Windows Mobile, called Pocket PC in its first years, ran on the touch PDAs and phones of the 2000s, before the iPhone changed everything. Its games came on a memory card or from a website, and most of them disappeared with the shops that sold them.
We have about 110 Windows Mobile games on My Abandonware, from small puzzle games to full strategy titles like Warfare Incorporated. Almost all of them are .cab files, the installer of the time.
Emulators
Two young projects run these games today, and both are free: PocketHLE, which opens a .cab file directly, and cerf, which emulates whole PDAs. Expect rough edges from either.
- PocketHLE (Windows, Linux, Android): it does not emulate a whole PDA. It opens the game itself, runs its ARM code, and answers the calls the game makes to Windows Mobile. So it needs no system image: point it at a
.caband it tries to play. Start here. - cerf (Windows): a universal Windows CE emulator, from Windows CE 1.0 to Windows Mobile, which emulates more than 25 real machines. It needs the ROM of one of those machines, so it is the harder road, but it gives you the whole system, storage card included.
- Microsoft Device Emulator: Microsoft's own developer tool, from 2007, no longer developed. Its installer and its system images live on the Internet Archive. Try it if the two above fail on your game.
Both PocketHLE and cerf call themselves experimental, and say so plainly: some games start, some stop at once. This is where Windows Mobile emulation is today.
Running a game with PocketHLE
Unzip our download, find the .cab file inside, and open it in PocketHLE, from its window or with one command: pockethle run Game.cab.
PocketHLE unpacks the .cab itself, finds the game program inside and starts it. Some games come as a plain .exe for Windows Mobile instead: open it the same way. On Android, add the .cab through the file picker of its launcher.
The games that work best are the ones written straight for the screen, like Asphalt 4 or Call of Duty 2. A game that uses a part of Windows Mobile the project has not written yet stops during startup: try another game, or another emulator.
Running a game with cerf
cerf emulates a whole PDA, so you first pick a machine and give it that machine's ROM. Then you install the .cab inside the emulated system, as you would have on a real device.
The project lists the machines it supports, from Casio, HP, NEC, Sharp and others, and reads ROM dumps of them. It does not hand out ROMs. Once the system starts, copy the .cab to the emulated storage card and open it there: Windows Mobile installs the game and adds it to its programs.
What does not work
Some games ask for hardware no emulator offers: a phone line, a camera, a GPS. These need a real device, and the game will stop or show an error.
A game made for a screen the emulated machine does not have may also fail, or draw in a corner. If our game page lists several versions, try the one for another screen size or another device.
Windows Phone is another system
Windows Phone 7 and 8, from 2010 onwards, replaced Windows Mobile and share nothing with it. Their games are .xap files, and they need their own program: WPR.
WPR, for Windows and Android, plays the XNA and Silverlight games of Windows Phone 7 and 8. Like PocketHLE, it does not emulate a phone: it answers the calls the game makes, with modern parts. It keeps a list of the games it runs, more than 270 of them, with their state.
We hold no Windows Phone game today, so this note is only here to save you a search: a .cab file is Windows Mobile, a .xap file is Windows Phone.
I need help!
We do not provide support for running abandonware games. Windows Mobile emulation is young: the two projects above are the place to ask.
Both keep their notes and their compatibility on their pages, and the Emulation General Wiki keeps the list up to date as new versions come out.
Checked in October 2026 against each emulator's own documentation and, where it exists, its source code. Game counts and file sizes come from our own catalogue. These guides were drafted with the help of an AI assistant and checked by hand before publishing. If something here is out of date, tell us.