My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii
virtuallyfun.com308 points by DHowett 16 hours ago
308 points by DHowett 16 hours ago
Interesting timing. Nintendo just shutdown Mariokart Tour on mobile. I went back to my Nintendo Wii which was already modded, and updated it to the latest modded hacks and I was amazed to see more software, stability, and even online gaming brought back!
Hopefully their port of Mac OS gets put in the Open Shop Channel!
Open Shop Channel: https://oscwii.org WiiLink for online gaming: https://wiilink.ca
The Wii was truly the peak of gaming consoles.
Games still came on disk so there wasn’t the madness of endless buggy updates (disks had one opportunity to be bug free so quality was at a higher standard) and internet connectivity was not guaranteed, so there was no way for micro transactions.
However, internet connectivity was available, so things like optional online play were still possible, as well as some basic user generated content.
Wouldn’t this criteria make PS2 and Xbox “peak gaming” also? I remember playing CoD online on PS2 and many praising Xbox for its online features.
Once PS3 and Xbox 360 came in picture, things changed slightly since they relied more heavily on their network services… albeit, PSN back then was free for online gameplay. These were on the same generation as Wii, but Wii was a winner for casual playing.
A lot of aging millennials would agree with this statement. PS2 was peak Sony for sure and the original Xbox is one of the very few things Microsoft got right.
2001 for the PS2 was one of the greatest years in gaming history.
Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 2, Gran Turismo, and GTA.
Relevant video from one of my favourite youtube channels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwnphd_QUXo
> GTA
I'm guessing you mean GTA 3, but then we also had GTA Vice City... and GTA San Andreas. Which are all three in the top 5 selling games for the PS2.
Im going PS2 as peek as the sheer number of titles made for it and the ability to play PS1. First edition PS3 with hardware backward compatibility and running yellow dog linux might win over that if they didnt nerf it.
That being said I recently got the Analog 3d with 4 controllers and theres something amazing about the speed at which u can boot and get into a 4 player game.
360 was excellent. Yeah RROD but the library actually is very impressive.
The 360 remains my favorite M$ console to date. The indie game store was a wild place with some real hidden gems, the controller is still good, and it had the last good iteration of Geometry Wars
Xbox 360 was pretty great. My favorite game to play online there was fight night round 3. It was an incredible experience. Managed to climb to the top 50 on the leaderboards!
Also the peak console experience for me as an 80s kid, but the RRoD means MS definitely didn’t get it right.
Later revisions fully fixed RRoD. Not to excuse the original issue, but if you get one of the S models (Trinity or early Corona boards), they're extremely reliable in my experience. I even saw a guy pour a whole can of Mountain Dew Voltage into his Halo Reach edition 360 while it was on (not on purpose, can tipped over) and after some time in front of a space heater it was good to go again. The 360 aged like wine and is very worth modding and playing still today.
Xbox360 might not be the most important console out of ALL consoles, but I think it's the most important _modern_ console. Online gaming, online store, an indie game channel with XNA (which itself was revolutionary, even though some of its importance might be forgotten today), HD support. A lot of things it got right back when these were all brand new on a console. Plus it had geometry wars.
It was the first system of a modern design in a lot of ways.
Six hardware threads, so the thread per subsystem model didn't really work. Instead you got the best results from a DAG of tasks submitted to a job stealing scheduler running on most of the CPU resources. But beside that, no little DSPs that you had to separate work out onto other than the GPU.
And it had the first consumer GPU to incorporate unified shaders (so vertex and pixel shaders ran on the same cores, dynamically scheduled to improve utilization).
The 360’s GPU was very modern, but I’m hesitant to give the 360 the “modern design” label because of how esoteric those CPU cores were; And the major hoops developers needed to jump through to get them preforming at peak performance, along with offloading work to the GPU.
They had SMT, but unlike every other implementation of SMT I’m aware of, memory stalls on one thread would stall both threads… which kind of defeats the primary purpose of SMT.
