&gt; There is a zero percent chance of this ever happening.Honestly, I would have said the same. Great work!

Absolutely atrocious. Congratulations!That&#x27;s the hacker spirit.

That was it, I knew someone ported an OS to a Wii recently, thank you

There was a PPC version of Windows NT, and yes someone put it on the Wii!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Wack0&#x2F;entii-for-workcubes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Wack0&#x2F;entii-for-workcubes</a>See also: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gbatemp.net&#x2F;threads&#x2F;windows-nt-ported-to-wii.667959&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gbatemp.net&#x2F;threads&#x2F;windows-nt-ported-to-wii.667959&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m pretty sure someones done this for the 360. Also, doesn&#x27;t NT have a wii port?

You made me curious: why would you need to disassemble UIKit for iOS as part of your day job?

&gt; I like using it for disassembling UIKit (for my day job working on iOS apps), and overall, I like the UI&#x2F;UX and how it feels like a native Mac app.You are correct about the UI&#x2F;UX. I do think Hopper is ahead of others in that regard. Though, Radare2 being a CLI tool is nice as well. Though, I haven&#x27;t attempted to use Radare2 for MacOS&#x2F;iOS disassembly. Though I must ask, why are you disassembling UIKit? Looking for private API behavior or working around bugs? I&#x27;ve been learning more about iOS in my spare time, because despite my love for Swift, I have never used it for iOS. I only have used Swift for MacOS automation, i.e., AppleScript replacement via the Accessibility, Core Foundation, AppKit, etc..&gt; Ghidra, and while extremely impressive and capable, it might be the most Java-feeling appI chuckled while reading this because I had the exact same thought when I first used Ghidra. I haven&#x27;t tried Ghidra on MacOS because I will not taint my machines with the impurities of Java. I also do not want to enable Rosetta, so that was another obstacle in trying Ghidra on MacOS. In Ghidra&#x27;s defense, using Java was a pragmatic choice. The &quot;write once, run anywhere&quot; promise of Java is likely a near-necessity for a disassembler for government operations.

I&#x27;ve had it on my list to do for a very long time but unfortunately it has never gotten much effort. Although at this point I&#x27;m not super happy with the design (I feel like it&#x27;s built to be slow…) and I might build on top of something more modern like Binary Ninja instead.

Thank you for the kind words!I like using it for disassembling UIKit (for my day job working on iOS apps), and overall, I like the UI&#x2F;UX and how it feels like a native Mac app.I&#x27;ve tried Ghidra, and while extremely impressive and capable, it might be the most Java-feeling app I&#x27;ve ever used. I&#x27;d love for someone to whip up an AppKit + SwiftUI shell for it.

Exceptional work. While it may not mean much, I am truly impressed. I like to toy with reverse engineering here and there, but such a port like this would take me multiple lifetimes.Not to distract too much from the main topic, but what do you think about the Hopper disassembler? I have only used Radare2, IDA Pro, and Ghidra. Though, I haven&#x27;t used the latter two on MacOS. What do you prefer about Hopper? I have been hesitant to purchase a license because I was never sure if it was worth the money compared to the alternatives.

This is awesome!  I can&#x27;t wait to plug in my Wii and give it a try myself.

Great write-up. I love hardware running software it shouldn’t support

Hahaha! Yes! We need more of this in the world, love it!

&quot;According to a 2021 Reddit comment:&gt; There is a zero percent chance of this ever happening.Feeling encouraged, I started with the basics&quot;dude this absolutely sent me lmfao

Pre-App Store iPhone stuff was its own kind of wild west

Back in the day I was a hardcore Mac nerd and became a professional at it too. My best reverse-engineering trophy was building one of the first &quot;iOS&quot; apps when there was not an official appstore for the iPhone.But man, this is way ahead of what I could do. What this dude accomplished blew my mind. Not only the output (running MacOS on a Wii), but the detailed post itself. A-MA-ZING.

Damn, that&#x27;s some dedication! Congrats on getting it running

awesome, good to see some real content from pre-AI moment

Ah, the Procrustian definition of &quot;real hacker&quot;, where using AI disqualifies you but using Github pages is considered only a minor infraction.The build-in-public era of hacking has really turned this field into an influencer economy.

I used plenty of non-agentic AI to help understand the XNU codebase, and also research various topics. It wasn&#x27;t always correct, but it certainly helped at times! My philosophy for this project was to use it as a learning tool - since that was kind of the whole point of me attempting this :)

looks like they did use AI, swing and a miss for the luddites once again!

