Total braindeath. Right after I posted that, watched a movie with my wife and afterwords within 5 minutes of sitting back down to the PC here, it hit me like a ton of bricks.
All that grumbling about how useless their emulator had been (no wceload.exe for moving cabs to it, etc) had made me kind of give up on their SDK.
Download
Wits A81 English SDK from BBS.
Smack that baby on, and viola. Even with no partnership, and only a Quick Connect in Windows Mobile Device Center, you can us the Visual Studio tools to target the Wits via the WTTSSDK_R3_ENG_ARMV4I_Device entry that it registers alongside the emulator.
So, I have to hit the rack now and haven't tried to attach to a process or deploy and debug yet, however, I did use this device entry to actually connect to my device and use the Remote Registry Editor in VS Tools, so I'm sure all the rest of it is bound to work.
Nothing special since I'm a programmer and not a graphics designer guy, but I'm working on a Bubble Pop game that's finger friendly and takes advantage of the 800 x 480. Since I'm going to give it all away freely licensed, I've scarfed some graphics from free iconset/png sites that just require attribution to the artists (which I'll plaster their names all over the Help|About screen.
I'm also working of fixing up a pretty good version of Mahjong source code that was for Windows Mobile. It was originally for 640 x 480 vga, so the tileset is good sized for the Wits. It's just open source and rough around the edges. Throws some exceptions now and then, likely attributable to CE vs Pocket PC/Mobile. Anyway, hasn't been touched since 2008, so I'll see if the author would make a CE branch if I wanted to contribute back. It's GNU public license, so I wouldn't have to necessarily send the changes back to him if I understand correctly, as long as I offer all my source for it for free and clearly label all my changes from his originals, keep all his original lables and offer it as GNU myself under the same license.
Too much to do, not enough time to do it.