301–310 of 337 posts
Much easier to do, because of the superior, more modern architecture of Windows NT. (It's not based on Apollo-era OS like OSX is.)
Highly 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?
Thanks! The project was mostly C for the bootloader and C++ for the drivers. As for which part was the most challenging... probably understanding the IOKit driver model. I really would have benefitted from having an expert explain some of the concepts to me, and give me some advice about how to structure my own drivers.
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…
Back in the day I was a hardcore Mac nerd and became a professional at it too. My best reverse-engineering trophy was building one of the first "iOS" apps when there was not an official appstore for the iPhone. But man, this is way ahead of what I could do. What this dude accomplished blew my mind. Not only the output (running MacOS on a Wii), but the detailed post itself. A-MA-ZING.
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
Reminds me of the old saying "don't interrupt the one doing it, to tell him it can't be done."
Great work and writeup. I wonder if the YUV conversion could be offloaded somehow to the ARM inside the Hollywood or somehow using a shader (or equivalent) if the graphics were accelerated - though maybe this is way way too much.
I hope OP is still reading comments. I noticed that the project was written in Xcode (the repo even has the xcodeproj folder) but in some screenshots I see CLion. Did you switch at some point or were you using both throughout the development simultaneously? Amazing writeup, love this types of blog posts and hope the hawaii trip was enjoyable
Xcode is definitely not perfect, but it's IDE I'm most used to, so I ended up doing my most of my editing in it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10006411 "At some stage in the future we may be able to move IOKit over to a good programming language"
IOKit was almost done in Java; C++ was the engineering plan to stop that from happening. Remember: there was a short window of time where everyone thought Java was the future and Java support was featured heavily in some of the early OS X announcements. Also DriverKit's Objective-C model was not the same as userspace. As I recall the compiler resolved all message sends at compile time. It was much less dynamic.
Makes me think of how plists in macOS are xml because back then xml was the future