Installing Mac OS on the Nintendo Wii!

well if you thought that installing Linux on the Wii was crazy enough buckle up hello everybody and welcome back to another video now in today's episode yeah we're going to be trying something kind of crazy running Mac OS on the Nintendo Wii which is something that I feel like has been talked about ever since people began tinkering and messing around with the Wii in ways that Nintendo would rather you not because this thing has a power PC processor inside that is part of the same series of processors found in G3 iMacs of course there's a lot more to OS compatibility than just the type of processor but it's something that got people thinking if this was possible and I've received many comments about it over the years so I actually started working on this project a while back when I was sent a link to this video shot in 2009 I'm still saving up for a capture card style it shows Mac OS booting on the Wii and there was a link in the description to a RAR file containing everything you need so I thought great this should make for a pretty simple video which was my first mistake because as I'm sure you're all aware things are never simple on this channel if we dig into the files here you'll notice that this is just a copy of dosbox for the Wii because as it turns out this whole thing is accomplished by using Fusion not VMware Fusion this is a 68k Mac emulator for MS-DOS meaning that yes you have to go through two emulation layers to get this working and as you can imagine that doesn't work super well because holy cow this thing is slow remember that video I mentioned before well it's 15 minutes long and all of that time is spent loading into Mac OS which doesn't even finish before the video cuts off and that's basically the same thing that happened to me so I began to wonder if there was a way to install Mac OS natively on the Wii without relying on emulation and turns out there is and it's made possible using the Mac on Linux project that's been around for over a decade now which lets you run the classic Mac OS and even some OS 10 versions on Lin 6 natively there's no CPU emulation or anything and luckily for us someone from GBA temp has already taken the Liberty to prepare an SD card image with everything set up and ready to go so all we have to do is download it flash it to an SD card pop it into the Wii launch boot me and yeah again nothing is ever simple on this channel when the disk drive light flashes like this it's letting you know that it can't boot into boot me of course we're not trying to boot into boot me but we've replaced it with modified files that allow Wii Linux to run in place of it so something's not working right I initially thought that something was wrong with the image because we were able to get Linux working just fine on this thing in a previous video but nobody who responded to the original post said anything about it not working and I was able to find this French blog post detailing the process of doing this and there didn't seem to be anything that indicated something was up with the image so I began to troubleshoot I re-downloaded the image I tried different SD cards even different pieces of software to flash it multiple times over and in the end nothing worked which is hands down the most frustrating feeling ever when something works just fine for everybody else but when you do the same thing there's a problem so after spending some more time tinkering with this this whole thing I had a brain wave I thought maybe the problem lies only in the bootable partition on the SD card and the partition actually containing the OS and data is intact so to put this Theory to the test I went through the process of installing regular Wii Linux on the console again just like I did in that other video and then I took the SD card out and plugged it into my computer along with the card that had the Mac on Wii image flash to it I then opened up a partitioning tool to delete the boot partition from the Mac on Wii card and clone the boot partition from the regular Wii Linux card over to it it works and let me tell you I had never been this happy to see Linux starting up in my entire life but I shouldn't have gotten too excited because although Linux booted up just fine and all the necessary files were there Mac on Linux wouldn't start it kept spitting out an error saying that it couldn't find the necessary kernel modules that corresponded to the version of the Linux kernel that we were running there was a way to bypass this by appending Dash a to the end of the command but that didn't help at all it now said that the module format was invalid and then it couldn't be loaded so the next thing I did was append dash dash list to the end of the start Mall commands that we could see what modules were available to us and I immediately noticed the mismatch the version of the Linux kernel running on the Wii was 2.6.32 Dash Isobel Dash we but the module needed to run Mac OS was compiled for kernel version 2.6.32.71 I tried looking around online for a version of the module for the kernel that we were running but it proved rather difficult the Mac on Linux website though still online is filled with links that point to a now non-existent FTP server however I was able to locate the Project's sourceforge page and I was almost about to download all of these packages and rummaged through them to see if they had what we needed but then I had another brainwave if you remember from the Wii Linux video we updated the Linux kernel version by swapping out the PPC boot.el file on the boot partition with a new one which had updated support for the Wii's wireless adapter so I went back to the SD card flash with the image from GBA temp grabbed its PPC boot.elf and used it to replace the one on the SD card I was using and it booted up and now we have this image of tux on screen during the boot process which was a good sign because it wasn't there before indicating that the kernel version is indeed different I confirmed this after logging in when the system identified itself as Linux white 2.6.32.71 an exact match and when I tried to start Mac on Linux this time it just said that it couldn't find any bootable disk which is an error I'm more than happy to see if we take a look back at the GBA temp thread the poster says that Mac on Linux was set up to look for a hard disk image