I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

> 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'm surprised by how well abstracted MacOS is (was). The I/O Kit abstraction layers seemed to actually do what they said. A little kudos to the NeXT developers for that.

You might also be interested in this similar work: Installing Mac OS on the Nintendo Wii [video] (123pts, 37cmts): (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37306018)

The author has mentioned earlier attempts to port other OSes to the Wii but it appears these works didn't get much traction here on HN except for Windows:

  WindowsNT (255pts, 86cmts): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43221633
  Linux (53pts, 1cmts): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30568676
  NetBSD (4pts,0 cmts): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46668959

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.

TIL Wii has only 88MB of RAM. Fortunately games weren't electron-based.

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] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Inspiron_Mini_Series

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackintosh

  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.

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 'in' for someone with a special interest in development. Even worse, AI is artificially dumbing things down, while making things even more inaccessible.

A side note: you embedded .mov videos inside <img> tags. This is not compatible with all browsers (notably Chrome and Firefox), which won't load the videos.

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.

Amazing writeup, love this types of blog posts and hope the hawaii trip was enjoyable

Now that the MacBook Neo has an A18, I wonder if you could get MacOS running on an iPhone? :)

> 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't agree more. I've had my own experience porting something that seemed like an intractable problem (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31251004), and when it finally comes together the feeling of accomplishment (and relief!) is great.

If you like this story, you might also like the story of how Mac OS X was ported to Intel as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4091216

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'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.

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/

Honestly, I would have said the same. Great work!

I wonder if the YUV conversion could be offloaded somehow to the ARM inside the Hollywood or somehow using a shader (or equivalent) if the graphics were accelerated - though maybe this is way way too much.

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's iOS (the coincidentally-named system this is replacing) could handle that abstraction for game developers.

> There is a zero percent chance of this ever happening.

Kudos to the author for being able to do make real progress in such a hostile (IMHO) environment.

Much easier to do, because of the superior, more modern architecture of Windows NT. (It's not based on Apollo-era OS like OSX is.)

Always great when your debugging feedback is via a led xD

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'm amazed this works as well as it does with seemingly heterogeneous memory

I kind of want to try some project like this sometime, but I wouldn't even know where to start...

Yes, I know about Ardi Executor being libre and enhanced now, but that's not the point.

I'd love to spawn MiniVMAC with a free system ROM replacement and a free Mac OS 7 reimplementation.

EDIT: Oh interesting, the final paragraph says NT has been ported, didn't know that. Sadly, no pun is mentioned in that project.

That's the hacker spirit.

This is exceptional work. Unlike the low-effort slop posts I see here on "Show HN".

Well, okay, that's almost cheating.