The post is a work of an actual hacker who knows what they&#x27;re doing. Zero mention of &quot;I used Claude&quot; or &quot;Used AI&quot; to understand what is needed for accomplish this task.This is exceptional work. Unlike the low-effort slop posts I see here on &quot;Show HN&quot;.

Very neat project and an extremely enjoyable read.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20141228042901&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tuaw.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;06&#x2F;10&#x2F;how-marklar-os-x-on-intel-owes-its-start-to-a-one-year-old-boy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20141228042901&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tuaw.c...</a>

Oof linkrot :(((((I remember reading this back then. Amazing story. All the secrecy, and needing to be a very small team.

Blogspam about this Quora post from the founding engineer&#x27;s wife: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Apple-Inc-2&#x2F;How-does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well&#x2F;answer&#x2F;Kim-Scheinberg?srid=i1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Apple-Inc-2&#x2F;How-does-Apple-keep-secrets...</a>

Amazing work.If you like this story, you might also like the story of how Mac OS X was ported to Intel as well.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4091216">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4091216</a>

I struggle so much to even comfortably play a handheld video game system on a plane, let alone use a laptop (I have also tried that) that I&#x27;ve mostly given up on even trying and just line up a few albums on my phone to listen to and close my eyes as much as possible.I can&#x27;t imagine trying to program on a laptop with an external device, even something as portable and small as a phone, on a plane. I expect my frustration and frequently bumping things about would mean I&#x27;d get nothing done aside from having a bad time.

Get a pair of XR glasses. I bought some Viture glasses a few years ago and they have been perfect for flights.

This is the most incredible part. I cannot even use a laptop adequately in an economy class seat, I cannot position the screen so that I could see it, and the keyboard so that I could type on it, at the same time. (To say nothing of connecting a Wii.)

Still looks like a plane to me, with rows of 2-3-2 seats.There are definitely no buses that wide.

It seems a bus to me, just look at the size of the windows. Airplanes don&#x27;t have windows like that..

The picture with the black seats in on a train and the one with the green seats is on a plane.

because of the mix of boredom, very shoddy internet that drops constantly and ANC earbuds removing distractions, I often find myself getting in the zone while riding the train back home from the office. As the kids say, I lock in

I can&#x27;t imagine concentrating on a complicated project like that on the go, but I went back to stare in awe at said picture and I think its a train or bus. Still a flex.

It&#x27;s uncomfortable and awkward (the Wii was on his leg in the first shot), and often you need to break concentration and pack things up to let someone out of or into their seat.

What&#x27;s flex-worthy about this? There&#x27;s a lot of dev work that goes on in economy class airplane seats. Or are VC valley programmers so rich they fly business everywhere?

&quot;I&#x27;ve now received my Cease and Desist letter from Nintendo over their Wii trademark. Feeling encouraged, I&#x27;ve written a full seven-world Super Mario Brothers sequel for macOS on the Wii that I&#x27;ve titled &#x27;Newer Super Mario Brothers Wii Subsystem for macOS&#x27;&quot;

Why would there be no access to Claude?I mean, you need WiFi, and that&#x27;s definitely a roll of the die on flights. But the last flight I had had WiFi, and the gal who sat next to me was vibe coding something.Meanwhile I was taking photos of the seat back infotainment system&#x27;s map, which showed our ETA as being before we left. Sadly, we did not time travel.

Which means no access to Claude.Can’t wait for his sequel “I received a Cease and Desist Letter from Apple; Feeling encouraged, I registered the trademark ‘Wii subsystem for macOS’”.

Imagine if he was developing it on a laptop found at a refuse site that was still charged, just hiding in the hedge so that guards wouldn&#x27;t see him.

And the guy next to him is just staring at his phone, probably thinking, &quot;I&#x27;m not even gonna ask&quot;.Although if it were me I&#x27;d probably annoy the heck out of him asking why he had a Wii on the airplane!

At first I thought it might be a train. “Surely he’s not doing that on a plane“.Once he showed he went to Hawaii my idea made slightly less sense.

I think it is a bus maybe? I can see out a window over some seats, and the overhead compartments don&#x27;t really look like ones i&#x27;ve seen before.That being said, that is absolutely amazing they brought a wii where ever they were going to write and debug this while traveling! That is dedication!EDIT: nvm, there are multiple pictures of them traveling. First one looks bus like, second one look like an airplane.

Huh - I know Apple’s first PowerBook 100 had an ad with Shaq on a plane, and then later one with Yao Ming… I guess Apple really wanted to crack the “I’m working on a plane damn it” market?