file called imac.hfv on the root of a USB drive plugged into the Wii so I went ahead and downloaded this pre-installed image of Mac OS 8.1 from Macintosh repository renamed it and put it on the USB drive then I mounted the drive on the Wii started up X again and ran start Maul for what seems like the 100th time however we ran into yet another problem because even though Mac on Linux could find the hard disk image it said it wasn't bootable now it's worth noting that this image was specifically made for basilisk 2 which I'm sure handles ROM files a bit differently in fact Mac on Linux doesn't even require a separate ROM file to work but it does search for one on the hard disk image and I'm guessing it didn't find what it needed so plan B was to use a Mac OS 9 install CD image I had which was actually already configured as a bootable Drive in the configuration file just commented out along with the physical disk drive itself and yes because I know people will ask I did try to use this physical install CD I had but it turns out I was wasting my time because the Wii's optical drive only has a DVD laser though you are able to mount DVDs just fine using this command seen over on the Wiki page so yeah this thing has been a prop this whole time and you fell for it you freaking fell for it anyways after getting that configured it was time for the Moment of Truth [Music] oh foreign that's right it actually worked here's Mac OS 9 starting up on my Nintendo Wii let me tell you it was an amazing feeling to finally get this thing working after going through all of that nonsense and for those wondering yes I did try to get some early versions of os 10 booted up on this thing but I wasn't successful so os9 will have to do for now though we're far from done because we haven't installed the thing yet so here it is in all of its Glory it's honestly amazing to just get this running after going through all these hoops now you probably have noticed that uh well the text is a little bit screwed up to where it's basically illegible and from what I can tell this is just the side effect of running this on the Wii it just doesn't display this stuff properly though it's not all the text you know the menu options up here and pretty much everything in the menu bar is displayed just fine but it's these options when you go into the menus and the icons over here but these icons here or this texture rather displays just fine at least until you highlight it then it kind of just screws up yeah that is unfortunate but this is mentioned in the blog post uh from that guy that you know that this is something you just have to be aware of and he wasn't able to really find a solution to it but now that it really matters it will make it a little bit difficult to install uh Mac os9 but we are going to do that here and attempt to go through the installation wizard now you can see that the hard disk image that we tried to boot from originally with OS 8.5 on it or OS 8.6 whatever it was is mounted in here so this is it we've got all these applications on here and you know we could try to run like the Apple cd audio player let's see well there's an error message I cannot read I think I can make out CD-ROM I don't know uh but yeah so yeah here it is what we're going to try to do is just install Mac OS 9 on this hard disk image and just erase the existing install of os 8. so we'll run the installation wizard here and again not really going to be able to make out any of this but we'll hit on continue and so there it is Mac HDD I'm assuming I mean it's the only thing that shows up here so it has to be the uh you know drive and we can't hit select but I believe if we go to options here and we say perform clean installation uh this should allow us to overwrite yeah there it is so we'll hit select and okay we have a before you install I can make that out but yeah this is this is just really obnoxious but okay we'll hit continue I think this is the license agreement and let's see what options we get okay update Apple hardness drivers create installation report okay and what do we have under customize okay uh well I wish I could see what this stuff is um we'll just say don't customize we're just gonna go with what it does by default just a standard install uh so we'll hit start and here we go checking Mac HDD uh oh okay this just looks like an information pop-up not an error um but let's hit okay and see okay so that was evidently nothing major if this actually works I will be pleasantly surprised oh there we go see I spoke too soon I shouldn't have said anything I think configuration maybe is what that says uh um we can say try again so maybe this is just a problem with a file or something that says we can skip it but let's try again okay so it is the same thing so what does Skip do okay so maybe that was just all right it came up again here yeah this isn't looking good this is like uh you know when you're trying to install like Windows 95 and again it gets that last portion and can't recognize the CD driver and it comes up with all those like I can't find this file and you can just skip all of them but then you know you're missing a bunch of components when the system uh logs in so I mean we can I don't know let's just keep hitting Skip and see you know if it's able to install properly but yeah I literally can't tell what any of this says it's very difficult to make out now the other option which is what I'm gonna try to do if this doesn't work is just install os9 on another Mac and then you know make a a hard disk image of that and then copy it over the USB drive okay so we have this message it looks like this is the end of the word install or uninstall um I would hope it's saying Mac OS 9 has been successfully installed but I don't think something tells me that's not the case something tells me it's saying something else stop or continue what do we want to do let's try continue oh I think this is yeah this is just gonna do the same thing again so I'm guessing it failed to install although wait a second yeah it did write files to it because we've got Mac OS 9 applications here I don't know let's just try let's try to quit out of this oh I'm so used to OS 10 I'm going to the Apple menu let's put out of this and then we need to uh let's just exit out of here and I'm gonna go and edit that file here again and we'll just comment out the uh disk