Since its launch in 2007, the Wii has seen several operating systems ported to it: Linux, NetBSD, and most-recently, Windows NT. Today, Mac OS X joins that list.
In this post, I’ll share how I ported the first version of Mac OS X, 10.0 Cheetah, to the Nintendo Wii. If you’re not an operating systems expert or low-level engineer, you’re in good company; this project was all about learning and navigating countless “unknown unknowns”. Join me as we explore the Wii’s hardware, bootloader development, kernel patching, and writing drivers – and give the PowerPC versions of Mac OS X a new life on the Nintendo Wii.
↫ Bryan Keller
And all of this, because someone on Reddit said it couldn’t be done. It won’t surprise you to learn that the work required was extensive, from writing a custom bootloader to digging through the XNU source code, applying binary patches to the kernel during the boot process, building a device tree, writing the necessary drivers, and so much more. Even just setting up a development environment was a pretty serious undertaking.
Especially writing the drivers posed an interesting and unique challenge, as the Wii doesn’t use PCI to connect and expose its hardware components. Instead, components are connected to a dedicated SoC with its own ARM processor that talks to the main Wii PowerPC processor, exposing hardware that way. This meant that Keller had to write a driver for this chip first, before moving on to the device drivers for devices connected to this ARM SoC – graphics drivers, input drivers, and so on.
After a ton more work and overcoming several complex roadblocks, we now have Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah on the Nintendo Wii. Amazing.
Mac OS X 10.0, with the pinstripes and the gorgeous aqua interface. Magic!
My favorite look for Mac OS X which I wish I could use for ALL versions of Mac OS X. Note that many times during the life of Macs, software can only be used for a narrow range or versions and unless you keep one of each of the versions you ever owned, there is a good chance if that there is software that you loved and wish to use, you are SOOL (____ out of luck), too bad, so sad. Which is why I have four different iMacs that I keep running, usually at all times, and switch which one I am using based on which program(s) I want/need to use). YMMV
This is brilliant, this guy deserves an award. I feel like buying a Wii so I can run MacOS.
There are two kinds of people on Reddit that always get the golden downvote: those who say things are impossible, and those who stupidly ask “why” once the prowess has been done. Congratulations, this is true love towards retrocomputing.
But, does it run on Dolphin?
Next thing you know, They’ll run Doom on it.
There’s another project, WiiIntosh, that’s attempting to port 10.2-10.4 to the Wii and wiiU
https://github.com/Wiintosh/Wiintosh