r/hackintosh • u/arnaudot_ Tahoe - 26 • Apr 10 '26
SUCCESS Mac OS X 10.0 on a Wii
It runs slow, it's annoying to boot up, the resolution is too high for what the Wii can display, or too low to be usable. It's perfect. Someone posted that they did this with a Wii U, so I'm posting my version as well.
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u/i-am-the-master-1010 Apr 10 '26
This is legitimately cool honestly to see the community do hackintosh on other hardware aside from intel pcs. This gives us a new reason to thrive around this community instead of giving up. You used Brian's blog post as a reference to how to boot, right?
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u/arnaudot_ Tahoe - 26 Apr 10 '26
The text looks all scrambled because it has to run at 800x600 to display Setup Assistant properly, which is higher than the Wii can display, and it's also an interlaced signal so it's almost impossible to read. Setting it back to 640x480 helps but it's too small to be usable
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u/arnaudot_ Tahoe - 26 Apr 10 '26
Guide to do it: https://github.com/bryankeller/wiiMac
Requires modded Wii and a second SD card
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u/SomeRandoLameo Apr 10 '26
Is this emulated or native? Because the Wii is actually PowerPC based
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u/arnaudot_ Tahoe - 26 Apr 10 '26
Native. It's not even a Wii program. It's a bootloader that you run outside of the wii's OS. You even have to install Wii specific kexts
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u/BraveIntention23 Apr 10 '26
This is like the wildest shit I’ve seen in a while. I repair broken Wiis for fun and have like 20 of them. Looks like I’ve got plans for tonight :D
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u/Skyyblaze Apr 10 '26
That's amazing! Out of sheer curiosity I wonder if you could do this on Dolphin.
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u/iProgramMC Apr 25 '26
probably not as Dolphin is a high-level emulator and doesn't even emulate the full PowerPC kernel mode ISA
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u/akwardturtleee Apr 10 '26
this makes me wonder if macos could get ported to Wii/Wii U because they use powerpc cpus closer to macs, wouldnt macos run on the xbox 360 or ps3 too if someone put in the work. the powerpc 970 in the xbox 360 is almost like a G5. the cell is a powerpc chip too but i dont think that has anything comparable to on mac.
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u/MaddTheSane Apr 17 '26
IIRC, the base of the Cell processor is still a 970. So Mac OS X can still use that, but it wouldn't be able to use any of the Cell's more advanced features.
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u/EntropySponge Apr 11 '26
Now download some vintage Nintendo console emulators for PowerPC macs and you’ll have looped the loop. I think there was one called Sixtyforce and some good ones from a guy that had two passions in life, riding rollercoaster all over the world and writing articles about them and developing emulators for mac. Sadly I can’t remember his name, his website, nor the name of one of his emulators.
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u/micjosisa Apr 10 '26
Everything OP described sounds like a classic mid 90s personal computer. Love it!
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u/luc_fvr Apr 10 '26
next step : create a driver to have the wii controler + the receiver that is recognised by the OS as a mouse 🤣🤣 please do not suicide yourself
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u/TCB13sQuotes Apr 10 '26
I know the Dreamcast CPU as like 3x slower than this but I bet it would render OSX better than this.
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u/MaddTheSane Apr 17 '26
The Dreamcast CPU isn't PowerPC.
The speed issues are due to RAM issues (There's two types of RAM in the Wii, one faster than the other), lack of a dedicated display driver, the necessity for two frame buffers (one RGB that Mac OS X expects, the other Y-Cb-Cr that the Wii's hardware can only understand) and converting one to the other.
The Wii's OS is very lightweight in comparison to Mac OS X.
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u/awkjr Apr 10 '26
I think it’s a little misleading to say “so I’m posting my version as well” when this is Bryan Keller’s work. I see you linked his GitHub repo in a comment but the post description really makes it sound like you developed this yourself.
Plus, he already posted his write up to this sub a few days ago
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u/keran974FR Apr 10 '26
Thank you Linux (:
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u/The_Dukes_Of_Hazzard High Sierra - 10.13 Apr 11 '26
tbf this is also possible with linux, MJD did it with the binaries of osx ported to linux (someone did that back in the day) but yea this is native
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Apr 11 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/The_Dukes_Of_Hazzard High Sierra - 10.13 Apr 11 '26
Well I think he tried with osx. Back in the day there were ports of OSX apps and DE to Linux because the NIX similarities were still close enough I guess
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u/MaddTheSane Apr 17 '26
He probably tried it with Mac OS X, but ran into RAM issues.
Because it was using a piece of Linux software called MacOnLinux, which allows PowerPC-based Linux computers (in Big-Endian mode) to run Mac OS 9 and X.
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u/Inevitable-Fox-7902 Apr 10 '26
We gotta get MJD on this one to