blkhp19I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
https://bryankeller.github.io/2026/04/08/porting-mac-os-x-nintendo-wii.html
In addition to the incredible engineering work here the OP casually flexes by showing the development happening _in an economy class airplane seat_.
I can't imagine concentrating on a complicated project like that on the go, but I went back to stare in awe at said picture and I think its a train or bus. Still a flex.
Still looks like a plane to me, with rows of 2-3-2 seats.
There are definitely no buses that wide.
What's flex-worthy about this? There's a lot of dev work that goes on in economy class airplane seats. Or are VC valley programmers so rich they fly business everywhere?
It's uncomfortable and awkward (the Wii was on his leg in the first shot), and often you need to break concentration and pack things up to let someone out of or into their seat.
So what you're saying is if it's flexing, it's entirely performative. gotcha.
I don't think that's a healthy way to look at it - dude was just getting some work done, but maybe I'm a broken human being who's churned out more code than I would ever admit while sitting in 32C on a cross-country flight.
And the guy next to him is just staring at his phone, probably thinking, "I'm not even gonna ask".
Although if it were me I'd probably annoy the heck out of him asking why he had a Wii on the airplane!
If all the AI stories on this site were replaced with amazing stuff like this, the world would be a better place.
I probably have rose colored glasses, but this is what I associate with Hacker News when I first started coming to this site. Truly absurd projects for no reason other than the love of the game and detailed write ups.
I'm not an LLM post hater, but it definitely has been a bit draining lately. This is exactly what I love to see here.
Before figuring out how to tackle this project, I needed to know whether it would even be possible. According to a 2021 Reddit comment: There is a zero percent chance of this ever happening.
Feeling encouraged, I started with the basics: what hardware is in the Wii, and how does it compare to the hardware used in real Macs from the era.
I LOL'd
I almost think such projects are worth it just to immortalize comments like these. There's a whole psychology of wrongness that centers on declaring that not-quite-impossible things will definitely never happen, because it feels like principled skepticism.
That used to be my thing: wherever our ops manager declared something was impossible, I’d put my mind to proving her wrong. Even though we both knew she might declare something impossible prematurely to motivate me.
My favorite was “it’s impossible to know which DB is failing from a stack trace”. I created STAIN (stack traces and instance names): a ruby library that would wrap an object in a viral proxy (all returns from all methods are themselves proxies) that would intercept all exceptions and annotate the call stack with the “stain”ed tag.
Well you're doing gods work as far as I'm concerned. Conflating difficulty in practice with impossibility in principle is, to my mind, a source of so much unnecessary cognitive error.
I've seen more than one half-joke-half-serious chunk of code that would "encode" arbitrary info into stack traces simply by recursively calling `fn_a`, then `fn_s`, `fn_d`, and `fn_f` before continuing with the actual intended call, giving you a stack trace with (effectively) "asdf" in it.
They've also been useful more than once, e.g. you can do that to know what iteration of a loop failed. There are of course other ways to do this, but it's hard to beat "stupid, simple, and works everywhere" when normal options (e.g. logs) stop working.
Reminds me of https://github.com/jtolio/gls which implement a "thread local storage" in golang
100% agree, I find that sometimes I hit a dead end, but the things I build or learn on the way are usable at a later date.
Love that it's actually linked as well; too bad that user isn't still active.
So much has happened in the tech world because someone wrote at one point, "You can't do that"
My favorite part of our online world.
I have a project on my desk that started as a response to a line in the Adafruit docs for their RP2040 based MacroPad
It is not possible to add BLE or WiFi at this time to the MacroPad.
Oh yeah, really? There is a port hanging off the side that can be reconfigured for UART, are you sure Adafruit, what if I add an ESP32?
Wasn't the old Linux joke, don't ask "how do I do X with Linux" (because you'd get ridiculed for not reading the docs) but instead, just state "X isn't possible with Linux" and then someone would show you how it's done?
Not only is this an insanely cool project, the writeup is great. I was hooked the whole way through. I particularly love this part:
> At this point, the system was trying to find a framebuffer driver so that the Mac OS X GUI could be shown. As indicated in the logs, WindowServer was not happy - to fix this, I’d need to write my own framebuffer driver.
I'm surprised by how well abstracted MacOS is (was). The I/O Kit abstraction layers seemed to actually do what they said. A little kudos to the NeXT developers for that.
And there are enough parallels to Linux's stack, I'm thinking about looking through the Linux on Wii project more and comparing how it handles fb issues in comparison. I loved reading this whole post, crazy how many OSes have now been run on the humble Wii!
IOKit was actually built from the ground up for OS X! NeXT had a different driver model called DriverKit. I've never coded against either, but my understanding was they're pretty different beasts. (I could be wrong)
That said, indeed, the abstraction layer here is delightful! I know that some NetBSD devs managed to get PPC Darwin running under a Mach/IOKit compatibility layer back in the day, up to running Xquartz on NetBSD! With NetBSD translating IOKit calls. :-)
As I remember it, they were basically the same—but IOKit is C++ (with restrictions) because 3rd party developers didn't want to learn Objective-C.
But that's a hazy, 20 year old memory.
From here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10006411
"At some stage in the future we may be able to move IOKit over to a good programming language"
There’s a great video of a NeXT-era Steve Jobs keynote floating around—I think the one where he announces the x86 port as NeXT was transitioning to a software-only company—where he specifically calls out DriverKit and how great it is.
Steve was not a developer but he made it his business to care about what they cared about.
I felt similarly. The learning curve was a tad steep, especially since I had never written a driver before, but once I figured out how to structure things and saw the system come alive, I grew to appreciate the approach IOKit takes.
With that said, I haven't developed drivers for any other platforms, so I really can't say if the abstraction is good compared to what's used by modern systems.
[delayed]
> As for RAM, the Wii has a unique configuration: 88 MB total
TIL Wii has only 88MB of RAM. Fortunately games weren't electron-based.
Another funny history fact with the Wii is Windows Vista released the same month in North America. People were so upset that the minimum requirement for Vista said 512 MB (which was already more than the average existing home PC of the time had without an upgrade) but it ran like crap unless you had more.
We truly had to get away with less back then. These days it feels like there is a bit more headroom where 8 GB is on the downtrend, 16 GB is becoming the most common, and the user's apps are enjoying the extra fat.