image here so that our hfv is the only thing that it can boot from so we'll save that and then we'll start X and start them all holy cow oh my gosh no freaking way it actually worked holy cow yep there it is there it is it's Mac os9 on the Wii like actually installed you know instead of just booting off of the disc um I think this is is this the setup assistant is that what this is we'll just close out of that are you sure yes God not being able to read like half this or more than half of this stuff is uh is very annoying but yeah Mac OS 9.2.2 uh 48 Megs of ram it's reporting I don't know let's try to launch uh some applications here let's see if QuickTime will open up oh my gosh it's so screwed up okay I can't even tell what these buttons are though we're not going to be able to hear anything if we try to play something because the sound driver is not loaded properly and that's where this comes in so I noticed this I was like why is there a disk image here we commented out the ISO file in the configuration document so how is it loading a disk image well this is uh something that Mac on Linux loads by default and this contains this audio patch that we have to drag onto the system folder and apparently this will allow us to display or to display to hear audio uh so let's go ahead and just do that and we'll hit okay okay I think that just copied there is a CD driver patch as well um but you open up the readme document and well you can't freaking read it because it's all it's all a bunch of gibberish now this is where I was experimenting I was doing this off camera I was looking at the uh fonts here because I was like maybe if it's a font issue if we select something and change the font but I went through all of these here and you're going to see it doesn't make a difference at all so now let's go to control panels again and where is sound at there it is get an error message it really it really sucks because I I literally can't even attempt to troubleshoot this because I have no idea what the freaking message says like it makes it impossible so I don't know uh if that actually were maybe we have to restart let's just try to do that now can we restart and will it automatically start up again or will this just quit out of mall and then we have to start let's find out yeah it just looks like it quits out of it completely so okay we'll start them all again oh wait I think I think that's all we needed yeah yeah I'm looking at the audio meters on the capture computer here and it's not it's not displaying anything but the sound panel did load so oh okay we gotta change it to mall audio this output device may not be available to currently running applications so they have quit okay let's try that there we go I don't know let's just go through some programs here and kind of browse through the uh the stuff now I again I think that some of this stuff is left over from the previous Osa install because like Netscape Communicator uh was not bundled with yeah or actually you can see it's not even in here or like the whole thing's not not in here we've got a couple QuickTime plug-in stuff that's still there but yeah so that was probably removed by the Mac OS 9 installer but it's not completely removed I thought it would have formatted the drive though but I guess not uh Sherlock too we can open that up uh yes we got that like pre-os 10 OS 10 design language going on here which is the style of the window we saw with QuickTime as well although to end off this video the right way we're gonna do one more little thing here oh yeah we're going there let's see how crazy I am I'm gonna close out of all these freaking windows that we left opened up and I think this is it here oh boy yes there we go oh my God oh my god dude I swear I wonder how like oh uh well what are the controls you use using the mouse no it's not using the mouse either it's not responding to my controls because they're configured wrong or oh wait no I think it's just going really slow I think that's what it's doing oh my God holy cow okay can we just quit out of this oh my yeah it's it's really bad holy cow look at that frame rate that is glorious yeah there is a port of Doom for the Wii because you know everything runs Doom it's just the law uh so you know that that's probably gonna give if you really want to run doom on the Wii there is a better way to do it than running it through uh Mac on Linux here um but this technically works I mean it does run it's just it's running at a such a such an awful frame rate to where it's literally unplayable so yeah I'm not even going to attempt to load a new game because uh I mean look at it it's running at like a negative frame rate I mean seriously but yeah I mean that oh gosh I just can't believe this actually works I mean it's such a great feeling like just going through all this troubleshooting to finally get the thing freaking working um so yeah that is that is Mac OS 9 installed and running on the Nintendo Wii without emulation or anything because again Mac on Linux is not an emulator and Linux you know we're not we're just running that on the Wii right like we did in that other video so this is incredibly awesome and uh yeah hopefully you guys enjoyed this video if you did be sure to give it a thumbs up get subscribed all that good stuff and as always I want to thank you all so much for watching and I will see you in the next video [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Michael MJD

Views: 693,869

Keywords: video, michaelmjd, mjd7999, game, review, overview, apple, microsoft, unboxing, tutorial, windows, how-to, mac, os, operation, system, michael mjd, wii, nintendo, macos, mac os, hackintosh

Id: mdXQ8rcmF48

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/A-Delonix-Regia]

TIL that the Nintendo Wii used PowerPC (IDK why but I assumed it was some proprietary instruction set).

I had the Wii (still do but haven't used it since maybe 2016, because I had become more interested in iPad games) and loved it, but for some reason it used to shutdown after just 20 minutes every time. But now that I think about it, it was definitely either a damaged cooling system or the heat from the set-top box next to it.

[u/CAPSLOCKCHAMP]

Now you too can experience the entire OS stopping what it’s doing when you click the menu bar

[u/LongjumpingFormal287]

The best mac gaming setup on the market!