awesome work and write up! hella impressive!
I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
221–230 of 337 posts
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#222Amazing 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
Blogspam about this Quora post from the founding engineer's wife: http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets...
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#223Had a very similar issue porting a hypervisor to ARM S-EL2. Writes would succeed, there were no faults, and everything looked reasonable in GDB, but the other side never saw the data. The root cause was that Secure and Non-Secure physical address spaces were backed by different memory even at the same address, and a single PTE bit selected between them. That took me much longer to understand than I’d like to admit.
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Have you ever tried daily-driving a Hackintosh? It's nothing like using a Mac, or even a Windows/Linux machine for that matter. 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 mac…
System updates not working or being complicated is a given.
About the other things you mention: What do they mean in practice? That video games don't work, or that photo/video editing doesn't work?
How does filesystem support differ from MacOS installed on a Mac?
From what I understand your comment is only from the perspective of a developer? But there are many other uses for a computer.
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#225Highly respectable project. My hat's off to you. I'm just curious, what computer programming language did you do most of this in and what do you think was the most challenging part of porting Mac OS X on to the Wii console?
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever tried daily-driving a Hackintosh? It's nothing like using a Mac, or even a Windows/Linux machine for that matter. 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 mac…
System updates not working or being complicated is a given. About the other things you mention: What do they mean in practice? That video games don't work, or that photo/video editing doesn't work? How does filesystem support differ from MacOS installed on a Mac? From what I understand your comment is only from the perspective of a developer? But there are many other uses for a computer.
You didn't answer my question - have you tried making a Hackintosh yourself?
I'm writing from the perspective of a tech-savvy Windows user that had triple-boot working on my desktop and laptop. I'm willing to deal with some system configuration, but it took upwards of 12 hours to configure my EFI for each unique device I wanted to Hackintosh. And it still didn't fix my iCloud or get my laptop trackpad working.
That is an entirely unacceptable process for someone who isn't a developer. I cannot recommend anyone use an OS that blocks OTA security updates, let alone people that can't/don't/won't program.
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#227It was refreshing reading this in the age of AI slop, thank you for the great read and congratulations on the project
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
System updates not working or being complicated is a given. About the other things you mention: What do they mean in practice? That video games don't work, or that photo/video editing doesn't work? How does filesystem support differ from MacOS installed on a Mac? From what I understand your comment is only from the perspective of a developer? But there are many other uses for a computer.
You didn't answer my question - have you tried making a Hackintosh yourself? I'm writing from the perspective of a tech-savvy Windows user that had triple-boot working on my desktop and laptop. I'm willing to deal with some system configuration, but it took upwards of 12 hours to configure my EFI for each unique device I wanted to Hackintosh. And it still didn't fix my iCloud or get my laptop trackpad working. That i…
No I haven't, if I had I wouldn't have needed to make follow up questions.
But if you follow a guide from somebody who has hackintoshed the exact same device you have, then it shouldn't take that long, or am I missing something? The posts in the hackintosh subreddit generally details what will work and not work.
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#229Before 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
I’ve never seen someone go to so much effort just to prove a random Redditor wrong, but I am impressed.
Re: I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
#230As the author of the NetBSD Wii and Wii U ports, congrats! I’m looking forward to seeing how you solved some of the problems that I faced along the way.
Your ports were a huge inspiration - thanks for contributing so much to this space!
So when will you port MacOS X to the Wii U? Two more CPU cores and 2GB of RAM instead of 88MB!