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Developer Ports Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah to a Nintendo Wii

Shared PowerPC roots with early G3 Macs made a Cheetah-era macOS port feasible.

Overview

  • Bryan Keller got Apple's 2001 Mac OS X 10.0 running on a Nintendo Wii as a working proof of concept.
  • He wrote a custom bootloader, built a device tree, and patched Apple's XNU kernel to accept Wii hardware.
  • New drivers made the system usable, including support for the Wii's Hollywood system-on-a-chip, the SD card, the framebuffer display, and basic input.
  • The Wii's IBM PowerPC 750CL CPU is related to chips in early G3 Macs, and Cheetah can run within the Wii's 88 MB of RAM despite a 128 MB guideline.
  • Keller credits a Reddit claim of 'zero percent chance' as motivation, notes help from an IRC patch for keyboard and mouse, and has published a detailed write-up showing SD boot and framebuffer limits.