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Comments (216)

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  rayiner
  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.
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  guyzero
  In addition to the incredible engineering work here the OP casually flexes by showing the development happening _in an economy class airplane seat_.
• knivets
  Refreshing to read an article with an actual engineering work as opposed to another article about AI. Great work, very inspiring!
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  jmcneill
  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.
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  soci
  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.
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  raincole
  > As for RAM, the Wii has a unique configuration: 88 MB totalTIL Wii has only 88MB of RAM. Fortunately games weren't electron-based.
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  NetOpWibby
  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
• k38f
  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.
• eek2121
  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.
• willamhou
  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.
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  lampiaio
  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.
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  leonidasv
  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.
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  nickpeterson
  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.
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  mackid
  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? :)
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  tiffanyh
  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
• tombelieber
  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.
• hoten
  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.
• zadikian
  My favorite part of this is the detour to ask for the IOUSBFamily src on IRC
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  samtheDamned
  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.
• monkpit
  > There is a zero percent chance of this ever happening.Honestly, I would have said the same. Great work!
• p0seidon
  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.
• unanonymousanon
  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!
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  bsimpson
  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.
• hassaanr
  In love with projects that are done solely because 'why the hell not'. Fantastic writeup and work.
• OhMeadhbh
  Presumably this means you could also port MacOS 9 if you were okay with writing a few drivers and patching some virtual ROMs.
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  cyrialize
  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).
• flopsa
  This was a brilliant write up and an insane project. Kudos!
• AnnikaL
  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...
• djsavvy
  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!
• chrisweekly
  Haha, this is great. Very impressive -- and a fantastic, detailed writeup. Congrats! And thanks for sharing! :)
• bredren
  It is satisfying to see someone hacking on deprecated hardware and software also is keen to look forward into Vision Pro.
• MaxLeiter
  Great write-up. I love hardware running software it shouldn’t support
• swiftcoder
  Damn, that's some dedication! Congrats on getting it running
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  WorldPeas
  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
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  zdware
  Fun post.Always great when your debugging feedback is via a led xD
• bottlepalm
  And here I am shopping for Macs because getting a hackintosh working from a VM on Windows is too difficult for me.
• rafaelgoncalves
  awesome work and write up! hella impressive!
• vsgherzi
  This is some amazing work, a good reminder to dig more into operating systems for myself!
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  mghackerlady
  I'm pretty sure someones done this for the 360. Also, doesn't NT have a wii port?
• talkfold
  Brought the Wii to Hawaii to finish the framebuffer driver. Priorities perfectly set.
• cdrnsf
  Wonderful. Can it run Doom?
• khernandezrt
  Unrelated to the article but please compress your images. Why is one of them almost 8mb!?
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  carlosjobim
  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/
• oliad1
  Nice project! Love seeing emulators & ports
• delduca
  The best hack of the last 10 years.
• bananaboy
  Amazing work and write up!
• xoxxala
  Very neat project and an extremely enjoyable read.
• nticompass
  This is awesome! I can't wait to plug in my Wii and give it a try myself.
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  hirvi74
  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.
• jkbowa
  Really cool!
• davenporten
  Hahaha! Yes! We need more of this in the world, love it!
• mlfreeman
  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
• spiderice
  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!
• c0_0p_
  Fantastic work and a great write up.
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  kogasa240p
  Wonder if it can happen on the Wii U
• rado
  Great, how about on iPhone?
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  postalcoder
  Sorry if off topic but I was struck by the view from your window. Were you in Hanalei Bay?
• lanyard-textile
  Absolutely atrocious. Congratulations!That's the hacker spirit.
• serhack_
  awesome, good to see some real content from pre-AI moment
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  anthk
  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.
• dejongh
  Great hack!
• anArbitraryOne
  I love it. I mean I hate MacOS, but great project
• eats_indigo
  honestly expected this port to be headed in the opposite direction
• rdanieli
  nice!
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  stavros
  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.
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  rvz
  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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  frakt0x90
  If all the AI stories on this site were replaced with amazing stuff like this, the world would be a better place.
• zenlot
  [dead]
• ValveFan6969
  [dead]
• anskksdkdkdk
  [flagged]
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  ynajjarine
  [flagged]
• guerrilla
  > The Wii uses a PowerPC 750CLWell, okay, that's almost cheating.