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
glenstein 1 minutes ago [-]
I almost think such projects are worth it just to immortalize comments like these. There's a whole psychology of wrongness that centers on declaring that not-quite-impossible things will definitely never happen, because it feels like principled skepticism.
nancyminusone 13 minutes ago [-]
Gotta love that particular Redditors follow up comment:
>Go ahead and downvote me. I am correct on every single thing I said
dpoloncsak 7 minutes ago [-]
Tempted to necro a 5 year old reddit post just to tell that guy he was wrong, honestly
rayiner 12 minutes ago [-]
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 abstraction layers seemed to actually do what they said. A little kudos to the NeXT developers for that.
geerlingguy 25 seconds ago [-]
And there are enough parallels to Linux's stack, I'm thinking about looking through the Linux on Wii project more and comparing how it handles fb issues in comparison. I loved reading this whole post, crazy how many OSes have now been run on the humble Wii!
guyzero 36 minutes ago [-]
In addition to the incredible engineering work here the OP casually flexes by showing the development happening _in an economy class airplane seat_.
nine_k 30 minutes ago [-]
This is the most incredible part. I cannot even use a laptop adequately in an economy class seat, I cannot position the screen so that I could see it, and the keyboard so that I could type on it, at the same time. (To say nothing of connecting a Wii.)
soci 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
frakt0x90 35 minutes ago [-]
If all the AI stories on this site were replaced with amazing stuff like this, the world would be a better place.
kstrauser 31 minutes ago [-]
Get to submitting! Be the change you want to see.
leonidasv 31 minutes ago [-]
Nice work and write-up!
A side note: you embedded .mov videos inside <img> tags. This is not compatible with all browsers (notably Chrome and Firefox), which won't load the videos.
efdee 26 minutes ago [-]
If it's not working on Chrome nor Firefox, it's safe to say it's incompatible with almost all browsers.
blkhp19 25 minutes ago [-]
I only texted on Safari - whoops! Fixed now.
tverbeure 33 seconds ago [-]
Minor usability comment: the screenshots are too small to be readable. Whenever that's that case in my blog posts, I make those screenshots clickable and add (Click to enlarge) below it, to make it easier for readers to see the image are original resolution. In markdown, I do that like this:
[ ](image_url.png)
(Of course, I can also right-click and do "Open image in new tab", but that's one click extra...)
leonidasv 26 minutes ago [-]
It works on Safari.
blkhp19 25 minutes ago [-]
Whoops, thanks! Fixed.
tiffanyh 37 minutes ago [-]
Amazing work.
If you like this story, you might also like the story of how Mac OS X was ported to Intel as well.
> There is a zero percent chance of this ever happening.
Honestly, I would have said the same. Great work!
unanonymousanon 25 minutes ago [-]
This is extraordinary, not only pushing the limit but documenting everything so clearly to show people what can be accomplished with time and dedication. Thank you for such thorough documentation, and congrats on getting it done!
swiftcoder 44 minutes ago [-]
Damn, that's some dedication! Congrats on getting it running
MaxLeiter 52 minutes ago [-]
Great write-up. I love hardware running software it shouldn’t support
zdware 22 minutes ago [-]
Fun post.
Always great when your debugging feedback is via a led xD
xoxxala 37 minutes ago [-]
Very neat project and an extremely enjoyable read.
mghackerlady 56 minutes ago [-]
I'm pretty sure someones done this for the 360. Also, doesn't NT have a wii port?
nticompass 53 minutes ago [-]
There was a PPC version of Windows NT, and yes someone put it on the Wii!
This is awesome! I can't wait to plug in my Wii and give it a try myself.
davenporten 52 minutes ago [-]
Hahaha! Yes! We need more of this in the world, love it!
hirvi74 55 minutes ago [-]
Exceptional work. While it may not mean much, I am truly impressed. I like to toy with reverse engineering here and there, but such a port like this would take me multiple lifetimes.
