If you’ve got an old-but-beloved Nintendo Wii around the house and want to take on an absolutely bonkers challege of a tech project, you can apparently run an older version of Mac OS X on it.
Per the mighty Roman Loyola over at Macworld, developer Bryan Keller has come up with an awesome hack, wherein he wrote a custom bootloader, patched the Mac OS X kernel, wrote custom drivers, and was able to get Mac OS X Cheetah (the very first version of Mac OS X, originally released 25 years ago) running on the Wii.
Keller wrote about the project in his blog, wherein he covered the details involved, the Wii’s hardware specifications, the obstacles he ran up against, and how he overcame them. In one instance, he chose to write a new bootload as opposed to porting two other methods. Another challenge had him write drivers for the Wii’s Hollywood chip, which handles the GPU, USB, and more.
While you may not be a developer or ready to tackle this project on your own quite yet, Keller’s project is an interesting study as to how to find solutions to the problems that occur. He’s also posted the files and instructions that you’ll need if you want to take on the challenge yourself.
Via Macworld and bryankeller.github.io
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