Really cool!
I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
211–220 of 337 posts
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#212Amazing work and write up!
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#213Congrats, 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.
Go ahead and downvote krsw, he is correct on every single thing he said.
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#214This 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.
Some of this is just really widespread imprecise usage of terms: what really should be called "YCbCr" in digital contexts is frequently called "YUV." So-called "YUV" digital formats for video are really really common, and they're used for both NTSC and PAL. "YUV420," YCbCr using 4:2:0 chroma subsampling so the two color components are half the resolution in each dimension vs. the luma, in particular is super-common.
The Wii seems to actually use "YUV422" internally, so 4:2:2 chroma subsampling, where the chroma is only halved in one dimension. The conversion to analog NTSC or PAL signals happens later in the process. The repository here actually looks like it sets up the Wii's video interface to output NTSC progressive by default, but lets you configure for PAL with a config file.
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#215In addition to the incredible engineering work here the OP casually flexes by showing the development happening _in an economy class airplane seat_.
Apple had a commercial about this a million years ago, where a guy decides to edit a video on a plane.
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is it possible that a jailbreak is found that could allow a “kexec” kind of thing to load a new OS? Of course it would be a huge amount of work even if theoretically possible
marcan once said this was not possible on M1 macs. It was possible before, as coolbooter demonstrated, but it seems now that the hardware cannot be completely reinitialized without being power cycled (it was on Mastodon in 2024, he has since deleted his account so I cannot give you the exact quote). But you can do wizardry to load macOS' userspace on top of iOS' kernel [0] with a jailbreak.
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#217Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#218Refreshing to read an article with an actual engineering work as opposed to another article about AI. Great work, very inspiring!
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#219This 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.
Chiming in as well to say to the author when the victory lap here is over: please consider adding the RSS feed! I want to see whatever you do next, regardless of how long it takes.
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Wii settings menu is an HTML webpage. Yes, even 2006 games consoles were not spared the web.
I was kind of ready to call BS on this, Nintendo is usually a little more careful with these things. But, you are absolutely correct.
Nintendo uses web UI a lot. The Switch eShop is notoriously a web app running on WebKit without JIT. The Action Guide in Super Mario Odyssey is web despite everything else being native.