5 ms·

Installing Mac OS on the Nintendo Wii [video]

123 points by gslin 3y ago

mdaniel 3y ago
the non-video links: https://gbatemp.net/threads/mac-on-wiilinux.617142/ https://gbatemp.net/threads/mac-on-wiilinux.617142/ https://www.maconlinux.net/ https://www.maconlinux.net/
- kergonath 3y ago
  It seems someone else showed that last year: https://www.journaldulapin.com/2022/11/21/wii-mac-linux/ https://www.journaldulapin.com/2022/11/21/wii-mac-linux/ (in French, but well worth a read; Google translate might help). Also, the MOL website is a thing of beauty. I never thought I’d be nostalgic for early 2000s websites.
userbinator 3y ago
Classic Mac OS, running in an emulator, on Linux running on the Wii. ...but that wouldn't be as clickbaity of a title.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I think it's virtualized but not emulated?
  - jwells89 3y ago
    Yes, the GameCube, Wii, and Wii U use PowerPC CPUs so this would technically be virtualization.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      It could regardless be emulation, if they ran a CPU emulator. But they don’t.
- redbonsai 3y ago
  Or readable
- IntelMiner 3y ago
  Virtualized Mac OS, running on Linux, running on the Wii ...But if you're going to be pedantic, at least be correct :)
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    It's not a particularly pedantic correction, as there is a major performance difference. This looks like it would actually be usable on the Wii, if not for the unfortunate text-rendering bug.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
whalesalad 3y ago
This dudes videos are some of my favorites. I might be insane but I actually enjoy watching someone unbox a pristine copy of Windows ME and install it on an ancient Gateway PC.
- xattt 3y ago
  I can smell the mix of polyethylene and polycarbonate of the box already.
- lathiat 3y ago
  You may enjoy this guy: Cathode Ray Dude [CRD] https://youtube.com/@CathodeRayDude?si=xSx8uUsUoMSraz-H https://youtube.com/@CathodeRayDude?si=xSx8uUsUoMSraz-H These two are better known: LGR Technology Connections
  - dpkirchner 3y ago
    This isn't exactly the same thing but if you like them you'll probably also like The 8-bit Guy: https://youtube.com/@The8BitGuy https://youtube.com/@The8BitGuy
    - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
      Okay so this is now a spectrummy-YouTuber-thread, so I'll add: For Apple Stuff, Action Retro: https://www.youtube.com/@ActionRetro https://www.youtube.com/@ActionRetro For weird 3dfx Voodoo stuff, BitsUndBolts: https://www.youtube.com/@bitsundbolts https://www.youtube.com/@bitsundbolts For Apollo-era rebuilds: CuriousMarc: https://www.youtube.com/@CuriousMarc https://www.youtube.com/@CuriousMarc Other honourable mentions: * https://www.youtube.com/@FooneTuring https://www.youtube.com/@FooneTuring (their channel isn't much; they're far better known for their Twitter feed) * https://www.youtube.com/@FranLab https://www.youtube.com/@FranLab * https://www.youtube.com/@Techmoan https://www.youtube.com/@Techmoan * https://www.youtube.com/@TheCodingTrain https://www.youtube.com/@TheCodingTrain * https://www.youtube.com/@ThisDoesNotCompute https://www.youtube.com/@ThisDoesNotCompute * https://www.youtube.com/@timhunkin1 https://www.youtube.com/@timhunkin1 * https://www.youtube.com/@vwestlife https://www.youtube.com/@vwestlife
grecy 3y ago
Seems like he might have better luck getting an older MacOS X to boot directly?
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  I'm curious why you think a newer version would be easier. The Wii, after all, is from 2006. It used an IBM processor that used what's essentially PowerPC G3, which Apple started using in 1997.
  - idinnoaname 3y ago
    Chances are the commenter you’re responding to threw the “x” after Mac OS as that is the common verbiage for the operating system, not realizing that X represents a version number. I know I’ve made this mistake countless times as well.
  - grecy 3y ago
    I was thinking The X public Beta or 10.0 might be easier because it's BSD, and you can drop into verbose mode and see what's happening. I had to do some work to get IIRC 10.2 (or maybe 10.3 or 10.4) to boot on my PowerMac G3, but it was doable booting into single user mode and going from there.
    - monocasa 3y ago
      Apparently 10.4.11 was the last to support PowerPC without altivecs. I'd imagine that you could rely on the ubiquitousness of open source kernels to figure out what's not booting right considering that you'd need to write all of the drivers for the peripherals.
- epcoa 3y ago