Apple had a commercial about this a million years ago, where a guy decides to edit a video on a plane.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;LQWjxAdSsHE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;LQWjxAdSsHE</a>

Many planes have AC power outlets, the Wii uses &lt;20W.

That stood out to me as well. Specifically: how did he power the Wii?

In one of the pictures, the laptop is on his tray, and the wii is on the tray of the seat next to him, and that seat looks empty. So the wii got its own airplane seat?

In addition to the incredible engineering work here the OP casually flexes by showing the development happening _in an economy class airplane seat_.

Get to submitting! Be the change you want to see.

yeah - I wish the &#x27;Hacker&#x27; part of &#x27;HackerNews&#x27; got more attention. Last few years it often feels more like &quot;VC-Buzzword-of-the-day-News&quot; - AI is just the most recent cycle.

I probably have rose colored glasses, but this is what I associate with Hacker News when I first started coming to this site. Truly absurd projects for no reason other than the love of the game and detailed write ups.I&#x27;m not an LLM post hater, but it definitely has been a bit draining lately. This is exactly what I love to see here.

I’m SOO happy but also wistfully sad when I open a post like this that I am desperately excited to read and it’s not muddled-thinking- and LinkedInese-riddled slop.

If all the AI stories on this site were replaced with amazing stuff like this, the world would be a better place.

I don&#x27;t know man, &quot;Wiindows&quot; was right there and they chose &quot;entii&quot;? I weep for the missed opportunity more than anything.Maybe it was a legal worry.

“entii-for-workcubes” is a pretty good pun!

I wonder if Gamecube&#x27;s PPC CPU is sufficiently compatible. then you have the easy Cube puns to use in reference to G4 cube

This is excellent, though if you had chosen another OS, you could have called the project Wiindows.EDIT: Oh interesting, the final paragraph says NT has been ported, didn&#x27;t know that. Sadly, no pun is mentioned in that project.

I only tested on Safari - whoops! Fixed now.

If it&#x27;s not working on Chrome nor Firefox, it&#x27;s safe to say it&#x27;s incompatible with almost all browsers.

Nice work and write-up!A side note: you embedded .mov videos inside &lt;img&gt; tags. This is not compatible with all browsers (notably Chrome and Firefox), which won&#x27;t load the videos.

Tempted to necro a 5 year old reddit post just to tell that guy he was wrong, honestly

The comment score is 1. It doesn&#x27;t even have a controversial flag. The gamification of social media is a mistake.

The best part is the comment ranting about how the Wii&#x27;s CPU is so fundamentally different, and then:&gt; The Wii uses a PowerPC 750CL processor - an evolution of the PowerPC 750CXe that was used in G3 iBooks and some G3 iMacs.Hilarious.

Gotta love that particular Redditors follow up comment:&gt;Go ahead and downvote me. I am correct on every single thing I said

I&#x27;d be lying if I said it wasn&#x27;t a very tiny part of my motivation :)

That used to be my thing: wherever our ops manager declared something was impossible, I’d put my mind to proving her wrong. Even though we both knew she might declare something impossible prematurely to motivate me.My favorite was “it’s impossible to know which DB is failing from a stack trace”. I created STAIN (stack traces and instance names): a ruby library that would wrap an object in a viral proxy (all returns from all methods are themselves proxies) that would intercept all exceptions and annotate the call stack with the “stain”ed tag.

100% agree, I find that sometimes I hit a dead end, but the things I build or learn on the way are usable at a later date.

Love that it&#x27;s actually linked as well; too bad that user isn&#x27;t still active.

They&#x27;re kinda like high-effort shitposts. Which are my absolute favorite kind. The worse the effort&#x2F;reward payoff, and the more it makes you ask &quot;WHY??!!?&quot;, the better.

Now tell me your opinion on P==NP being confirmed within 5 years.

I&#x27;m remindded of my favorite immortalized comment, &quot;No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.&quot; Rob Malda of Slashdot, 2001, dunking on the iPod when it debuted.

Yes, I’ve found at work that the best way to get me off my ass and work furiously is to tell me something isn’t possible

Agreed. Also who doesn&#x27;t like knocking a smug commenter down a peg

I almost think such projects are worth it just to immortalize comments like these. There&#x27;s a whole psychology of wrongness that centers on declaring that not-quite-impossible things will definitely never happen, because it feels like principled skepticism.

The missile knows at all times where it is, by knowing at all times where it isn’t.

So much has happened in the tech world because someone wrote at one point, &quot;You can&#x27;t do that&quot;My favorite part of our online world.