At least with the PS3’s Cell, the SPUs were designed to be esoteric on purpose. It seems like Xenon kind of just ended up being esoteric by accident. (Or maybe they ended up like that because Microsoft were cheating off Sony’s homework)
Geometry wars was very fun. I played on PC always trying to top my friends high scores.
PS2 is certainly a high-point in retro gaming via emulation. The huge, diverse game library spanning >10 years, a great emulator in PCSX2 and tons of community mods and HD texture packs make it amazing.
You've got the option of OG authenticity with CRT emulation (although I use a shader emulating a high-end analog RGB CRT so the effect is more subtle) or you can 'upgrade' games to looking and feeling quite modern yet without the modern cruft. Also want to give a nod to PS3 / X360 emulation as both have come a long way in the last ~18 months and I'm really enjoying working my way through a backlog of titles I never played back in the day.
I wouldn't disagree with that!
Mind you, I broke my video game addiction shortly after that time-period - my last console was an Xbox 360 - and haven't got a firm grasp on what's come since.
Dreamcast came with a modem and an optional Ethernet adapter 8 years earlier. The GD-ROM was too clever by half. But perhaps it was the prototype of peak game consoles. I have a soft spot because the home brew scene on that started a full quarter century ago.
> The Wii was truly the peak of gaming consoles.
everyone says that about their childhood :)
There's an objective argument behind this statement that could be made though - everyone, and I mean _almost literally everyone_ tried a Wii at some point during its regular lifespan. Even if it was just Wii Sports, it brought millions of people into video games who only considered them another toy. Parents, grandparents, a lot of the people who chastised video games for years were suddenly enamoured with virtual bowling and sword fights, while the rest of us still got our fill of Mario et. al.
As much as it pains me to say that, the same could be said about mobile gaming. In fact, I am pretty sure a lot of countries did not have access to Nintendo hardware but they can now enjoy gaming thanks to their phone.
I suppose. 95%+ of the games I've played on my phone are one euchre implementation. I tried a couple of early space-shooting games (Motorola Photon Q era and earlier) and basically gave up on the idea. No joystick, trying to hit the right spot on a phone to actually do anything is hard (I type with one finger on a phone vs. 140+ wpm on a keyboard), etc. Plus, I rarely have sound on, so that part is also missing.
Games I currently play: SupermegaBaseball, Assetto Corsa (with wheel), Dirt series on gaming PC. Also various Mario etc games on Wii U.
I did grow up with a number of mobile games from my childhood, but it seems like the ones people earnestly enjoy are maybe Pokemon Go and then a number of centuries old card games.
Probably, but the Wii games are actually good, as well, not microtransaction slop factories.
While the Wii didn't have modern microtransactions, its surprise popularity led to a lot of poorly produced cash grab games. I'd count those as slop, even if they aren't AI-produced slop.
>There's an objective argument behind this statement that could be made though
Everyone says that about their childhood too :)
> _almost literally everyone_
Sorry to disappoint, but I don't even know what a Wii looks like. I've always been using my computer to play games on.
I grew up playing NES and SNES games and DOS games like Doom and Quake, and while I have a lot of fond memories and still think very highly of many of the games of that era, there’s no way I’d call it peak gaming. I’ve revisited them a lot over the years and game development as an art has certainly come a long way since then IMO.
Wii U is even better since it can play all the Wii games. And that's NOT my childhood - my childhood was audio cassette drives for storage.
I was 26 when I bought one, and agree. I long for a modern STB with the Wii interface and lots of OSS to tinker with. The sounds, the music, the tactile feel of using the WiiMode to navigate was sublime.
The games were cool too.
The Wii had possibly the best big screen UI I’ve ever used. I always thought having the live icon tiles on a regular TV with station previews would be incredible. The WiiMotes worked so much better than the Samsung and LG remote pointers do now.
There's been HTPC frontends that emulated that UI. I think no longer maintained.
