I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

Not only is this an insanely cool project, the writeup is great. I was hooked the whole way through. I particularly love this part:

> 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.

Excellent project! This is one of the topics that keeps Hacker News ever refreshing. Seeing work get done in a way that feels like real hacking but in a positive way.

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

Lastly, since we are in the context of turning the Wii into a computer, I'd like to honorable mention: Hosting a blog on the Wii (622pts, 104cmts): (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43754953)

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

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 "iOS" 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.

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

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.

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

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

> As for RAM, the Wii has a unique configuration: 88 MB total

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

  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.

I LOL'd

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

Debugging kernel panics on a Wii in an economy seat is a level of focus I can't even imagine. Most people can't read a book on a plane without losing their place every 5 minutes.

Really impressive work, and a very fun read

I wonder what, if anything significant, has changed architecturally from osx to modern macos and how this post could be used as a guide for future porting efforts (aside from the obvious 2 CPU isa changes over the last 20 years)

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

Nice work and write-up!

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.

Hehe that's so cool, I didn't know that it was a thing to port OSes to the Wii :D

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? :)

Great work and writeup.

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.

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.

Amazing work.

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

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.

I hope OP is still reading comments. I noticed that the project was written in Xcode (the repo even has the xcodeproj folder) but in some screenshots I see CLion. Did you switch at some point or were you using both throughout the development simultaneously?

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

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

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.

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

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

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'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

Wonderful write up, thank you for sharing!

> 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.

What's not to love? A small and beautiful PowerPC Unix workstation, something IBM hasn't done in a long, long time. How far does MacPorts go with a PPC?

The one that really bugs me is the Apple TV. It would be a great little box to use for terminals/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.

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!

In love with projects that are done solely because 'why the hell not'. Fantastic writeup and work.

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.

There was a Windows NT 4.0 for PowerPC. And several people have had this running on the Wii. https://github.com/Wack0/entii-for-workcubes

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.)

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

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

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.

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

The Wii is very moddable. I'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).

How do you get good like this?

Highly respectable project. My hat's off to you. I'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?

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

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

Damn, that's some dedication! Congrats on getting it running

I'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!

Wow! This is really impressive!

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

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

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

Incredible project. The dual-framebuffer RGB -> YUV conversion trick is really clever. Really entertaining read as well!

Fun post.

Always great when your debugging feedback is via a led xD

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

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

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

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

I'm pretty sure someones done this for the 360. Also, doesn't NT have a wii port?

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

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

They are successfully porting Mac OS onto every kind of modern computer over at the hackintosh subreddit, and I can't understand why there is so little interest for this stuff in the "hacker" 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.

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

Nice project! Love seeing emulators & ports

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

Very neat project and an extremely enjoyable read.

The best hack of the last 10 years.

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

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

Wonderful. Can it run Doom?

This is awesome! I can't wait to plug in my Wii and give it a try myself.

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'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.

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

Amazing work and write up!

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!

Fantastic work and a great write up.

awesome work and write up! hella impressive!

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

Wonder if it can happen on the Wii U

Great, how about on iPhone?

Absolutely atrocious. Congratulations!

That's the hacker spirit.

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

Really cool!

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

Not OSX, but I'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's not the point.

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

Great hack!

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

honestly expected this port to be headed in the opposite direction

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't know that. Sadly, no pun is mentioned in that project.

nice!

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

The post is a work of an actual hacker who knows what they're doing. Zero mention of "I used Claude" or "Used AI" to understand what is needed for accomplish this task.

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

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> The Wii uses a PowerPC 750CL

Well, okay, that's almost cheating.