&gt; Readers with a keen eye might notice some issues:&gt; - Everything is magenta.was fun too

I have a project on my desk that started as a response to a line in the Adafruit docs for their RP2040 based MacroPad<pre><code> It is not possible to add BLE or WiFi at this time to the MacroPad.
</code></pre>
Oh yeah, really? There is a port hanging off the side that can be reconfigured for UART, are you sure Adafruit, what if I add an ESP32?

Or eventually you could answer wrongly to a question without answers, triggering plenty of correct ones

Ha so well known it has a name, Cunningham’s law

Wasn&#x27;t the old Linux joke, don&#x27;t ask &quot;how do I do X with Linux&quot; (because you&#x27;d get ridiculed for not reading the docs) but instead, just state &quot;X isn&#x27;t possible with Linux&quot; and then someone would show you how it&#x27;s done?

Plus the internet basically equates cynicism with intelligenceThis is a generally known phenomenon in psychology. If you leave a book review saying that you liked a book, people are biased to believe you are stupid. If you criticize a book negatively people are biased to believe you are smart.

HN is not as bad but I think a lot of internet commenters do this because it gives them a little hit of superiorityPlus the internet basically equates cynicism with intelligenceThere is somehow no concept of &quot;ignorant cynicism&quot;

The &quot;zero percent&quot; guy definitely opened a browser tab to check after the post went live.

I’ve never seen someone go to so much effort just to prove a random Redditor wrong, but I am impressed.

Its a great motivator, happened with me too, I once asked a question about getting the original camera on custom rom and got this as a response [1].
This lead to 2 year long project [2] and an awesome time full of learnings and collaboration[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xdaforums.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;how-do-i-port-pocos-miui-camera-to-custom-rom.3863917&#x2F;post-78087607" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xdaforums.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;how-do-i-port-pocos-miui-camera-to-c...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xdaforums.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;anxcamera-closed-on-xda-only-16th-feb-2020.3879357&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xdaforums.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;anxcamera-closed-on-xda-only-16th-fe...</a>

Reminds me of the old saying &quot;don&#x27;t interrupt the one doing it, to tell him it can&#x27;t be done.&quot;

I thought the same thing about running macOS Ventura on pre-AVX2 Macs until this[1] showed up.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;acidanthera&#x2F;CryptexFixup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;acidanthera&#x2F;CryptexFixup</a>

I got the idea of writing an emulator in JavaScript in the pre-Chrome era, circa 2007. I remember searching around trying to find whether somebody had done it before. It seemed not, and somebody on a forum declared “that’s not possible”.To me, it was obviously possible, and I was determined to prove them wrong.Anyway, this now exists because of that: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;bfirsh&#x2F;jsnes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;bfirsh&#x2F;jsnes</a>

<pre><code> Before figuring out how to tackle this project, I needed to know whether it would even be possible. According to a 2021 Reddit comment:

 There is a zero percent chance of this ever happening.

 Feeling encouraged, I started with the basics: what hardware is in the Wii, and how does it compare to the hardware used in real Macs from the era.
</code></pre>
I LOL&#x27;d

This is extraordinary, not only pushing the limit but documenting everything so clearly to show people what can be accomplished with time and dedication. Thank you for such thorough documentation, and congrats on getting it done!

honestly expected this port to be headed in the opposite direction

How about a piezoelectric buzzer? That&#x27;s how the firmware on some iPods were first dumped.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20050828114013&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ipodlinux.org&#x2F;stories&#x2F;piezo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20050828114013&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ipodli...</a>

Fun post.Always great when your debugging feedback is via a led xD

And there are enough parallels to Linux&#x27;s stack, I&#x27;m thinking about looking through the Linux on Wii project more and comparing how it handles fb issues in comparison. I loved reading this whole post, crazy how many OSes have now been run on the humble Wii!

As I remember it, they were basically the same—but IOKit is C++ (with restrictions) because 3rd party developers didn&#x27;t want to learn Objective-C.But that&#x27;s a hazy, 20 year old memory.

Funnily enough, there is a (different) DriverKit in macOS again now ;)

There’s a great video of a NeXT-era Steve Jobs keynote floating around—I think the one where he announces the x86 port as NeXT was transitioning to a software-only company—where he specifically calls out DriverKit and how great it is.Steve was not a developer but he made it his business to care about what they cared about.

Driver Kit used Objective-C, and ironically it is back, as Apple gave the same name to the userspace driver model replacement for IO Kit.

