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" when normal options (e.g. logs) stop working.
Similarly, one of the great things about Python (less so JS with the ecosystem's habit of shipping minified bundles) is that you can just edit source files in your site_packages once you know where they are. I've done things like add print statements around obscure Django errors as a poor imitation of instrumentation. Gets the job done!
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.
I'm remindded of my favorite immortalized comment, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." Rob Malda of Slashdot, 2001, dunking on the iPod when it debuted.
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.
Wasn't the old Linux joke, don't ask "how do I do X with Linux" (because you'd get ridiculed for not reading the docs) but instead, just state "X isn't possible with Linux" and then someone would show you how it's done?
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.
Yes, you're right! I'm just dolt who's never checked what a .kext on OS X actually is.
I had been under the impression that DriverKit drivers were quite a different beast, but they're really not. Here's the layout of a NS ".config" bundle:
The driver itself is a Mach-O MH_OBJECT image, flagged with MH_NOUNDEFS. (except for the _reloc images, which are MH_PRELOAD. No clue how these two files relate/interact!)
OS X added a dedicated image type (MH_KEXT_BUNDLE) and they cleaned up a bit, standardized on plists instead of the "INI-esque" .table files, but yeah, basically the same.
IOKit was almost done in Java; C++ was the engineering plan to stop that from happening.
Remember: there was a short window of time where everyone thought Java was the future and Java support was featured heavily in some of the early OS X announcements.
Also DriverKit's Objective-C model was not the same as userspace. As I recall the compiler resolved all message sends at compile time. It was much less dynamic.
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 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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
So what you're saying is if it's flexing, it's entirely performative. gotcha.
I don't think that's a healthy way to look at it - dude was just getting some work done, but maybe I'm a broken human being who's churned out more code than I would ever admit while sitting in 32C on a cross-country flight.
Another funny history fact with the Wii is Windows Vista released the same month in North America. People were so upset that the minimum requirement for Vista said 512 MB (which was already more than the average existing home PC of the time had without an upgrade) but it ran like crap unless you had more.
We truly had to get away with less back then. These days it feels like there is a bit more headroom where 8 GB is on the downtrend, 16 GB is becoming the most common, and the user's apps are enjoying the extra fat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's true in broad strokes, but looking into it, it turns out NTSC's variant of YUV is called YIQ, and SECAM's variant is called YDbDr. They are however all more or less the same thing, and the digital YUV used by the Wii hardware in this case is presumably independent of the video standard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I wrote that L-cancel training code! Funny to see it come up out of nowhere. I too have always adored the Wii and its moddability. It'd be my go-to choice if I someday ever get the itch to write console homebrew software of my own.
Yes - this project (and countless others) would not have been possible without the incredible work to hack the Wii from Team Twiizers (now fail0verflow) back in the day. The work they did was a huge inspiration for me getting into computer science when I was a teenager.
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!
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)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 :)
Absolutely nothing. People protest Github to virtue signal their anti-Microsoft sentiment and fill a hole in their personality.
Similarly, "zero mention of AI" is just a surface-level observation that says nothing about how the project was completed and everything about your own insecurities defining the word hacker.
170 comments:
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" when normal options (e.g. logs) stop working.
Reminds me of https://github.com/jtolio/gls which implement a "thread local storage" in golang
Similarly, one of the great things about Python (less so JS with the ecosystem's habit of shipping minified bundles) is that you can just edit source files in your site_packages once you know where they are. I've done things like add print statements around obscure Django errors as a poor imitation of instrumentation. Gets the job done!
The solution to every software problem is another layer of indirection :-)
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.
Wise men speak when needed; fools because they want
Adversarial software development is also when I do my best work
I'm remindded of my favorite immortalized comment, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." Rob Malda of Slashdot, 2001, dunking on the iPod when it debuted.
Now tell me your opinion on P==NP being confirmed within 5 years.
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.
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.
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. ;)
Wasn't the old Linux joke, don't ask "how do I do X with Linux" (because you'd get ridiculed for not reading the docs) but instead, just state "X isn't possible with Linux" and then someone would show you how it's done?
Or eventually you could answer wrongly to a question without answers, triggering plenty of correct ones
yeah, it's an interesting socio-psychological phenomenon
I have a project on my desk that started as a response to a line in the Adafruit docs for their RP2040 based MacroPad
Oh yeah, really? There is a port hanging off the side that can be reconfigured for UART, are you sure Adafruit, what if I add an ESP32?HN is not as bad but I think a lot of internet commenters do this because it gives them a little hit of superiority
Plus the internet basically equates cynicism with intelligence
There is somehow no concept of "ignorant cynicism"
> Readers with a keen eye might notice some issues:
> - Everything is magenta.
was fun too
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.
The missile knows at all times where it is, by knowing at all times where it isn’t.
I had the same reaction.
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
This is why Reddit defaults to archiving posts (preventing new comments or votes) after 6 months.
User hasn't posted in 4 years. Sadly, they'd probably never see it.
I wanted to, but no replies are allowed now :)
I tried messaging them and it says I'm not allowed to message them. Weird, never had that happen to me
Make a new thread calling them out personally.
Comments are blocked there
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.
Funnily enough, there is a (different) DriverKit in macOS again now ;)
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.
Yes, you're right! I'm just dolt who's never checked what a .kext on OS X actually is.
I had been under the impression that DriverKit drivers were quite a different beast, but they're really not. Here's the layout of a NS ".config" bundle:
The driver itself is a Mach-O MH_OBJECT image, flagged with MH_NOUNDEFS. (except for the _reloc images, which are MH_PRELOAD. No clue how these two files relate/interact!)Now, on OS X:
OS X added a dedicated image type (MH_KEXT_BUNDLE) and they cleaned up a bit, standardized on plists instead of the "INI-esque" .table files, but yeah, basically the same.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"
IOKit was almost done in Java; C++ was the engineering plan to stop that from happening.
