Booting Mac OSX on a Nintendo Wii

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Yes, you read that title, right? And no, I also can't believe that we're going to install Mac OS 10 on a Nintendo Wii. So, I guess let's go.

[00:00:15]And if you enjoy mildly cursed computing setups, I hope you'll consider subscribing to the channel. You see, this early 2000's iMac G3 and this Nintendo Wii actually share a lot in common. Crucially and surprisingly, CPU architecture. This iMac here is powered by a Power PC 750 CPU, which Apple marketed as the G3. And the Wii is powered by a Power PC 750 CL CPU. H, I think those numbers match. So, running Mac OS 10 on a Nintendo Wii might not be so impossible, just highly, highly improbable. Ah, yes. It's the soothing duet tones of the Nintendo Wii. Boy, I hate this controller. How do I find out what menu version I'm running? Uh H. Oh, 4.3U.

[00:01:09]Okay, sweet. So, we're going to be using a GitHub repository by Brian Keller, who did all of the heavy lifting here. And in addition to this wonderful GitHub repository he's put up, he also wrote a very indepth blog post detailing exactly all the magic he had to do to get this to work. And I have to admit some of this is pretty far above my pay grade.

[00:01:33]So I'm going to post a link to this in the description of the video of course and definitely recommend giving it a read. We however are going to be using the instructions in the GitHub repository which removes a lot of the uh hard stuff and should be fairly straightforward. Although the first thing we're going to have to do is jailbreak my Wii because I've never done that. And we're going to be using this hopefully straightforward jailbreaking process. And this also has a handy tool which lets us do a customized hack with our own MAC address and download a zip file that should jailbreak this without issue. Now to get the MAC address, we have to go into Wii settings and then we go to internet. Uhoh.

[00:02:19]Uh, this is easy to crack fortunately.

[00:02:22]So yeah, I don't know the PIN.

[00:02:25]Okay, so we have to go into parental controls. Change parental controls. I forgot the pin. I forgot again. Just take a quick picture of that. Michael MJD shared this tool many years ago.

[00:02:39]Let's see if this works. Please don't steal my confirmation number. Okay, there's my unlock code. Take a picture of that. Hopefully that works. All right, let's see here.

[00:02:52]7 6 7 9. Yes. All right. Now, we need to go to internet console information. Oh, there we go. MAC address. Take a quick picture of you. All right. Now, in our tool here, we've got version 4.3U. Yep.

[00:03:12]And then the MAC address. We've got 00 2659 0 E29.

[00:03:22]>> Oops.

[00:03:23]>> EC. And I'm sure that giving all this information out in a YouTube video is totally fine, right? All right. So, I grabbed a couple SD cards to use. Let's get this hack on the disc. So, I believe we need this. We need to unzip it. There are some instructions, but this seems quite simple. Let's go hack our Wii.

[00:03:45]And right into the little front-facing SD card slot, this goes.

[00:03:51]Power on.

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[00:05:15]Oh, there it is. We're jailbreaking now.

[00:05:18]Oh, yeah. We got it. All right, we'll just install everything. Install the homebrew channel. Yep. And boot me. We need to prepare an SD card. Okay, we'll install to the SD card we're currently using. Success. I think we've got it.

[00:05:36]Oh, yeah. The homebrew channel. All right, so we need two SD cards. Here's the one containing boot me. And here is a new one which will be the Mac OS 10 file system. We'll pop that in. All right. Here is our boot me disc.

[00:05:51]Download the latest version from releases. I already did that. We'll copy this to the root folder, the SD card.

[00:06:00]And in boot me, we have power PC boot.fm boot.bin. Yep. And in we've got our two files. Set the correct video mode. Okay.

[00:06:11]Config.ext. text video mode NTSCP probably fine and then next on a different SD card we'll prepare a Mac OS 10 system to be installed all right eject this card next we need three partitions all right so we'll follow these instructions to format this disc dis disc 9 okay all right in this list here we've got our patched kernel and drivers all right make a Mac folder in here for our patched drivers right here. And now what we're doing is copying the installer from the DMG installer, official installer from Apple for 10.0 and we're copying that to the install partition on the SD card. So it will boot the Mac OS 10 installer and yep, seems fine. Input output error. Great.

[00:07:08]All right. I don't know why this is being so grumpy. Let's change this block size.

[00:07:14]Well, hopefully that completes. All right. So, first in goes the boot me SD card, which should get us into an installer. All right. This next part is a little bit weird, but hopefully it works and we've configured everything correctly. Once we're in the homebrew channel, we have to press home and then go down to launch boot me. And now, interestingly, in the boot me, the controller doesn't work. It doesn't do anything. And instead of using this thing, we use the controls on the front of the Wii. We press the power button to change the option. So, we go over to SD card and then reset to select it. And then we scroll through the SD card list again using the power button. Select WAC. And then we go down to WAC.f, elf, which should boot the Mac OS 10 installer, or at least bootstrap us into this, which is the actual Mac OS 10 installer, because Weac is basically a bootloader. A magical, wonderful bootloader. All right, will you boot Mac OS 10? Blue screen. That's promising.

