Discussion
Porting Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
lanyard-textile: Absolutely atrocious. Congratulations!
monkpit: > There is a zero percent chance of this ever happening.Honestly, I would have said the same. Great work!
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
xoxxala: Very neat project and an extremely enjoyable read.
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".
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.
efdee: If it's not working on Chrome nor Firefox, it's safe to say it's incompatible with almost all browsers.
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
guyzero: In addition to the incredible engineering work here the OP casually flexes by showing the development happening _in an economy class airplane seat_.
nine_k: 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.)
c0_0p_: Fantastic work and a great write up.
bigyabai: 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.
nancyminusone: Gotta love that particular Redditors follow up comment:>Go ahead and downvote me. I am correct on every single thing I said
dpoloncsak: Tempted to necro a 5 year old reddit post just to tell that guy he was wrong, honestly
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.
snazz: “entii-for-workcubes” is a pretty good pun!
pa7ch: 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.
jasaldivara: Whats wrong about Github pages?
dewey: A real hacker would obviously never use a Microsoft product, or worse, post on a VC funded web forum!
oceansky: Comments are blocked there
bottlepalm: And here I am shopping for Macs because getting a hackintosh working from a VM on Windows is too difficult for me.
blkhp19: I only texted on Safari - whoops! Fixed now.
tverbeure: 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.
slackfan: 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?
badc0ffee: 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.
noman-land: Make a new thread calling them out personally.
varispeed: 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.
vsgherzi: This is some amazing work, a good reminder to dig more into operating systems for myself!
dirasieb: looks like they did use AI, swing and a miss for the luddites once again!
jedberg: 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!
glenstein: 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.
blkhp19: I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a very tiny part of my motivation :)
bombcar: 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. ;)
to fix this, I’d need to write my own framebuffer driver
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.
spijdar: 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. :-)
geerlingguy: 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!
