Porting Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii

Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) running natively on the Nintendo Wii

Bryan Keller’s Dev Blog

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.

Adversarial software development is also when I do my best work