201–210 of 337 posts
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.
Godspeed.
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
In addition to the incredible engineering work here the OP casually flexes by showing the development happening _in an economy class airplane seat_.
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 trying to program on a laptop with an external device, even something as portable and small as a phone, on a plane. I expect my frustration and frequently bumping things about would mean I'd get nothing done aside from having a bad time.
In addition to the incredible engineering work here the OP casually flexes by showing the development happening _in an economy class airplane seat_.
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’”.
In addition to the incredible engineering work here the OP casually flexes by showing the development happening _in an economy class airplane seat_.
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’”.
I mean, you need WiFi, and that's definitely a roll of the die on flights. But the last flight I had had WiFi, and the gal who sat next to me was vibe coding something.
Meanwhile I was taking photos of the seat back infotainment system's map, which showed our ETA as being before we left. Sadly, we did not time travel.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
I dual-booted Mojave on 2 Wintel machines back during the Clover bootloader days, I could only tolerate it for ~2 weeks before giving up. Spoofing OEM Apple hardware is basically impossible, even with configuration-matched CPUs your motherboard will still mismatch the ACPI overrides that macOS expects. Any variety of modern GPU is basically forfeit, hardware acceleration is flaky, Metal is inhumane (with or without Hackintosh), CUDA is unsupported, Vulkan is MIA, filesystem support is a joke, and OTA updates have to be disabled or else your system volume will overwrite the partition table and erase everything that's installed. Reinstalling from scratch can take multiple days if you don't back up your EFI configuration, so you really want to avoid bricking your install while you tweak the configs to stop being broken.
Even as a developer, using a Hackintosh was a waste of my time back in 2018 when "everything was supported". In 2026, I cannot comprehend a single objective reason why you would use an x86 Hackintosh instead of a better-supported and more fully-featured Linux or WSL installation. x86_64-apple-darwin is a partially depreciated target triple that's not suitable for any macOS or Linux development work, and for prosumers the architecture is already unsupported by many professional apps. Hackintosh is a museum piece now, even OpenCore can't save it: https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2025/07/16/open-core-is-dead...
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
> 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.
The Wii settings menu is an HTML webpage. Yes, even 2006 games consoles were not spared the web.