Fun: Get Mac OS X 10.0 Running on Nintendo Wii
Remember Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah? If you’re a super longtime Mac user you just might, and you might also remember the Nintendo Wii gaming console too. Well because the Nintendo Wii runs on PowerPC architecture, the theoretical possibility of running original Mac OS X versions has always existed, but were largely impractical. That didn’t stop developer Bryan Keller though, who has hacked together a Nintendo Wii that runs the original release of Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah. If you’re adventurous, you can even give a try to get this setup on a Wii yourself too.
If you recall, the Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah operating system was quite sluggish and buggy, with Mac OS X 10.1 Puma being the first more stable and usable version of the Mac OS X operating system. If you feel like diving into a similar project yourself, you likely won’t get a ton of practical usage out of this setup, but nonetheless this is a fun and interesting proof of concept.
If you’re the type to want to see the techy nitty gritty and specifics, the developers blog post is a fun stop so you’ll want to check that out, and if you wish to try it yourself with a Nintendo Wii you can head over to the WiiMac project GitHub page:
- Check out the “Porting Mac OS X to Nintendo Wii” blog post here
- Check out the WiiMac Github project page
Some of the prerequisites are needing a Wii with an SD slot that has been soft modded, and two different SD cards.
Some pretty major features like wi-fi, Bluetooth, audio, and the optical drive don’t work at present, so again this is more for fun and proof of concept than creating some workstation.
If you’re into this kind of thing, you might be curious to investigate some other fun stuff while you’re at it.
Cheers to developer @SiliconForest on X (the dev who revived AOL in a web-based Mac emulator with DialTone) for the heads up on this neat project.
