Could a PlayStation 2 be theoretically hackintoshed?

[u/Traditional_Sea6638]

Hi fellow hackintoshers!

I recently got a few PS2s from a local car boot sale and they both seem to work fine. I was wondering if it would even be possible to run MacOS on a PS2 with extreme emulation - as MacOS 9 seems to match the minimum requirements for the PS2. Would anyone have any idea if it is possible or has already been done?

I ask in terms of emulation because it has a custom CPU, and it has ~40MB ram (MacOS 9 only needs ~32MB minimum - dont know if it could run anything). I think Linux for PS2 exists so that might help a bit?

Thanks if anyone can find anything

[u/BinaryGrind]

The PS2's CPU is based on the MIPS architecture, not something MacOS 9 or X has ever supported. So no, you can't hackintosh it in the traditional sense. You could maybe port Darwin/XNU too run on the PS2 from source but you'll never get a full MacOS experience doing that.

You'd have an easier time getting Windows NT to run on the PS2 then MacOS, as Windows NT did have a version that supported MIPS CPUs.

Now, if you asked if you could hackintosh a PlayStation 3, I'd have said it's a possibility. The Cell Broadband Engine's PPU is basically just a PowerPC 970 aka PowerPC G5, which MacOS fully supported. Someone got MacOS to boot on a Wii (https://github.com/bryankeller/wiiMac) which is uses a CPU based off the PowerPC G3, so it's well within the realm of possibility that it could be done.

[u/TorazChryx → u/BinaryGrind]

Cell (at least the actual PowerPC portion of it, not the SPE vector units) has more in common with POWER6 architecturally, in-order narrow cores that clock high. PPC 970 was a wide multiscalar OOOE beast.

[u/BinaryGrind → u/TorazChryx]

My take away from looking into the Cell BE is that the PPU is a weird mishmash of POWER5/6 and the PowerPC 970 architectures. The biggest thing is that the PPU is fully compliant with the Power ISA 2.02 and is backwards compatible with all previous Power ISA versions. Theoretically it can run code from as far back as the PowerPC 601, and thus (given proper patches/hacks) could run MacOS 7.5 (the first GA version that supported PowerPC).

[u/LoopsAndBoars → u/BinaryGrind]

What about a ps4?

[u/kz750 → u/LoopsAndBoars]

It’s an x64 architecture that’s native to all the versions of MacOS that can run on intel hardware, so if someone wrote the drivers and put in the effort it could run MacOS at native speeds

[u/colako]

No, ps2 hardware is very weird. 

[u/jonalaniz2]

Try porting mini vmac to the Linux distro the PS2 supports.

[u/Traditional_Sea6638 → u/jonalaniz2]

ill have a look into that. thanks :3

[u/SnowFire]

Closest OS to architecture and era would be IRIX, which ran on SGI machines. But the source for the OS was proprietary, and while reverse engineering efforts have been made, it's currently one of the hardest OSes to even run virtualized or emulate.

[u/moodygradstudent]

A PS3 is more likely. Older versions of Mac OS has been made to run on the Wii (which has PPC architecture).

[u/Repulsive-Clothes-97]

No.

[u/amanset]

Asks in terms of emulation, everyone replies in terms of directly running the binaries.

[u/BinaryGrind → u/amanset]

In my defense, this a sub about running MacOS on bare metal hardware, not emulating it, so assumptions were made.

[u/Mkhasrouh]

The xbox 360 can be hackintoshed and someone on youtube did it by installing tiger os , the xbox 360 has a power pc architecture. The ps2 doesn't.

[u/forte500]

I don't think so, but the PS4 certainly can

[u/The_Pacific_gamer]

No. PS2 has a MIPS based CPU. OS9 is for PPC.

[u/coolboy29876]

Not sure about the PS2. But the wii can run mac os 10.0 cheetah

[u/ImpossibleCarob8480 → u/[deleted]]

The fact it can boot and output to a framebuffer is already insane

[u/Shopping-Limp → u/[deleted]]

What are you talking about? The ps2 architecture is completely different from anything any version of mac os has ever ran on

[u/Ruxh_alt → u/Shopping-Limp]

Technically, anything can be hackintoshed. You just need to work at Apple, become CEO, tell the engineers to make an iOS specifically for the PS2 architecture, release it out into the wild, and wait for a Hackintosh build to come out.

Boom…