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I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

bryankeller.github.io

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Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

#31

Post by xandrius »

blkhp19 wrote: post #12
hirvi74 wrote: post #5

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 bee…

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?

Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

#33

Post by crazysim »

xandrius wrote: post #31
blkhp19 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sometimes things aren't documented and sometimes they could be documented wrong.

Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

#34

Post by bigyabai »

rvz wrote: post #14

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".

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.

Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

#35

Post by nancyminusone »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #24

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

Gotta love that particular Redditors follow up comment:

>Go ahead and downvote me. I am correct on every single thing I said

Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

#36

Post by 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.

Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

#37

Post by blkhp19 »

xandrius wrote: post #31
blkhp19 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

#38

Post by snazz »

stavros wrote: post #19

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!

Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

#39

Post by dpoloncsak »

nancyminusone wrote: post #35
NetOpWibby wrote: post #24

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

Gotta love that particular Redditors follow up comment: >Go ahead and downvote me. I am correct on every single thing I said

Tempted to necro a 5 year old reddit post just to tell that guy he was wrong, honestly

Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

#40

Post by blkhp19 »

rvz wrote: post #14

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 :)
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