Not to distract too much from the main topic, but what do you think about the Hopper disassembler? I have only used Radare2, IDA Pro, and Ghidra. Though, I haven't used the latter two on MacOS. What do you prefer about Hopper? I have been hesitant to purchase a license because I was never sure if it was worth the money compared to the alternatives.
blkhp19 42 minutes ago [-]
I like using it for disassembling UIKit (for my day job working on iOS apps), and overall, I like the UI/UX and how it feels like a native Mac app.
I've tried Ghidra, and while extremely impressive and capable, it might be the most Java-feeling app I've ever used. I'd love for someone to whip up an AppKit + SwiftUI shell for it.
xandrius 24 minutes ago [-]
You made me curious: why would you need to disassemble UIKit for iOS as part of your day job?
blkhp19 10 minutes ago [-]
There are bugs and undocumented behaviors that need to be understood in order to be worked around - I wish it wasn't the case but such is life developing for closed-source platforms.
crazysim 21 minutes ago [-]
Sometimes things aren't documented and sometimes they could be documented wrong.
eats_indigo 24 minutes ago [-]
honestly expected this port to be headed in the opposite direction
serhack_ 41 minutes ago [-]
awesome, good to see some real content from pre-AI moment
lanyard-textile 56 minutes ago [-]
Absolutely atrocious. Congratulations!
That's the hacker spirit.
stavros 32 minutes ago [-]
This is excellent, though if you had chosen another OS, you could have called the project Wiindows.
EDIT: Oh interesting, the final paragraph says NT has been ported, didn't know that. Sadly, no pun is mentioned in that project.
snazz 8 minutes ago [-]
“entii-for-workcubes” is a pretty good pun!
rvz 38 minutes ago [-]
The post is a work of an actual hacker who knows what they're doing. Zero mention of "I used Claude" or "Used AI" to understand what is needed for accomplish this task.
This is exceptional work. Unlike the low-effort slop posts I see here on "Show HN".
blkhp19 4 minutes ago [-]
I used plenty of non-agentic AI to help understand the XNU codebase, and also research various topics. It wasn't always correct, but it certainly helped at times! My philosophy for this project was to use it as a learning tool - since that was kind of the whole point of me attempting this :)
bigyabai 18 minutes ago [-]
Ah, the Procrustian definition of "real hacker", where using AI disqualifies you but using Github pages is considered only a minor infraction.
The build-in-public era of hacking has really turned this field into an influencer economy.
jasaldivara 3 minutes ago [-]
Whats wrong about Github pages?
Rendered at 17:05:05 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
>Go ahead and downvote me. I am correct on every single thing I said
> 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 abstraction layers seemed to actually do what they said. A little kudos to the NeXT developers for that.
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.
A side note: you embedded .mov videos inside <img> tags. This is not compatible with all browsers (notably Chrome and Firefox), which won't load the videos.
[ ](image_url.png)
(Of course, I can also right-click and do "Open image in new tab", but that's one click extra...)
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
Honestly, I would have said the same. Great work!
Always great when your debugging feedback is via a led xD
https://github.com/Wack0/entii-for-workcubes
See also: https://gbatemp.net/threads/windows-nt-ported-to-wii.667959/
Not to distract too much from the main topic, but what do you think about the Hopper disassembler? I have only used Radare2, IDA Pro, and Ghidra. Though, I haven't used the latter two on MacOS. What do you prefer about Hopper? I have been hesitant to purchase a license because I was never sure if it was worth the money compared to the alternatives.
I've tried Ghidra, and while extremely impressive and capable, it might be the most Java-feeling app I've ever used. I'd love for someone to whip up an AppKit + SwiftUI shell for it.
That's the hacker spirit.
EDIT: Oh interesting, the final paragraph says NT has been ported, didn't know that. Sadly, no pun is mentioned in that project.
This is exceptional work. Unlike the low-effort slop posts I see here on "Show HN".
The build-in-public era of hacking has really turned this field into an influencer economy.