the Start Screen, it just sits accessing the boot media, looking like it's attempting to load but failing, I left it for 30 minutes and it never progressed beyond the blackness after the boot splash. At 64MB it doesn't even show the boot splash, it simply shows a single underscore and stops.