A brave soul has managed to port Mac OS X to the Wii.
The Wii, released in 2007, has seen numerous operating systems ported to it, including Linux, NetBSD, and Windows NT. Now, IT engineer Brian Keller has announced that he has successfully ported Mac OS X to the Wii.
Porting Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii | Bryan Keller's Dev Blog
There have been previous instances of running Macintosh-based operating systems on the Wii. For example, YouTuber Michael MJD successfully ran Mac OS 9.2 on his Wii.
How to run macOS on a Wii - GIGAZINE
However, MJD's method involved 'running Linux on the Wii and virtually running MacOS 9.2.' While both methods succeeded in getting it to work, Keller succeeded in 'running Mac OS X Cheetah directly on the Wii hardware.'
First, Keller compared the Wii's hardware to the hardware used when Mac OS X was released in 2001. The Wii's CPU was a PowerPC 750CL, an improved version of the PowerPC 750CXe used in Apple's 'G3 iBook' notebook PC, so Keller was confident that there was no problem with the CPU. The memory capacity was 88MB, which did not meet the minimum memory requirement of 128MB for Mac OS X Cheetah, but Keller found that the actual amount of memory needed was less than 64MB, which was sufficient.
In addition, while it was necessary to support some hardware such as serial debug output, Keller determined that there were no compatibility issues with the essential parts. Next, he investigated software compatibility.
The core components of Mac OS X, such as the kernel and drivers, use open-source code called Darwin , and Keller determined that 'it would work simply by modifying the open-source parts.'
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Keller then began creating the bootloader. The bootloader is the first program executed after power-on, and its role is to restore the system to a normal initial state before loading and running the operating system. Keller reportedly created the bootloader based on ppcskel .
Furthermore, while Macs connected various hardware components to the motherboard via PCI connections, the Wii used its own proprietary system-on-a-chip called Hollywood. Because of this, it was impossible to use the existing IOKit driver family included with Mac OS X, and it seems that all equivalent drivers had to be created from scratch.
Furthermore, the Wii's video encoder hardware is optimized for analog TV signal output and requires 16-bit YUV pixel data in the frame buffer. However, since Mac OS X outputs RGB pixel data, it uses two frame buffers to perform 60 conversions per second.
Ultimately, it became possible to use a mouse and keyboard, and it reached a state where it was truly usable as Mac OS X.
Keller commented, 'The satisfaction of accomplishing something that we weren't even sure was possible at first is exceptional.'
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