I Ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
bryankeller.github.io583 points by blkhp19 3 hours ago
583 points by blkhp19 3 hours ago
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 almost think such projects are worth it just to immortalize comments like these. There'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.
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.
I've seen more than one half-joke-half-serious chunk of code that would "encode" arbitrary info into stack traces simply by recursively calling `fn_a`, then `fn_s`, `fn_d`, and `fn_f` before continuing with the actual intended call, giving you a stack trace with (effectively) "asdf" in it.
They've also been useful more than once, e.g. you can do that to know what iteration of a loop failed. There are of course other ways to do this, but it's hard to beat "stupid, simple, and works everywhere ".
Well you're doing gods work as far as I'm concerned. Conflating difficulty in practice with impossibility in principle is, to my mind, a source of so much unnecessary cognitive error.
The declaration of an impossibility of a given task or goal is a reflection of the perceived barrier by the individual, rather than the task itself.
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.
They're kinda like high-effort shitposts. Which are my absolute favorite kind. The worse the effort/reward payoff, and the more it makes you ask "WHY??!!?", the better.
Love that it's actually linked as well; too bad that user isn't still active.
I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a very tiny part of my motivation :)
It's a variation of "because it's there" when asked why would you climb some giant mountain.
Impressive work! Now run Dolphin on it. ;)
> Readers with a keen eye might notice some issues:
> - Everything is magenta.
was fun too
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, "You can't do that"
My favorite part of our online world.
Gotta love that particular Redditors follow up comment:
>Go ahead and downvote me. I am correct on every single thing I said
The best part is the comment ranting about how the Wii's CPU is so fundamentally different, and then:
> The Wii uses a PowerPC 750CL processor - an evolution of the PowerPC 750CXe that was used in G3 iBooks and some G3 iMacs.
Hilarious.
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't even have a controversial flag. The gamification of social media is a mistake.
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.
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't developed drivers for any other platforms, so I really can't say if the abstraction is good compared to what's used by modern systems.
IOKit was actually built from the ground up for OS X! NeXT had a different driver model called DriverKit. I've never coded against either, but my understanding was they'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/IOKit compatibility layer back in the day, up to running Xquartz on NetBSD! With NetBSD translating IOKit calls. :-)
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.
As I remember it, they were basically the same—but IOKit is C++ (with restrictions) because 3rd party developers didn't want to learn Objective-C.
But that's a hazy, 20 year old memory.
From here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10006411
"At some stage in the future we may be able to move IOKit over to a good programming language"
And there are enough parallels to Linux's stack, I'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!
I guess having targeted multiple architectures and in the case of OPENSTEP also operating systems early on certainly helped.
In love with projects that are done solely because 'why the hell not'. Fantastic writeup and work.
In addition to the incredible engineering work here the OP casually flexes by showing the development happening _in an economy class airplane seat_.
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.)
And the guy next to him is just staring at his phone, probably thinking, "I'm not even gonna ask".
Although if it were me I'd probably annoy the heck out of him asking why he had a Wii on the airplane!
I can'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.
Still looks like a plane to me, with rows of 2-3-2 seats.
There are definitely no buses that wide.
My Wii has been on many planes and trains - and yes, there is a photo of each in my post.
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’”.
What's flex-worthy about this? There'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?
It'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.
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't see him.
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.
If all the AI stories on this site were replaced with amazing stuff like this, the world would be a better place.
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'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.
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.
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.
The original one does run a modified OS X Tiger. I jailbroke it a while ago to run custom stuff, but didn't do much with that. Just remember being able to VNC or SSH into it.
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.
If it's not working on Chrome nor Firefox, it's safe to say it's incompatible with almost all browsers.
I only tested on Safari - whoops! Fixed now.
Minor usability comment: the screenshots are too small to be readable. Whenever that's that case in my blog posts, I make those screenshots clickable and add (Click to enlarge) below it, to make it easier for readers to see the image are original resolution. In markdown, I do that like this:
[ ](image_url.png)
(Of course, I can also right-click and do "Open image in new tab", but that's one click extra...)
Congrats on the awesome project, BTW! You were lucky that I wasn't sitting next to you on the plane. I would have wasted so much of your time asking dumb questions.
Amazing work.
If you like this story, you might also like the story of how Mac OS X was ported to Intel as well.
Oof linkrot :(((((
I remember reading this back then. Amazing story. All the secrecy, and needing to be a very small team.
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.
