Hacker News: blkhp19

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:59:14 +0000

I started with CLion, and found the UX to be completely foreign (not at all Mac-like) and overall frustrating to use.

Xcode is definitely not perfect, but it's IDE I'm most used to, so I ended up doing my most of my editing in it.

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:53:09 +0000

I considered this! There were a lot of things I wanted to try but didn't want the timeline of this project to blow up any more than it already had. Now that I've done the hard part of writing about it and publishing it, I can revisit some of these ideas :)

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 03:29:55 +0000

Thanks! The project was mostly C for the bootloader and C++ for the drivers.

As for which part was the most challenging... probably understanding the IOKit driver model. I really would have benefitted from having an expert explain some of the concepts to me, and give me some advice about how to structure my own drivers.

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:13:52 +0000

Your ports were a huge inspiration - thanks for contributing so much to this space!

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:57:59 +0000

I'm intrigued by this technique! Will look into it, thanks for the tip!

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:57:15 +0000

Last I checked, the 60fps frame buffer conversion resulted in the system idling at 18% CPU. Certainly not ideal. I'd love to optimize this further.

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:35:08 +0000

Yes - this project (and countless others) would not have been possible without the incredible work to hack the Wii from Team Twiizers (now fail0verflow) back in the day. The work they did was a huge inspiration for me getting into computer science when I was a teenager.

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:57:44 +0000

I was - incredible views indeed!

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:56:10 +0000

Very cool! I'd love to learn more. That seems extra challenging considering Mac OS 9 is closed source!

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:54:50 +0000

Thank you for the kind words :)

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:14:03 +0000

With the extra RAM, higher clock speed, and no need to waste CPU cycles converting YUV -> RGB framenbuffers - I bet it would be!

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:54:53 +0000

Images now expand when clicked - thanks for the feedback!

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:40:46 +0000

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.

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:31:08 +0000

My Wii has been on many planes and trains - and yes, there is a photo of each in my post.

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:20:50 +0000

> Looking for private API behavior or working around bugs?

Exactly this!

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:11:53 +0000

I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a very tiny part of my motivation :)

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:00:46 +0000

I used plenty of non-agentic AI to help understand the XNU codebase, and also research various topics. It wasn't always correct, but it certainly helped at times! My philosophy for this project was to use it as a learning tool - since that was kind of the whole point of me attempting this :)

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:55:07 +0000

There are bugs and undocumented behaviors that need to be understood in order to be worked around - I wish it wasn't the case but such is life developing for closed-source platforms.

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:40:02 +0000

I only tested on Safari - whoops! Fixed now.

New comment by blkhp19 in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

blkhp19 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:39:42 +0000

Whoops, thanks! Fixed.