Remember: there was a short window of time where everyone thought Java was the future and Java support was featured heavily in some of the early OS X announcements.
Also DriverKit's Objective-C model was not the same as userspace. As I recall the compiler resolved all message sends at compile time. It was much less dynamic.
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.
> I'm surprised by how well abstracted MacOS is (was).
Usually the difference between something being well-abstracted vs poorly-abstracted is how well it's explained.
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.
Get to submitting! Be the change you want to see.
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.
Brought the Wii to Hawaii to finish the framebuffer driver. Priorities perfectly set.
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.
In addition to the incredible engineering work here the OP casually flexes by showing the development happening _in an economy class airplane seat_.
I think it is a bus maybe? I can see out a window over some seats, and the overhead compartments don't really look like ones i've seen before.
That being said, that is absolutely amazing they brought a wii where ever they were going to write and debug this while traveling! That is dedication!
EDIT: nvm, there are multiple pictures of them traveling. First one looks bus like, second one look like an airplane.
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!
Looks like a Switch 2 actually.
You're totally right, it's a Switch 2.
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.
The picture with the black seats in on a train and the one with the green seats is on a plane.
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.
It seems a bus to me, just look at the size of the windows. Airplanes don't have windows like that..
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.
So what you're saying is if it's flexing, it's entirely performative. gotcha.
I don't think that's a healthy way to look at it - dude was just getting some work done, but maybe I'm a broken human being who's churned out more code than I would ever admit while sitting in 32C on a cross-country flight.
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.
> 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.
Another funny history fact with the Wii is Windows Vista released the same month in North America. People were so upset that the minimum requirement for Vista said 512 MB (which was already more than the average existing home PC of the time had without an upgrade) but it ran like crap unless you had more.
We truly had to get away with less back then. These days it feels like there is a bit more headroom where 8 GB is on the downtrend, 16 GB is becoming the most common, and the user's apps are enjoying the extra fat.
The Wii settings menu is an HTML webpage. Yes, even 2006 games consoles were not spared the web.
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.
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.
Thank you for the kind words :)
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.
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...
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!
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.
YUV is a color model, akin to RGB or HSL; it's independent of video formats like NTSC or PAL.
That's true in broad strokes, but looking into it, it turns out NTSC's variant of YUV is called YIQ, and SECAM's variant is called YDbDr. They are however all more or less the same thing, and the digital YUV used by the Wii hardware in this case is presumably independent of the video standard.
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.
Good news, just today a bypass was released to allow any EFI bootloader to work on the original Apple TV https://github.com/DistroHopper39B/ATV1sm
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.
Images now expand when clicked - thanks for the feedback!
Works on Orion.
It works on Safari.
Whoops, thanks! Fixed.
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
Oof linkrot :(((((
I remember reading this back then. Amazing story. All the secrecy, and needing to be a very small team.
My favorite part of this is the detour to ask for the IOUSBFamily src on IRC
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'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!
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.
Haha, this is great. Very impressive -- and a fantastic, detailed writeup. Congrats! And thanks for sharing! :)
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? :)
There is a zero percent chance of that ever happening.
Are you willing to elaborate on the _why_ or is this a challenge comment, similar to the reddit comment that spurred this project? ;)
Or better yet, an iPad!
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.
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).
I wrote that L-cancel training code! Funny to see it come up out of nowhere. I too have always adored the Wii and its moddability. It'd be my go-to choice if I someday ever get the itch to write console homebrew software of my own.
Yes - this project (and countless others) would not have been possible without the incredible work to hack the Wii from Team Twiizers (now fail0verflow) back in the day. The work they did was a huge inspiration for me getting into computer science when I was a teenager.
> There is a zero percent chance of this ever happening.
Honestly, I would have said the same. Great work!
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!
Unrelated to the article but please compress your images. Why is one of them almost 8mb!?
It is satisfying to see someone hacking on deprecated hardware and software also is keen to look forward into Vision Pro.
In love with projects that are done solely because 'why the hell not'. Fantastic writeup and work.
The best hack of the last 10 years.
Great write-up. I love hardware running software it shouldn’t support
Damn, that's some dedication! Congrats on getting it running
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.
Tiger had a native PPC version too
And here I am shopping for Macs because getting a hackintosh working from a VM on Windows is too difficult for me.
> The Wii uses a PowerPC 750CL
Well, okay, that's almost cheating.
This is some amazing work, a good reminder to dig more into operating systems for myself!
Nice project! Love seeing emulators & ports
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/
>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.
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.
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
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/
That was it, I knew someone ported an OS to a Wii recently, thank you
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.
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 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.
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.
> Looking for private API behavior or working around bugs?
Exactly this!
Hahaha! Yes! We need more of this in the world, love it!
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!
Sorry if off topic but I was struck by the view from your window. Were you in Hanalei Bay?
I was - incredible views indeed!
Your post and pictures brightened up my day. Thanks!
Great, how about on iPhone?
Fantastic work and a great write up.
Great hack!
Absolutely atrocious. Congratulations!
That's the hacker spirit.
awesome, good to see some real content from pre-AI moment
honestly expected this port to be headed in the opposite direction
nice!
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 :)
looks like they did use AI, swing and a miss for the luddites once again!
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!
Absolutely nothing. People protest Github to virtue signal their anti-Microsoft sentiment and fill a hole in their personality.
Similarly, "zero mention of AI" is just a surface-level observation that says nothing about how the project was completed and everything about your own insecurities defining the word hacker.