These days, probably you could feed a video into Claude Code and have it spit out one which is pretty decent.
We bought the first Wii at 35. We still have a Wii U for the family and still play 4-player games, and have 8 WiiMotes for Smash Brothers.
Bought my first one 3 years ago. It's used occasionally -- I'm not a gamer at all but I have a little kid and she likes it.
guilty as charged here. I will say my parents are quite fond of the Wii too though. (they’re not really gamers though)
Yeah part of the magic of the Wii was that everyone seemed to have one. Even grandparents and other folks that wouldn't usually have a game console seemed to have them and be able to figure it out.
In defense the Wii was popular with people that very likely died of natural causes years ago.
I'll forgive you for thinking Wii was the peak because people are obviously biased based on the time they grew up. For me it was the SNES/Genesis era. Or arguably PlayStation 1.
For me it's the (New) 3DS. It's about the peak for handheld gaming. It can run GB, GBC, NES, SNES very well, GBA can run natively and obviously DS/3DS. You can run pretty much any Zelda game up to the GameCube on it with the official ports of Ocarina/Majora. The emulation community also has some promising demos of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, but who knows about that. I have a Switch and it's frustrating seeing games that Nintendo haven't released for it (like WW and Pokopia), but maybe after a decade I'll get a Switch 2 OLED whenever that comes out.
rare as an unicorn though, especially the smaller version
I've got one of those smaller ones in its box, bought back in 2016 from a GameStop I still frequent. Is it really particularly rare?
I don't know that I'd call them rare, but secondhand prices are a bit crazy. Knowledge of how cool modded 3DSes were spread on social media and the eBay prices all shot up. It's a similar cost to a Switch 1 IIRC. The non-XL New 3DS did come to America pretty late so they aren't as common over here. I got a Japanese one originally because they weren't out over here at the time. There's also the IPS panel lottery to worry about. If yours has an IPS panel for one or both screens, it's worth a bit more.
I’ve not been able to figure out if the Japanese ones will work for me so I’m always hesitant.
Yes if you jailbreak it
It removes the region lock and you can set the system language to english. The eShop was shutdown already so that doesn’t matter
The motion controls make it age really poorly imo (motion controls aren't bad, but forced motion controls to do anything is)
When they were shoved in yes, it's terrible. But the effortless way they were incorporated in games like Super Mario Galaxy is something special.
The pointing feature was snappy and worked well. The motion controls were pretty badly implemented.
Outside of a handful pf motionplus compatible games, there was no gyroscope. Everything relied on a 3axis accelerometer.
Agree to disagree on the Wii. It was fun, but the poor thing got a lot of dust in our households. A bit too gimmicky for us. Doubly so for the Wii U.
not every console stays connected to my tv... and wii stayed. wii sports is still fun and get everyone moving during a rainy day which is quite an achievement all by itself
The Wii was the first era where game discs came with console firmware updates that were silently installed and could lock you out owning your device.
I don't disagree, but the wii remote market was/is the absolute worst console device market.
I've played more MK Wii custom tracks, on split-screen multiplayer, than pretty much any other multiplayer game for the past few years.
The custom mkwii wiki has 17,000 articles https://www.mkwiiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
> Nintendo just shutdown Mariokart Tour on mobile.
Eek my son is not gonna be happy about that
Same guy who made NT for Macintosh https://github.com/Wack0/Macintosh and GC/Wii https://github.com/Wack0/entii-for-workcubes if you're unaware.
Is it possible to go the other way? Make a PowerMac into a Nintendo Wii?
Not exactly what you're asking about, but related and from the same time period. The original Xbox 360 dev kit was a PowerMac G5.
The Nintendo Wii notably has two processors that run different operating systems, so you might need some emulation or hardware modifications to do so
The GPU would also be a problem. I don't think the Wii/Gamecube's GPU block really corresponds to any ATI/AMD card.
