Homebrew Homebrew app Project I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

[blk19]

My side project for the past year has been porting Mac OS X to run natively on the Nintendo Wii. I'm excited to share that as of today, Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah can be booted using the wiiMac bootloader. I hope to have Mac OS X 10.1 Puma running soon.

If you're interested in how I accomplished this, I wrote a blog post recounting the interesting parts of the porting process.

If you want to try this for yourself, either follow the instructions in the README for the wiiMac bootloader, or grab a ready-to-flash SD card image from here. You must have a software-modded Wii capable of running BootMii. The Wii Mini is not supported.

Use `dd` or software like balenaEtcher to flash `wiiMac_cheetah.img` to an SD card that's at least 4 GB in capacity. This will replace all contents on the SD card, so backup any important files first.

To boot the system, insert the flashed SD card into the Wii and turn on the console. If BootMii is installed as Boot1, then the wiiMac bootloader will automatically load and start booting into Mac OS X. If BootMii is installed as IOS, open the Homebrew Channel from the system menu, then open the Options menu by pressing the Home button on the WiiMote, then select "Launch BootMii".

Hardware support is limited to just the essentials:
- The SD card
- USB mice and keyboards
- Non-accelerated video output

I'm excited for folks to give this project a try - let me know what you think

 

[impeeza]

My side project for the past year has been porting Mac OS X to run natively on the Nintendo Wii. I'm excited to share that as of today, Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah can be booted using the wiiMac bootloader. I hope to have Mac OS X 10.1 Puma running soon.

If you're interested in how I accomplished this, I wrote a blog post recounting the interesting parts of the porting process.

View attachment 567110View attachment 567109

I you want to try this for yourself, either follow the instructions in the README for the wiiMac bootloader, or grab a ready-to-flash SD card image from here. You must have a software-modded Wii capable of running BootMii. The Wii Mini is not supported.

Use `dd` or software like balenaEtcher to flash `wiiMac_cheetah.img` to an SD card that's at least 4 GB in capacity. This will replace all contents on the SD card, so backup any important files first.

To boot the system, insert the flashed SD card into the Wii and turn on the console. If BootMii is installed as Boot1, then the wiiMac bootloader will automatically load and start booting into Mac OS X. If BootMii is installed as IOS, open the Homebrew Channel from the system menu, then open the Options menu by pressing the Home button on the WiiMote, then select "Launch BootMii".

Hardware support is limited to just the essentials:
- The SD card
- USB mice and keyboards
- Non-accelerated video output

I'm excited for folks to give this project a try - let me know what you think

Wow mate that is great.

 

[mudrik]

That's some astonishing work! If you ever decide to add OpenGL support (after a break, sure!), you should be able to reuse OpenGX, though you'll have to translate shaders into GX code yourself (as done in chro.mono for example: https://github.com/mardy/chromono)

 

[InsaneNutter]

Amazing work!

I love the photo on your blog of the Wii just casually plugged in on a plane, sat on the middle tray!

I'll be sure to give this a go on my Wii when i get time.

 

[AtsuNii]

Someone give this person a biscuit!
Or hell the entire biscuit tin!

Actually impressive to see OS X run on a game console, and one hell of a way to use wasted time spent traveling by plane to turn be productive.

 

[lightwo]

From OSX PPC Unity game builds running on Wii to OSX PPC itself running on Wii, the homebrew community went full circle

 

[ZodiaKGalXy]

Cool project.
Also, congrats, you're on a Michael MJD video!

 

[Flame]

Amazing work. this is a proper project.