My favorite part of this is the detour to ask for the IOUSBFamily src on IRC
The approach of using the LED as a debugging tool when serial and video output were both disabled is such a classic embedded development move. When you have no visibility into what's happening, you work with whatever output you have — even if it's a single bit.
The dual-framebuffer solution for the RGB-to-YUV conversion is clever too. 60 conversions per second on that hardware can't be cheap — curious what kind of CPU overhead that adds.
This solution’s COU cost can be significantly improved by using memory protection. You protect the frame buffer from writes. The first time it is written, you take a fault, and start refreshing every 60 Hz and leave it writeable. After some number of refreshes, you protect it again, the idea being is that the UI may now be quiescent. I do this in my Palm OS port for the same reason.
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.
Very cool! I'd love to learn more. That seems extra challenging considering Mac OS 9 is closed source!
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? :)
I wonder if you can place an A18 from a Neo onto an iPhone board, and then make that work somehow... You wouldn't be able to use the one originally from the iPhone because it's differently fused to only accept iOS images.
> There is a zero percent chance of this ever happening.
Honestly, I would have said the same. Great work!
Nice project! Love seeing emulators & ports
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!
Sorry if off topic but I was struck by the view from your window. Were you in Hanalei Bay?
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
I'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.
Oh interesting, it looks like that geforce had an entire 64mb of gddr3 too, it'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)
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.
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!
This is some amazing work, a good reminder to dig more into operating systems for myself!
And here I am shopping for Macs because getting a hackintosh working from a VM on Windows is too difficult for me.
Damn, that's some dedication! Congrats on getting it running
Great write-up. I love hardware running software it shouldn’t support
Great hack!
I'm pretty sure someones done this for the 360. Also, doesn't NT have a wii port?
There was a PPC version of Windows NT, and yes someone put it on the Wii!
https://github.com/Wack0/entii-for-workcubes
See also: https://gbatemp.net/threads/windows-nt-ported-to-wii.667959/
Fun post.
Always great when your debugging feedback is via a led xD
How about a piezoelectric buzzer? That's how the firmware on some iPods were first dumped.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050828114013/http://www.ipodli...
Very neat project and an extremely enjoyable read.
Wonder if it can happen on the Wii U
With the extra RAM, higher clock speed, and no need to waste CPU cycles converting YUV -> RGB framenbuffers - I bet it would be!
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.
>better option than Linux
I'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's move to ARM)?
For usability I mean. It's clearly an interesting technical feat.
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't want to purchase the Apple hardware.
And the latest Mac OS still supports Intel, so you'll get many more years out of a machine. For what I know, the last 10 versions of MacOS are still very usable.
This is awesome! I can't wait to plug in my Wii and give it a try myself.
Great, how about on iPhone?
Hahaha! Yes! We need more of this in the world, love it!
Fantastic work and a great write up.
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.
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/UX and how it feels like a native Mac app.
I've tried Ghidra, and while extremely impressive and capable, it might be the most Java-feeling app I've ever used. I'd love for someone to whip up an AppKit + SwiftUI shell for it.
You made me curious: why would you need to disassemble UIKit for iOS as part of your day job?
There are bugs and undocumented behaviors that need to be understood in order to be worked around - I wish it wasn't the case but such is life developing for closed-source platforms.
Sometimes things aren't documented and sometimes they could be documented wrong.
> I like using it for disassembling UIKit (for my day job working on iOS apps), and overall, I like the UI/UX and how it feels like a native Mac app.
You are correct about the UI/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't attempted to use Radare2 for MacOS/iOS disassembly. Though I must ask, why are you disassembling UIKit? Looking for private API behavior or working around bugs? I'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..
> Ghidra, and while extremely impressive and capable, it might be the most Java-feeling app
I chuckled while reading this because I had the exact same thought when I first used Ghidra. I haven'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's defense, using Java was a pragmatic choice. The "write once, run anywhere" promise of Java is likely a near-necessity for a disassembler for government operations.
awesome, good to see some real content from pre-AI moment
Absolutely atrocious. Congratulations!
That's the hacker spirit.
nice!
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.
“entii-for-workcubes” is a pretty good pun!
I don't know man, "Wiindows" was right there and they chose "entii"? I weep for the missed opportunity more than anything.
Maybe it was a legal worry.
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".
I used plenty of non-agentic AI to help understand the XNU codebase, and also research various topics. It wasn'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 :)
Ah, the Procrustian definition of "real hacker", 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.
Whats wrong about Github pages?
A real hacker would obviously never use a Microsoft product, or worse, post on a VC funded web forum!
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