IOKit was actually built from the ground up for OS X! NeXT had a different driver model called DriverKit. I&#x27;ve never coded against either, but my understanding was they&#x27;re pretty different beasts. (I could be wrong)That said, indeed, the abstraction layer here is delightful! I know that some NetBSD devs managed to get PPC Darwin running under a Mach&#x2F;IOKit compatibility layer back in the day, up to running Xquartz on NetBSD! With NetBSD translating IOKit calls. :-)

I felt similarly. The learning curve was a tad steep, especially since I had never written a driver before, but once I figured out how to structure things and saw the system come alive, I grew to appreciate the approach IOKit takes.With that said, I haven&#x27;t developed drivers for any other platforms, so I really can&#x27;t say if the abstraction is good compared to what&#x27;s used by modern systems.

I guess having targeted multiple architectures and in the case of OPENSTEP also operating systems early on certainly helped.

I’d say it’s more about how much explanation is needed.  There are cool abstractions that require explanation because they aren’t intuitive at first, and then it clicks.  But usually if I find endless explanations of why indirection is better because it aligns with someone’s conceptual model, that’s to me a bad abstraction.  Not because it’s leaky, but because it resists understanding.

&gt; I&#x27;m surprised by how well abstracted MacOS is (was).Usually the difference between something being well-abstracted vs poorly-abstracted is how well it&#x27;s explained.

Once he could satisfy the expected interfaces well enough, the rest of the system seems to have been surprisingly willing to play along

Not only is this an insanely cool project, the writeup is great. I was hooked the whole way through. I particularly love this part:&gt; At this point, the system was trying to find a framebuffer driver so that the Mac OS X GUI could be shown. As indicated in the logs, WindowServer was not happy - to fix this, I’d need to write my own framebuffer driver.I&#x27;m surprised by how well abstracted MacOS is (was). The I&#x2F;O Kit abstraction layers seemed to actually do what they said. A little kudos to the NeXT developers for that.

And here I am shopping for Macs because getting a hackintosh working from a VM on Windows is too difficult for me.

Oh interesting, it looks like that geforce had an entire 64mb of gddr3 too, it&#x27;d still be fun to see if one could limbo that low, though I agree that save for upgrading the BGA ddr3 of the wii to something more the size of the dev kit had(128mb GDDR3)

I&#x27;d say there is a zero percent chance of this ever happening :D
The original Apple TV was an Intel Core Solo with 256 MB of RAM and an nVidia GPU, running a modified Mac OS X 10.4 that booted into something similar to Front Row instead of Finder.

Apple TV came after the switch to Intel processors, so you would have to have some kind of reverse-Rosetta layer to run it on a PowerPC Wii.

Given that the original Apple TV ran on a modified version of macos, what are the chances one could turn an old wii into an Apple TV..?EDIT: also, I just noticed on a second pass the system is addressing 78mb of ram, potentially meaning the ram spans the gddr3 and sram, I&#x27;m amazed this works as well as it does with seemingly heterogeneous memory

This is some amazing work, a good reminder to dig more into operating systems for myself!

The original one does run a modified OS X Tiger. I jailbroke it a while ago to run custom stuff, but didn&#x27;t do much with that. Just remember being able to VNC or SSH into it.

Good news, just today a bypass was released to allow any EFI bootloader to work on the original Apple TV <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;DistroHopper39B&#x2F;ATV1sm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;DistroHopper39B&#x2F;ATV1sm</a>

Hell Apple’s latest monitors have an A19 Pro chip in them which are more powerful than the MacBook Neo.

Aren&#x27;t those Android boxes that you can get for less than $30 and then flash Linux (Armbian etc) onto a much better option?

The one that really bugs me is the Apple TV. It would be a great little box to use for terminals&#x2F;thin client style work and there are a ton of old cheap ones. Having a $50 dollar used box that was low power and could run OSX would be great.

With the extra RAM, higher clock speed, and no need to waste CPU cycles converting YUV -&gt; RGB framenbuffers - I bet it would be!

Are you willing to elaborate on the _why_ or is this a challenge comment, similar to the reddit comment that spurred this project? ;)

Go ahead and downvote krsw, he is correct on every single thing he said.

There is a zero percent chance of that ever happening.

Is it possible that a jailbreak is found that could allow a “kexec” kind of thing to load a new OS? Of course it would be a huge amount of work even if theoretically possible

I wonder if you can place an A18 from a Neo onto an iPhone board, and then make that work somehow... You wouldn&#x27;t be able to use the one originally from the iPhone because it&#x27;s differently fused to only accept iOS images.

