【魔改造】WiiでMac OS Xを動かしてみた！伝説のゲーム機への移植プロジェクトが話題に

Nintendo Wiiという本来のゲーム機としての枠を超え、Mac OS Xを動作させるという驚きの技術プロジェクトが報告されました。ハードウェアの限界に挑む、エンジニアの遊び心と技術力が詰まった試みです。

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.

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

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.

  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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.