  That is not workable. Unlike a G3, The Wii is not a Mac in any meaningful way and shares virtually no hardware other than the processor (tons of embedded shit used Power PCs, that doesn’t make them a Mac any more than a Google Pixel is an iPhone because it uses Arm arch). This method is leveraging the (ancient) driver support already developed for Linux to run on the Wii. No version of OS X has drivers for the Wii and I don’t know of any prior effort to do so. Mac OS X does have some FreeBSD parts, but Darwin is not FreeBSD, especially at the hardware interface.
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
Anyone want to speculate on the cause of that text rendering bug? I hate it when everything seems to work so well, except for one absolute show-stopper.
- gymbeaux 3y ago
  OS 9 ran on PowerPC CPUs (like the one in the Wii) and more or less supported ATI and NVIDIA GPUs of the era (90s), but the GPU in the Wii, which can be traced back to the GPU in the GameCube, was created in 2000, so I would guess it’s a small change between the ATI GPUs of the 90s and whatever they changed for the GameCube GPU, which then was passed down to the Wii GPU. Graphics drivers are always a fickle thing with modern hackintoshes, so I would guess it has to do with the GPU “driver”. It could also be related to VRAM as the GameCube and Wii GPUs were likely both significantly weaker than the average desktop GPU of their respective eras. I know for sure the Wii GPU was already antique when the Wii was released because the Wii only output up to 480p, a joke in 2006 when 1080p TV were starting to become mainstream… so from that perspective we can’t be surprised that this thing is struggling with text rendering, if the GPU is indeed the culprit.
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    I would have assumed Mac OS 9 used CPU rendering for the UI, though. On the Windows side accelerated rendering didn't become a thing until Vista AIUI. Also if it was GPU rendering I'm surprised any of this works at all.
    - gymbeaux 3y ago
      Oh true. Still, if that’s true, I don’t know why the rendering would be whack (which is your point!)
    - lgg 3y ago
      HW accelerated rendering was supported at least as far back as System 6.0 in 1990 Classic MacOS used an API called Quickdraw, which was implemented as a series of graphics primitives (originally written for the Lisa as part of LisaGraf). Quickdraw implemented support for things like drawing lines, rectangles, etc. The original implementation software rendered them onto the system frame buffer. Essentially all drawing went through Quickdraw, which made it a natural chokepoint to introduce acceleration, which is exactly what happened when Apple shipped the Macintosh Display Card 8*24GC in 1990. The card included a separate Am29000 processor (which was often higher performance than the host CPU), which had its own memory and an implementation of Quickdraw. Its driver patched the Quickdraw calls in the OS to RPC them over the bus to the card, which would then render them on behalf of the host. It also supported off screen rendering and DMAing the results back to other cards. You could argue that is still software rendering, just on another CPU, but at the end of the day that is sort of orthogonal, almost all GPUs have some programmable components you need to load firmware into in order to operate. The key point is that there was an abstract interface the OS could use to offload rendering to some other device besides the main application processor, and the UI used it. I honestly can't recall how much of this was still in common use by the time Mac OS 9 came around. CPUs were also much faster by then, and the move to PCI meant it was possible to use fast off the shelf PCI GPUs which may have changed the cost benefit ratios enough that it was best to just take whatever the GPU vendors were offering and software render into their frame buffers even if it could not fully accelerate all the same operations a bespoke earlier design could. There is a contemporary write up of the card available here: http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_03/824GC_V007.html http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_03/824GC_...
gymbeaux 3y ago
It wouldn’t have been hard for the author to title the video “installing Mac OS 9 on the Nintendo Wii”, but then people like me wouldn’t have watched the video expecting “macOS”. Obviously getting OS 9 on it is much less difficult and much less impressive.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  It looks like this channel focuses on vintage technology, so I don't find the title unreasonable in that context. It's more confusing on Hacker News where that context is removed, but that's not the creator's fault. Would you feel differently about the title if he'd gotten early OS X working? He actually wasn't so far off from that. MacOnLinux supports up to 10.2, it didn't boot in this case but it theoretically should have worked given the same setup.