It&#x27;s already been done <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;jailbreak&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1mn7mk1&#x2F;your_jailbroken_idevices_may_be_able_to_run_macos&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;jailbreak&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1mn7mk1&#x2F;your_jai...</a>

Congrats, great project and great writeup. That would have won MacHack back in the day.Now that the MacBook Neo has an A18, I wonder if you could get MacOS running on an iPhone? :)

Debugging kernel panics on a Wii in an economy seat is a level of focus I can&#x27;t even imagine. Most people can&#x27;t read a book on a plane without losing their place every 5 minutes.

My favorite part of this is the detour to ask for the IOUSBFamily src on IRC

Because it has all the advantages of Linux + all the advantages of Windows + many advantages of its own.So to have a fully fledged and more usable computer, for those who don&#x27;t want to purchase the Apple hardware.And the latest Mac OS still supports Intel, so you&#x27;ll get many more years out of a machine. For what I know, the last 10 versions of MacOS are still very usable.

&gt;better option than LinuxI&#x27;m not sure why it would. Why would anyone want to hack on different proprietary software with no supplier support and whose days are clearly numbered (Apple&#x27;s move to ARM)?For usability I mean. It&#x27;s clearly an interesting technical feat.

They are successfully porting Mac OS onto every kind of modern computer over at the hackintosh subreddit, and I can&#x27;t understand why there is so little interest for this stuff in the &quot;hacker&quot; sphere.Surely, it must be a better option than Linux if you want to get the most out of a PC computer? At least for 10 more years.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;hackintosh&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;hackintosh&#x2F;</a>

This rules. It’s exactly the kind of cursed side quest that sounds fake until you read the writeup and realize you actually did the work.

Very cool! I&#x27;d love to learn more. That seems extra challenging considering Mac OS 9 is closed source!

You are at a slight disadvantage without XNU and Darwin sources, but you can have leaked System 7.1 source, Ghidra and MCP to help make up the difference.Godspeed.

Nice!Are there one or two instructions that aren&#x27;t available ?I guess it might be possible to trap and emulate those?

As someone who&#x27;s been trying to do something VERY similar (port Mac OS 9 to the Nintendo Wii U), all I can say is I&#x27;m 1) absolutely impressed, and 2) absolutely encouraged, as my project keeps telling me &quot;this is impossible&quot; at every opportunity.

Nice project! Love seeing emulators &amp; ports

I bet if me-20-years-ago knew that current me would have no fucking clue how to even begin to tackle a problem like this, me-20-years-ago would be very disappointed. Very jealous of your expertise.  Awesome work!

Your post and pictures brightened up my day. Thanks!

Sorry if off topic but I was struck by the view from your window. Were you in Hanalei Bay?

In love with projects that are done solely because &#x27;why the hell not&#x27;. Fantastic writeup and work.

It is satisfying to see someone hacking on deprecated hardware and software also is keen to look forward into Vision Pro.

That&#x27;s true in broad strokes, but looking into it, it turns out NTSC&#x27;s variant of YUV is called YIQ, and SECAM&#x27;s variant is called YDbDr. They are however all more or less the same thing, and the digital YUV used by the Wii hardware in this case is presumably independent of the video standard.

YUV is a color model, akin to RGB or HSL; it&#x27;s independent of video formats like NTSC or PAL.

Some of this is just really widespread imprecise usage of terms: what really should be called &quot;YCbCr&quot; in digital contexts is frequently called &quot;YUV.&quot; So-called &quot;YUV&quot; digital formats for video are really really common, and they&#x27;re used for both NTSC and PAL. &quot;YUV420,&quot; YCbCr using 4:2:0 chroma subsampling so the two color components are half the resolution in each dimension vs. the luma, in particular is super-common.The Wii seems to actually use &quot;YUV422&quot; internally, so 4:2:2 chroma subsampling, where the chroma is only halved in one dimension. The conversion to analog NTSC or PAL signals happens later in the process. The repository here actually looks like it sets up the Wii&#x27;s video interface to output NTSC progressive by default, but lets you configure for PAL with a config file.

This is excellent.YUV appears to be a PAL-specific color space. I wonder how off an NTSC Wii would be. Presumably it would have the wrong color space until an equivalent conversion scheme was devised for NTSC.I was surprised to see regional color spaces leak into the project, but I presume that Nintendo&#x27;s iOS (the coincidentally-named system this is replacing) could handle that abstraction for game developers.

Yes - this project (and countless others) would not have been possible without the incredible work to hack the Wii from Team Twiizers (now fail0verflow) back in the day. The work they did was a huge inspiration for me getting into computer science when I was a teenager.

Oh hi! I&#x27;m a huge fan of your work! I&#x27;ve watched so many videos breaking down Doki Doki Literature Club.Thank you for all that you do.

