A long-running project ports classic PowerPC Mac OS to Nintendo systems built around ArtX chipsets: the GameCube, Wii and potentially Wii U. Its author reached the desktop for the first time, showing Mac OS 7.6 and 9.2.2 running on a Wii, and presents the milestone as a rare modern effort to bring classic Mac OS to an unsupported machine. The work began in 2025 and grew from the author’s earlier Windows NT ports and interest in the peculiar layers of legacy Mac hardware and software. It is still far from ready for public release.
The main challenge is adapting software that expects Apple-specific firmware, memory layouts and peripherals. The port uses OpenBIOS to launch Mac OS’s Trampoline bootloader, then patches assumptions about physical memory, memory-mapped devices, interrupt controllers and power management. Further changes address failures in both the PowerPC kernel and its embedded 68k code, including missing hardware and an existing infinite-loop bug. Custom display and controller drivers made the system usable, while an OpenBIOS disk format and a driver that presents storage as SCSI enabled later boot experiments. The author also had to handle quirks in Mac OS disk drivers, such as scatter-gather reads. Even after these efforts, startup-device detection remained a problem under investigation, illustrating how much device-specific behavior must be reconstructed to run an old operating system on new hardware.
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