What you could probably do is take a Wii emulator like Dolphin and virtualize the CPU. Basically combine Dolphin and KVM_PR, getting ~native CPU performance while still needing to do 3D translation and simulate the IOS side of the Wii.
(Wii games run with the CPU in the supervisor state IIRC, so you can't just run them as processes under an OS, you'd either need a proper hypervisor or to catch traps caused by running supervisor instructions in "problem state", a la KVM_PR.)
There's no point.
Apart from exporting experience to future endeavours with more "point".
And "fun", relevant as other are insisting noticing, is another thing you build and will return in the future.
The author literally said that he did it for fun and to learn, at the beginning of the post
Wii turns 20 on 19th November 2026.
> This got me acquainted with the classic Mac OS,
> and I fell in love with the jank as it were (hacks
> upon hacks upon hacks going back to the 1980s is
> something I’d definitely describe as “jank”).
Modern macOS still has classic Mac OS code in it dating as far back, and has added Objective C and Swift abstractions on top.
Does it? I am pretty sure the entire Carbon stack is retired now.
Yeah I think you are right, I should say that some of that code was ported and still survives today in 26 uses some of the same APIs and naming, but isn’t necessarily the same code from classic Mac OS. One example is RegisterEventHotKey.
That surprises me; I assumed they dropped the last pre-Darwin code when they discontinued the classic environment. What remains that's that old?
I seem to recall years ago reading that the Cocoa (the NeXTstep derived API) menu code called into the Carbon (the classic Mac OS derived API) code to run stuff. But that was around Snow Leopard IIRC. That sort of stuff might still be around?
The Carbon API itself lasted until 10.15 (Catalina / 2019) for 32 bit apps, so there's presumably at least some classic Mac OS derived code in there until then.
Menus got moved away from Carbon on macOS 14.
You'll get this error if you try to use the Carbon menu APIs:
> References to Carbon menus are disallowed with AppKit menu system on macOS 14 and newer. Use instances of NSMenu and NSMenuItem directly instead
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...
Pretty sure the menu bar was Carbon in Snow Leopard, which was the same release that discontinued Classic. Lots of Cocoa widgets called into HIToolbox under the hood. QuickTime wasn't fundamentally changed. And iTunes of course was Carbon code for a very, very long time.
Most of the Security framework still dates from OS 9.
Is that so? Say more? Such fond memories of reading about Copland in MacAddict…. Then OS9…
These headers for the Keychain certainly do look familiar https://kalleboo.com/linked/macos86security_vs_macosgoldenga...
Yes but mostly not. Modern MacOS is based off of NeXTSTEP OS from the NeXT acquisition, not classic.
But in the early days, a lot of UI and OS frameworks were based on Carbon stuff ported from Classic MacOS with Cocoa wrappers on them.
One sibling mentioned the menus. Another sibling mentioned the Security framework. The SDK for macOS Golden Gate still ships with headers dating back to MacOS 8.6 (although they are mostly deprecated now) https://kalleboo.com/linked/macos86security_vs_macosgoldenga...
If I can play Specter or Shuffle board air hokey, the BW boulder dash clone, Marathon, I'm game. Can I? You just cost me some, now a search for a Mac classic. The emulators don't do it for me.
this reminds me of how the original xbox 360 dev kits were actually just powermac G5s. the mid-2000s were a wild time for cross-platform hardware.
oh geez.. I was not thinking about it, but if this piece of hardware runs PowerPC Mac.. then Amiga OS 4.x or MorphOS and Amiga baby... PowerMac is for sissies when you compare this opportunity!
Nintendo Wii have made for neat zero knowledge Nostr relays, mesh-net (CJDNS) routers, and other makeshift "underground" infrastructure.
USB hubs, USB SATA adapters and USB Ethernet interfaces for the win.
For me, the finest PowerMac is the one that explored Mars: https://vechai.org/mars-rover-perseverance-runs-on-a-1998-im...
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