I wrote that L-cancel training code! Funny to see it come up out of nowhere. I too have always adored the Wii and its moddability. It&#x27;d be my go-to choice if I someday ever get the itch to write console homebrew software of my own.

The Wii is very moddable. I&#x27;ve modded my Wii in the past just for playing modded versions of Super Smash Brother Melee (mainly training packs, like flashing a red light when I miss an L-cancel).

Recently I was ranting about this very thing, my work machine running win 11 has 16gb ram and Windows just sits at 8Gb on idle. My first laptop had 1 gig of ram... until I got my mac (16GB M1 Air) I used to manage with 4GB RAM while serving clients... Optimization seems to have been forgotten these days

Another funny history fact with the Wii is Windows Vista released the same month in North America. People were so upset that the minimum requirement for Vista said 512 MB (which was already more than the average existing home PC of the time had without an upgrade) but it ran like crap unless you had more.We truly had to get away with less back then. These days it feels like there is a bit more headroom where 8 GB is on the downtrend, 16 GB is becoming the most common, and the user&#x27;s apps are enjoying the extra fat.

Well, Microsoft pioneered with that earlier. Win98, or was it 95b, merged the filesystem Explorer with Internet Explorer and came up with ActiveDesktop.

I was kind of ready to call BS on this, Nintendo is usually a little more careful with these things. But, you are absolutely correct.

Wii and DS ran a version of Opera browser.

The Wii settings menu is an HTML webpage. Yes, even 2006 games consoles were not spared the web.

&gt; As for RAM, the Wii has a unique configuration: 88 MB totalTIL Wii has only 88MB of RAM. Fortunately games weren&#x27;t electron-based.

&gt; The Wii uses a PowerPC 750CLWell, okay, that&#x27;s almost cheating.

The Wii UI looked fine and was very easy to understand, too.

I&#x27;m shocked that the Wii only has 88mb of RAM. The programmers of that era really knew how to make a lot from a little!

Unrelated to the article but please compress your images. Why is one of them almost 8mb!?

Here&#x27;s another polite request for an RSS feed. Thank you

Chiming in as well to say to the author when the victory lap here is over: please consider adding the RSS feed! I want to see whatever you do next, regardless of how long it takes.

This was an incredible read! Especially for what looks like the first post to this blog too? I wanted to subscribe to the RSS feed but unfortunately it gives a 404 error.

Haha, this is great. Very impressive -- and a fantastic, detailed writeup. Congrats! And thanks for sharing! :)

That&#x27;s the same as Executor, or some similar project with GNU&#x2F;Linux 
with was exactly what Mace does with a free license.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.v68k.org&#x2F;advanced-mac-substitute&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.v68k.org&#x2F;advanced-mac-substitute&#x2F;</a>What I would like to see it&#x27;s the full OS reimplementation a la AROS m68k.There are Minivmac ports for 9front. Exegutor it&#x27;s made in C++, so no way to compile it with NPE (micro-POSIX compat layer for 9front). If anyone had that under MiniVmac, it could run everywhere.On Advanced Mac Substitute, as it has an SDL2 interface, it can be almost done unless it&#x27;s written in C++. If it&#x27;s ANSI C or C99, it might run under 9front.

Possibly of interest: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mace.home.blog&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mace.home.blog&#x2F;</a>Frustratingly, though, they haven&#x27;t released any source code yet.

Not OSX, but I&#x27;d love what Aros m68k is doing with the Amiga but for Mac OS System7.Yes, I know about Ardi Executor being libre and enhanced now, but that&#x27;s not the point.I&#x27;d love to spawn MiniVMAC with a free system ROM replacement and a free Mac OS 7 reimplementation.

Uh, I just noticed the Windows NT for GameCube port actually claims Wii support too...so maybe one day we&#x27;ll see a Wii dual boot NT4 and OS X 10.0

So when will you port MacOS X to the Wii U? Two more CPU cores and 2GB of RAM instead of 88MB!

Your ports were a huge inspiration - thanks for contributing so much to this space!

Many thanks for all the code! The second hand market is currently flooded with Wii U hardware that is cheap enough to buy enough stock to last a life time for peanuts. Would be amazing fun for PowerPC development and if I had an alternative timeline where I went into low-level programming, I would love to push for OpenBSD support inspired by your work.

As the author of the NetBSD Wii and Wii U ports, congrats! I’m looking forward to seeing how you solved some of the problems that I faced along the way.

