‘Everything is magenta’: This wild hack got Mac OS X Cheetah working on a Nintendo Wii, and I can’t quite believe it

• One coder got an ancient version of macOS running on a Nintendo Wii
• The project involved a mass of custom code and complex workarounds
• Despite the difficulties, the author said it was ‘worth pursuing’

Forget asking whether your PC can run Crysis, the ultimate test of computing capabilities these days is whether you can hack a working copy of Doom onto a random piece of electrical equipment. But perhaps we should add a new test of hacking prowess: can you run Mac OS X Cheetah on a Nintendo Wii?

That’s exactly what programmer Bryan Keller managed, with the enterprising coder detailing the at-times convoluted process on their blog. And as you’d imagine, getting an operating system that was discontinued almost 25 years ago to run on a games console that’s not much younger presented more than its fair share of hurdles.

Keller was inspired by seeing a similar project that managed to get Windows NT running on a Nintendo Wii. And considering the Wii uses a PowerPC 750CL processor — which is an updated version of the PowerPC 750CXe found in Apple’s old iMac G3 and iBook G3 computers — Keller had an inkling that his attempted hack would work. It proved to be a hunch that was right on the money.

That doesn’t mean it was a walk in the park, though. Keller had to build a custom bootloader, patch the OS X kernel source code, put together a modified kernel binary, and even write his own drivers that enabled the kernel to read from the Wii’s SD card slot in order to boot up properly. In other words, the process was about as hands-on as it gets.

‘Worth pursuing’

Even after all that effort, Keller still encountered some unusual problems. One, for example, resulted in the device displaying Mac OS X in the wrong colors. As Keller succinctly put it, “everything is magenta.”

Fixing this was complicated, Keller said, because “it relates to a fundamental incompatibility between the Wii’s video hardware and the graphics code that Mac OS X uses.” The solution was to use two framebuffers — one for Mac OS X Cheetah and one for the Wii — and have the output from one converted into something the other could understand.

It was just one of many problems that Keller (unsurprisingly) encountered in this unusual hack. But despite the hitches, the endeavor was a success, with Mac OS X Cheetah (released in 2001) fully operational on the Nintendo Wii (first launched in 2006). Keller has posted the source code on GitHub for anyone brave enough to take on the challenge themselves.

Reflecting on the project, Keller said that “There’s something deeply satisfying about accomplishing something that, at the start, you weren’t even sure was possible… In the end, I learned (and accomplished) far more than I ever expected — and perhaps more importantly, I was reminded that the projects that seem just out of reach are exactly the ones worth pursuing.”

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