123 points by gslin 3y ago

the non-video links: https://gbatemp.net/threads/mac-on-wiilinux.617142/ https://gbatemp.net/threads/mac-on-wiilinux.617142/ https://www.maconlinux.net/ https://www.maconlinux.net/

kergonath 3y ago
It seems someone else showed that last year: https://www.journaldulapin.com/2022/11/21/wii-mac-linux/ https://www.journaldulapin.com/2022/11/21/wii-mac-linux/ (in French, but well worth a read; Google translate might help). Also, the MOL website is a thing of beauty. I never thought I’d be nostalgic for early 2000s websites.

userbinator 3y ago

Classic Mac OS, running in an emulator, on Linux running on the Wii. ...but that wouldn't be as clickbaity of a title.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
I think it's virtualized but not emulated?
- jwells89 3y ago
  Yes, the GameCube, Wii, and Wii U use PowerPC CPUs so this would technically be virtualization.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    It could regardless be emulation, if they ran a CPU emulator. But they don’t.
redbonsai 3y ago
Or readable
IntelMiner 3y ago
Virtualized Mac OS, running on Linux, running on the Wii ...But if you're going to be pedantic, at least be correct :)
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  It's not a particularly pedantic correction, as there is a major performance difference. This looks like it would actually be usable on the Wii, if not for the unfortunate text-rendering bug.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

whalesalad 3y ago

This dudes videos are some of my favorites. I might be insane but I actually enjoy watching someone unbox a pristine copy of Windows ME and install it on an ancient Gateway PC.

xattt 3y ago
I can smell the mix of polyethylene and polycarbonate of the box already.
lathiat 3y ago
You may enjoy this guy: Cathode Ray Dude [CRD] https://youtube.com/@CathodeRayDude?si=xSx8uUsUoMSraz-H https://youtube.com/@CathodeRayDude?si=xSx8uUsUoMSraz-H These two are better known: LGR Technology Connections
- dpkirchner 3y ago
  This isn't exactly the same thing but if you like them you'll probably also like The 8-bit Guy: https://youtube.com/@The8BitGuy https://youtube.com/@The8BitGuy
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    Okay so this is now a spectrummy-YouTuber-thread, so I'll add: For Apple Stuff, Action Retro: https://www.youtube.com/@ActionRetro https://www.youtube.com/@ActionRetro For weird 3dfx Voodoo stuff, BitsUndBolts: https://www.youtube.com/@bitsundbolts https://www.youtube.com/@bitsundbolts For Apollo-era rebuilds: CuriousMarc: https://www.youtube.com/@CuriousMarc https://www.youtube.com/@CuriousMarc Other honourable mentions: * https://www.youtube.com/@FooneTuring https://www.youtube.com/@FooneTuring (their channel isn't much; they're far better known for their Twitter feed) * https://www.youtube.com/@FranLab https://www.youtube.com/@FranLab * https://www.youtube.com/@Techmoan https://www.youtube.com/@Techmoan * https://www.youtube.com/@TheCodingTrain https://www.youtube.com/@TheCodingTrain * https://www.youtube.com/@ThisDoesNotCompute https://www.youtube.com/@ThisDoesNotCompute * https://www.youtube.com/@timhunkin1 https://www.youtube.com/@timhunkin1 * https://www.youtube.com/@vwestlife https://www.youtube.com/@vwestlife

grecy 3y ago

Seems like he might have better luck getting an older MacOS X to boot directly?

bastawhiz 3y ago
I'm curious why you think a newer version would be easier. The Wii, after all, is from 2006. It used an IBM processor that used what's essentially PowerPC G3, which Apple started using in 1997.
- idinnoaname 3y ago
  Chances are the commenter you’re responding to threw the “x” after Mac OS as that is the common verbiage for the operating system, not realizing that X represents a version number. I know I’ve made this mistake countless times as well.
- grecy 3y ago
  I was thinking The X public Beta or 10.0 might be easier because it's BSD, and you can drop into verbose mode and see what's happening. I had to do some work to get IIRC 10.2 (or maybe 10.3 or 10.4) to boot on my PowerMac G3, but it was doable booting into single user mode and going from there.
  - monocasa 3y ago
    Apparently 10.4.11 was the last to support PowerPC without altivecs. I'd imagine that you could rely on the ubiquitousness of open source kernels to figure out what's not booting right considering that you'd need to write all of the drivers for the peripherals.
epcoa 3y ago
That is not workable. Unlike a G3, The Wii is not a Mac in any meaningful way and shares virtually no hardware other than the processor (tons of embedded shit used Power PCs, that doesn’t make them a Mac any more than a Google Pixel is an iPhone because it uses Arm arch). This method is leveraging the (ancient) driver support already developed for Linux to run on the Wii. No version of OS X has drivers for the Wii and I don’t know of any prior effort to do so. Mac OS X does have some FreeBSD parts, but Darwin is not FreeBSD, especially at the hardware interface.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago

Anyone want to speculate on the cause of that text rendering bug? I hate it when everything seems to work so well, except for one absolute show-stopper.

gymbeaux 3y ago
OS 9 ran on PowerPC CPUs (like the one in the Wii) and more or less supported ATI and NVIDIA GPUs of the era (90s), but the GPU in the Wii, which can be traced back to the GPU in the GameCube, was created in 2000, so I would guess it’s a small change between the ATI GPUs of the 90s and whatever they changed for the GameCube GPU, which then was passed down to the Wii GPU. Graphics drivers are always a fickle thing with modern hackintoshes, so I would guess it has to do with the GPU “driver”. It could also be related to VRAM as the GameCube and Wii GPUs were likely both significantly weaker than the average desktop GPU of their respective eras. I know for sure the Wii GPU was already antique when the Wii was released because the Wii only output up to 480p, a joke in 2006 when 1080p TV were starting to become mainstream… so from that perspective we can’t be surprised that this thing is struggling with text rendering, if the GPU is indeed the culprit.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  I would have assumed Mac OS 9 used CPU rendering for the UI, though. On the Windows side accelerated rendering didn't become a thing until Vista AIUI. Also if it was GPU rendering I'm surprised any of this works at all.
  - gymbeaux 3y ago
    Oh true. Still, if that’s true, I don’t know why the rendering would be whack (which is your point!)
  - lgg 3y ago
    HW accelerated rendering was supported at least as far back as System 6.0 in 1990 Classic MacOS used an API called Quickdraw, which was implemented as a series of graphics primitives (originally written for the Lisa as part of LisaGraf). Quickdraw implemented support for things like drawing lines, rectangles, etc. The original implementation software rendered them onto the system frame buffer. Essentially all drawing went through Quickdraw, which made it a natural chokepoint to introduce acceleration, which is exactly what happened when Apple shipped the Macintosh Display Card 8*24GC in 1990. The card included a separate Am29000 processor (which was often higher performance than the host CPU), which had its own memory and an implementation of Quickdraw. Its driver patched the Quickdraw calls in the OS to RPC them over the bus to the card, which would then render them on behalf of the host. It also supported off screen rendering and DMAing the results back to other cards. You could argue that is still software rendering, just on another CPU, but at the end of the day that is sort of orthogonal, almost all GPUs have some programmable components you need to load firmware into in order to operate. The key point is that there was an abstract interface the OS could use to offload rendering to some other device besides the main application processor, and the UI used it. I honestly can't recall how much of this was still in common use by the time Mac OS 9 came around. CPUs were also much faster by then, and the move to PCI meant it was possible to use fast off the shelf PCI GPUs which may have changed the cost benefit ratios enough that it was best to just take whatever the GPU vendors were offering and software render into their frame buffers even if it could not fully accelerate all the same operations a bespoke earlier design could. There is a contemporary write up of the card available here: http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_03/824GC_V007.html http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_03/824GC_...

gymbeaux 3y ago

It wouldn’t have been hard for the author to title the video “installing Mac OS 9 on the Nintendo Wii”, but then people like me wouldn’t have watched the video expecting “macOS”. Obviously getting OS 9 on it is much less difficult and much less impressive.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago
It looks like this channel focuses on vintage technology, so I don't find the title unreasonable in that context. It's more confusing on Hacker News where that context is removed, but that's not the creator's fault. Would you feel differently about the title if he'd gotten early OS X working? He actually wasn't so far off from that. MacOnLinux supports up to 10.2, it didn't boot in this case but it theoretically should have worked given the same setup.