3 ms·

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

by grecy 3y ago

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.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  > No version of OS X has drivers for the Wii But the XNU kernel is open-source, so -- in theory -- one could write those drivers. Classic Mac OS is much less open, and less well-documented. As far as I'm aware, there's never been any successful third-party attempt to "port" it to new hardware.
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    It's not really a "port" but there was a sort of translation layer for classic MacOS Toolbox by the Lattitude Group(?) I don't know the details, but there I believe there was a source-level translator and a binary-interpreter type thing. One of these was used for the Unix ports of Photoshop/Illustrator. It translated Mac Toolkit calls to Motif/Unix calls. http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Jun97FactoryFloor/index.html http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Ju...
  - epcoa 3y ago
    People write drivers and kexts for Mac OS and Windows - and most drivers in Mac OS do not interface with open source interfaces. Writing drivers has little to do with the source availability really. I’ve written drivers and kexts for OS X. Never really bothered with the XNU source. Classic Mac OS is also much simpler and built with more primitive tooling, so reverse engineering it is eminently doable, just that’s a bit beyond what anybody in the community wants to do. I think the Venn diagram of those that are interested in classic Mac OS (sizeable but small) and those sentimental about the Wii is not highly overlapping. People have hacked Palm OS to shit - this type of thing is certainly doable regardless of source if one is inclined (I could, but I have literally thousands of other hack projects that are more interesting to me). > third-party attempt to "port" it to new hardware. There hasn’t really been any with X either - Hackintoshes have always been quite limited in scope. I barely would calls those ports.
    - duskwuff 3y ago
      > Classic Mac OS is also much simpler Debatable. :) It's certainly less sophisticated, but I'd argue that it was a much weirder system architecture than OS X, and that's probably discouraged some reverse engineering. (For instance: parts of the OS were interpreted 68k code, and were interworked with native PowerPC code; significant components of the OS were patched in during system startup; there was a multitasking kernel but almost nothing used it...)
kergonath 3y ago
Apparently OS X cannot boot because of the small amount of RAM (around 50 MB). So, maybe an early alpha, but then this adds a whole lot of things that can go wrong. I think even the public beta required 128 MB. Also, MOL officially supports only Puma and Jaguar.
- fouc 3y ago
  Interestingly the Wikipedia pages for both Mac OS X 10.0 & 10.1 mention > unofficially 64 MB minimum

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

by grecy 3y ago

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

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.

duskwuff 3y ago
> No version of OS X has drivers for the Wii But the XNU kernel is open-source, so -- in theory -- one could write those drivers. Classic Mac OS is much less open, and less well-documented. As far as I'm aware, there's never been any successful third-party attempt to "port" it to new hardware.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  It's not really a "port" but there was a sort of translation layer for classic MacOS Toolbox by the Lattitude Group(?) I don't know the details, but there I believe there was a source-level translator and a binary-interpreter type thing. One of these was used for the Unix ports of Photoshop/Illustrator. It translated Mac Toolkit calls to Motif/Unix calls. http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Jun97FactoryFloor/index.html http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Ju...
- epcoa 3y ago
  People write drivers and kexts for Mac OS and Windows - and most drivers in Mac OS do not interface with open source interfaces. Writing drivers has little to do with the source availability really. I’ve written drivers and kexts for OS X. Never really bothered with the XNU source. Classic Mac OS is also much simpler and built with more primitive tooling, so reverse engineering it is eminently doable, just that’s a bit beyond what anybody in the community wants to do. I think the Venn diagram of those that are interested in classic Mac OS (sizeable but small) and those sentimental about the Wii is not highly overlapping. People have hacked Palm OS to shit - this type of thing is certainly doable regardless of source if one is inclined (I could, but I have literally thousands of other hack projects that are more interesting to me). > third-party attempt to "port" it to new hardware. There hasn’t really been any with X either - Hackintoshes have always been quite limited in scope. I barely would calls those ports.
  - duskwuff 3y ago
    > Classic Mac OS is also much simpler Debatable. :) It's certainly less sophisticated, but I'd argue that it was a much weirder system architecture than OS X, and that's probably discouraged some reverse engineering. (For instance: parts of the OS were interpreted 68k code, and were interworked with native PowerPC code; significant components of the OS were patched in during system startup; there was a multitasking kernel but almost nothing used it...)

kergonath 3y ago

Apparently OS X cannot boot because of the small amount of RAM (around 50 MB). So, maybe an early alpha, but then this adds a whole lot of things that can go wrong. I think even the public beta required 128 MB. Also, MOL officially supports only Puma and Jaguar.

fouc 3y ago
Interestingly the Wikipedia pages for both Mac OS X 10.0 & 10.1 mention > unofficially 64 MB minimum