Windows RT allegedly hacked onto a Lumia 520 with new Windows Phone Internals suite

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Earlier this week Windows Central broke the news of Windows Phone Internals, a new side project by XDA member heathcliff. The suite of tools opens the doors for custom ROMs with access to the bootloader on Lumia Windows Phones up through Windows 10 Mobile.

Tonight, the first signs of the project catching have appeared on XDA. Hacker Wack0Distractor has posted a photo of a Lumia 520 running on all things Windows RT.

In the brief post, Wack0Distractor notes:

"After patching signature checks out of winload, and adding the halexts and registry entries for those, I had to patch 1 byte in the kernel, without which a SECURITY_SYSTEM bugcheck happens during boot. I haven't fully added any drivers yet, other than the halexts, i'll be doing that soon. So right now touchscreen doesn't work etc."

Later he responds to question:

"I will probably try to get some drivers working in this WinPE then nothing more, this was a proof of concept. I have a DragonBoard 410c that I aim to use for WoA experimentation when i get a power supply for it, so..."

Granted, the idea that we all will be running Windows RT on our old Lumias is pretty farfetched. However, it does suggest that these Windows Phone Internals tools are rather powerful. Hopefully, we will see more crazy ideas being put into motion over the next few months.

Source: XDA; via Windows Phone Internals

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Daniel Rubino
Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central. He is also the head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007, when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and watches. He has been reviewing laptops since 2015 and is particularly fond of 2-in-1 convertibles, ARM processors, new form factors, and thin-and-light PCs. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.