Wonderful write up, thank you for sharing!&gt; In the end, I learned (and accomplished) far more than I ever expected - and perhaps more importantly, I was reminded that the projects that seem just out of reach are exactly the ones worth pursuing.Couldn&#x27;t agree more. I&#x27;ve had my own experience porting something that seemed like an intractable problem (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31251004">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31251004</a>), and when it finally comes together the feeling of accomplishment (and relief!) is great.

Start with the idea and then do some reading and then when you&#x27;re comfortable enough... onwards!

Wow! This is really impressive!I kind of want to try some project like this sometime, but I wouldn&#x27;t even know where to start...

Brought the Wii to Hawaii to finish the framebuffer driver. Priorities perfectly set.

Presumably this means you could also port MacOS 9 if you were okay with writing a few drivers and patching some virtual ROMs.

I love it. I mean I hate MacOS, but great project

This is incredible. I wonder when an LLM will pull this knowledge out to help someone down the line who would never have had the craft to pull this off, as it requires so much depth and broad skill. Admirable.

Neat, and kudos! Reminds me of my young hobbyist days. I wish low level dev work was that approachable now.Back in the old days, it was REALLY easy to initialize VGA and throw pixels around in ASM, C, or C++. The 6502 and related chips were relatively easy chips to build stuff for, even though tooling was non-existent. Shoot, you could do some really awesome things on a Tandy CoCo2 and BASIC of all things.It feels like engineering has made this type of thing inaccessible. Most systems require a ton of knowledge and expertise. There is no easy &#x27;in&#x27; for someone with a special interest in development. Even worse, AI is artificially dumbing things down, while making things even more inaccessible.

This was a brilliant write up and an insane project. Kudos!

Refreshing to read an article with an actual engineering work as opposed to another article about AI. Great work, very inspiring!

awesome work and write up! hella impressive!

Yo dawg I heard you liked virtual addressing so I designed virtual addresses for your physical addresses

Had a very similar issue porting a hypervisor to ARM S-EL2. Writes would succeed, there were no faults, and everything looked reasonable in GDB, but the other side never saw the data. The root cause was that Secure and Non-Secure physical address spaces were backed by different memory even at the same address, and a single PTE bit selected between them. That took me much longer to understand than I’d like to admit.

I see. Very interesting project. Do you think that you&#x27;re going to post it on GitHub?

Thanks! The project was mostly C for the bootloader and C++ for the drivers.As for which part was the most challenging... probably understanding the IOKit driver model. I really would have benefitted from having an expert explain some of the concepts to me, and give me some advice about how to structure my own drivers.

Highly respectable project. My hat&#x27;s off to you. I&#x27;m just curious, what computer programming language did you do most of this in and what do you think was the most challenging part of porting Mac OS X on to the Wii console?

It was refreshing reading this in the age of AI slop, thank you for the great read and congratulations on the project

Makes me wonder if 10.4 would work on the WiiU...

Yep, started coding iOS apps on an EeePC 1000H on Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and XCode 3.1.something.While the updates would break things, it was not more complicated than a Linux of the mid 90s to set up, especially with “hackintosh distros” like iDeneb. Surprisingly ok, given the anemic machine!

This reminds me the 2008-2009 era where Mac OS X Leopard was running Hackintosh on Dell Mini 9 and some other netbooks.At $349, it was almost a fully functional laptop that runs on Mac OS X (comparing to over $1000+ MacBooks or $1599 MacBook Pros)Two friends of mine literally working remotely in an Africa trip with Dell Mini 9 and mobile hotspots and were doing video conferencing with Skype (on Wi-Fi).[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dell_Inspiron_Mini_Series" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dell_Inspiron_Mini_Series</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hackintosh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hackintosh</a>

Super cool project and write-up, I loved reading it!

hand-rolled iokit drivers and a bootloader to get xnu running on 88mb of ram with cpu-bound yuv-to-rgb conversion at 60fps, all because the wii&#x27;s powerpc 750cl is close enough to a g3 imac that darwin mostly just worked. solid systems work and a genuinely useful writeup but might try on a dreamcast personally. rom burns

This writeup absolutely ruled – real low‑level hacking, great storytelling, and super inspiring.

Right, and I suspect as things get more complicated (and you have to ship), abstractions get leaky.

I feel that modern macOS might be even more abstracted, not less. But it is absolutely more complicated and will probably require a bunch more work.

What stood out to me is how much of this worked because of strong abstraction boundaries.It’s interesting because we don’t often think about OS-level abstractions in the same way anymore — but projects like this really show how powerful they are when they’re done right.Makes me wonder how feasible something like this would be with modern systems, where things feel more tightly coupled and security constraints are much stricter.

Reading this was the highlight of the week! I love it when people port things to places they do not belong :)

I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii