YHK - yet another hacker news clone

My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii

113 points DHowett 2 hours ago 24 comments

VladVladikoff 1 hour ago | parent

Is it possible to go the other way? Make a PowerMac into a Nintendo Wii?

odo1242 1 hour ago | parent

The Nintendo Wii notably has two processors that run different operating systems, so you might need some emulation or hardware modifications to do so

spijdar 1 hour ago | parent

The GPU would also be a problem. I don't think the Wii/Gamecube's GPU block really corresponds to any ATI/AMD card.

What you could probably do is take a Wii emulator like Dolphin and virtualize the CPU. Basically combine Dolphin and KVM_PR, getting ~native CPU performance while still needing to do 3D translation and simulate the IOS side of the Wii.

(Wii games run with the CPU in the supervisor state IIRC, so you can't just run them as processes under an OS, you'd either need a proper hypervisor or to catch traps caused by running supervisor instructions in "problem state", a la KVM_PR.)

RandallBrown 25 minutes ago | parent

Not exactly what you're asking about, but related and from the same time period. The original Xbox 360 dev kit was a PowerMac G5.

https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Alpha_Xenon_Development_Kit

unfocused 1 hour ago | parent

Interesting timing. Nintendo just shutdown Mariokart Tour on mobile. I went back to my Nintendo Wii which was already modded, and updated it to the latest modded hacks and I was amazed to see more software, stability, and even online gaming brought back!

Hopefully their port of Mac OS gets put in the Open Shop Channel!

Open Shop Channel: https://oscwii.org WiiLink for online gaming: https://wiilink.ca

jedbrooke 1 hour ago | parent

The Wii was truly the peak of gaming consoles.

Games still came on disk so there wasn’t the madness of endless buggy updates (disks had one opportunity to be bug free so quality was at a higher standard) and internet connectivity was not guaranteed, so there was no way for micro transactions.

However, internet connectivity was available, so things like optional online play were still possible, as well as some basic user generated content.

flanz_10 1 hour ago | parent

> The Wii was truly the peak of gaming consoles.

everyone says that about their childhood :)

jedbrooke 1 hour ago | parent

guilty as charged here. I will say my parents are quite fond of the Wii too though. (they’re not really gamers though)

thefunnyman 34 minutes ago | parent

Yeah part of the magic of the Wii was that everyone seemed to have one. Even grandparents and other folks that wouldn't usually have a game console seemed to have them and be able to figure it out.

FractalParadigm 30 minutes ago | parent

There's an objective argument behind this statement that could be made though - everyone, and I mean _almost literally everyone_ tried a Wii at some point during its regular lifespan. Even if it was just Wii Sports, it brought millions of people into video games who only considered them another toy. Parents, grandparents, a lot of the people who chastised video games for years were suddenly enamoured with virtual bowling and sword fights, while the rest of us still got our fill of Mario et. al.

snowram 27 minutes ago | parent

As much as it pains me to say that, the same could be said about mobile gaming. In fact, I am pretty sure a lot of countries did not have access to Nintendo hardware but they can now enjoy gaming thanks to their phone.

doublepg23 21 minutes ago | parent

I did grow up with a number of mobile games from my childhood, but it seems like the ones people earnestly enjoy are maybe Pokemon Go and then a number of centuries old card games.

classified 14 minutes ago | parent

> _almost literally everyone_

Sorry to disappoint, but I don't even know what a Wii looks like. I've always been using my computer to play games on.

RajT88 26 minutes ago | parent

I was 26 when I bought one, and agree. I long for a modern STB with the Wii interface and lots of OSS to tinker with. The sounds, the music, the tactile feel of using the WiiMode to navigate was sublime.

The games were cool too.

throwaway219450 1 hour ago | parent

For me it's the (New) 3DS. It's about the peak for handheld gaming. It can run GB, GBC, NES, SNES very well, GBA can run natively and obviously DS/3DS. You can run pretty much any Zelda game up to the GameCube on it with the official ports of Ocarina/Majora. The emulation community also has some promising demos of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, but who knows about that. I have a Switch and it's frustrating seeing games that Nintendo haven't released for it (like WW and Pokopia), but maybe after a decade I'll get a Switch 2 OLED whenever that comes out.

throwaway27448 59 minutes ago | parent

I don't disagree, but the wii remote market was/is the absolute worst console device market.

direwolf20 29 minutes ago | parent

The Wii was the first era where game discs came with console firmware updates that were silently installed and could lock you out owning your device.

deadnomore 57 minutes ago | parent

> This got me acquainted with the classic Mac OS,

> and I fell in love with the jank as it were (hacks

> upon hacks upon hacks going back to the 1980s is

> something I’d definitely describe as “jank”).

Modern macOS still has classic Mac OS code in it dating as far back, and has added Objective C and Swift abstractions on top.

hassaanr 52 minutes ago | parent

Yes but mostly not. Modern MacOS is based off of NeXTSTEP OS from the NeXT acquisition, not classic.

yjftsjthsd-h 50 minutes ago | parent

That surprises me; I assumed they dropped the last pre-Darwin code when they discontinued the classic environment. What remains that's that old?

fredoralive 32 minutes ago | parent

I seem to recall years ago reading that the Cocoa (the NeXTstep derived API) menu code called into the Carbon (the classic Mac OS derived API) code to run stuff. But that was around Snow Leopard IIRC. That sort of stuff might still be around?

The Carbon API itself lasted until 10.15 (Catalina / 2019) for 32 bit apps, so there's presumably at least some classic Mac OS derived code in there until then.

my123 13 minutes ago | parent

Menus got moved away from Carbon on macOS 14.

You'll get this error if you try to use the Carbon menu APIs:

> References to Carbon menus are disallowed with AppKit menu system on macOS 14 and newer. Use instances of NSMenu and NSMenuItem directly instead

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...

StilesCrisis 47 minutes ago | parent

Does it? I am pretty sure the entire Carbon stack is retired now.