A few days ago I joked with my fellow Android Community writers that I’d like to see Ice Cream Sandwich ported to the Atari 2600, so I could use it to run an Atari 2600 emulator. That hasn’t happened, but in terms of wow factor, the latest ICS port isn’t that far off. The HTC Universal, the Taiwanese company’s gigantic flipping QWERTY Windows Mobile megadevice from 2005, has been given a taste of Ice Cream Sandwich via (where else?) the XDA Developers forum. The port is based off of CyanogenMod 9, the ICS version of the most popular custom Android ROM.

If you’ve been following the mobile tech world for a while, you may have drooled over the HTC Universal way back when, just like I did. (Not that I could do much more than drool, being in high school at the time.) Naturally the Windows Mobile hardware isn’t ideal for running the modern version of Android – at 64 or 128 megabytes of RAM, compared to the 25gMB of the original G1 and a full gigabyte for the Galaxy Nexus. Like other Windows Mobile ports, this one has to be initiated from the MicroSD card.

After some tweaking by creator “notime2d8″, the image seems to work well enough, if slowly. Not surprising, since the entire system is running off of RAM and using a 528Mhz ARM processor. If you’re lucky enough to have an HTC Universal gathering dust, be sure to try out the port. Good on ya, Android mod developers – now how’s about that Atari version?