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Posted by blkhp19 5 hours ago

I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii(bryankeller.github.io)
893 points | 180 commentspage 2
cdrnsf 5 minutes ago|
Wonderful. Can it run Doom?
bsimpson 2 hours ago||
This is excellent.

YUV appears to be a PAL-specific color space. I wonder how off an NTSC Wii would be. Presumably it would have the wrong color space until an equivalent conversion scheme was devised for NTSC.

I was surprised to see regional color spaces leak into the project, but I presume that Nintendo's iOS (the coincidentally-named system this is replacing) could handle that abstraction for game developers.

duskwuff 1 hour ago||
YUV is a color model, akin to RGB or HSL; it's independent of video formats like NTSC or PAL.
TazeTSchnitzel 56 minutes ago||
That's true in broad strokes, but looking into it, it turns out NTSC's variant of YUV is called YIQ, and SECAM's variant is called YDbDr. They are however all more or less the same thing, and the digital YUV used by the Wii hardware in this case is presumably independent of the video standard.
nickpeterson 3 hours ago||
The one that really bugs me is the Apple TV. It would be a great little box to use for terminals/thin client style work and there are a ton of old cheap ones. Having a $50 dollar used box that was low power and could run OSX would be great.
wpm 2 hours ago||
Good news, just today a bypass was released to allow any EFI bootloader to work on the original Apple TV https://github.com/DistroHopper39B/ATV1sm
zadikian 3 hours ago||
The original one does run a modified OS X Tiger. I jailbroke it a while ago to run custom stuff, but didn't do much with that. Just remember being able to VNC or SSH into it.
leonidasv 4 hours 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 4 hours ago||
If it's not working on Chrome nor Firefox, it's safe to say it's incompatible with almost all browsers.
blkhp19 4 hours ago|||
I only tested on Safari - whoops! Fixed now.
tverbeure 4 hours 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 comment](image_url.png) ](image_url.png)

(Of course, I can also right-click and do "Open image in new tab", but that's one click extra...)

Congrats on the awesome project, BTW! You were lucky that I wasn't sitting next to you on the plane. I would have wasted so much of your time asking dumb questions.

blkhp19 3 hours ago||
Images now expand when clicked - thanks for the feedback!
tengbretson 1 hour ago||||
Works on Orion.
leonidasv 4 hours ago|||
It works on Safari.
blkhp19 4 hours ago||
Whoops, thanks! Fixed.
samtheDamned 50 minutes ago||
This was an incredible read! Especially for what looks like the first post to this blog too? I wanted to subscribe to the RSS feed but unfortunately it gives a 404 error.
talkfold 16 minutes ago||
Brought the Wii to Hawaii to finish the framebuffer driver. Priorities perfectly set.
AnnikaL 23 minutes ago||
Wow! This is really impressive!

I kind of want to try some project like this sometime, but I wouldn't even know where to start...

tiffanyh 4 hours 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4091216

dormento 3 hours ago|
Oof linkrot :(((((

I remember reading this back then. Amazing story. All the secrecy, and needing to be a very small team.

mackid 3 hours ago||
Congrats, great project and great writeup. That would have won MacHack back in the day.

Now that the MacBook Neo has an A18, I wonder if you could get MacOS running on an iPhone? :)

krsw 2 hours ago||
There is a zero percent chance of that ever happening.
gaudystead 1 hour ago||
Are you willing to elaborate on the _why_ or is this a challenge comment, similar to the reddit comment that spurred this project? ;)
Xerox9213 2 hours ago|||
Or better yet, an iPad!
LoganDark 2 hours ago||
I wonder if you can place an A18 from a Neo onto an iPhone board, and then make that work somehow... You wouldn't be able to use the one originally from the iPhone because it's differently fused to only accept iOS images.
zadikian 3 hours ago|
My favorite part of this is the detour to ask for the IOUSBFamily src on IRC
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