[00:08:23]Power button still illuminated. So, I'm just going to let this go for a while and hopefully it boots something. Well, apparently something has gone horribly wrong because it's been at this blue screen now for like an hour. Pretty sure it's not going to boot into Mac OS or the bootloadader. But I have a solution.

[00:08:40]And since there is no way this can possibly go wrong at this point, he says assuredly, let's hook up a USB keyboard, Bondi blue Apple keyboard of course, and the tasty cake mouse because yes, there are custom drivers written for these USB ports and in fact for a lot of stuff inside the Wii. All right, I've got a good feeling that we're about to be computing instead of just gaming. Chuck this in here. Uh, these buttons don't do anything right now because I think it is frozen. Turn it off. Back on. All right.

[00:09:16]Press A to continue. Sure.

[00:09:20]I'll go homebrew channel.

[00:09:24]Launch boot me. Uh, okay. I've switched the video mode to NTSCI and it looks like it's working. It is now telling us to swap the SD card to our Mac OS 10 SD card. I think it was this one. And then enter uh reset power.

[00:09:44]Oh, look at that. Bootable partitions.

[00:09:46]Macintosh HD and install. Power to select in. No, power removes it. Okay.

[00:09:52]Reset to select. Install. Loading kernel. Holy smokes. Ah, yes. My favorite. Failed to load kernel. Great.

[00:10:00]So, I put the Mac OS 10 SD card in here and selected the boot. Blue screen.

[00:10:06]Flickering disc drive. What the heck does this mean? Why is it flickering like that? Is it loading? All right. So, I had a sneaking suspicion that this was perhaps a symptom of a video issue. So, I went out and bought a cheap HDMI adapter for my Nintendo Wii. I think it's working. OH MY GOD, IT'S BOOTING.

[00:10:26]NO FREAKING WAY. It was booting this whole time. That's what this flickering was. It just couldn't handle this video mode. I guess for some reason Mac OS 10 doesn't like RCA connectors.

[00:10:37]No freaking way. This is Mac OS 10.

[00:10:40]We're at the desktop. This is freaking wild. Did I just find my new daily driver? Oh, we're in, friends. We are in. Oh, it's beautiful.

[00:10:53]Oh my god. This is This is freaking ridiculous. I cannot believe that this works. Let's see about this Mac.

[00:11:01]All right, there we go. 78 megs of RAM.

[00:11:03]The Nintendo Wii has a really weird RAM configuration where it's like split in half in a way that I don't even understand. But yeah, the developer here patched them together and gave us 78 megs of RAM on our G3 CPU. I cannot freaking believe this. All right. Well, let's start with what doesn't work.

[00:11:21]Everything. Obviously, as you expect, this does nothing in here. There are no Mac OS 10 drivers for that sensor bar.

[00:11:28]But there's also no driver for sound or networking or anything. Even the video driver here is I think just the frame buffer because why would Apple create video drivers for the Nintendo Wii? It is honestly extremely wild that this just freaking works. I mean, okay, okay, okay. We had some trouble getting it to go. But this image here, this is actually provided by the developer and it is an even more upto-date Mac OS 10.

[00:11:58]Yeah, I think we're at 104. So, this is an updated Mac OS Cheetah. There are some things installed on here. We've got lots of developer tools, Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, and Excel in case you want this to be your day-to-day computer. Oh no, it's starting the classic environment. Oh my god, we have the classic environment on here. No freaking way. It's best to stop the classic. Yeah, continue starting. Oh, look at that happy mech. Oh, this is so freaking wild. All right. Well, it took freaking forever, but we got there. Look at this. We have Microsoft Word on classic. We also have the Oregon Trail.

[00:12:36]Oh my goodness. License to Jenny Rossman rules. All right, let's be pioneers.

[00:12:44]Yeah. So, this is uh this is frankly something I didn't expect classic mode to be fully working and working well. I mean, there's no lag. It just works. Is there anything else on here? All right.

[00:12:58]Just some boot stuff. Oh, yeah. I forgot the computer icon is an iMac G3 in this version. I love that. Yeah, not a whole ton of applications pre-installed, but we could very easily get software onto here from, say, the Macintosh Garden because it's pretty easy to write to an SD card. Again, a lot of things don't work. We already talked about sound, the optical drive, any sort of acceleration, networking does not work, which is unfortunate. Also, this is the only screen resolution we're going to get out of the Nintendo Wii unless we do some hacking. And if we do that hacking, we will get a bigger resolution, but it will be very slow. So, I think this is well 640x480, and that's good enough for me. So, the Nintendo Wii, a serious business computer. And this also serves to remind me that there are people out there doing literal magic just to see if it's possible. So, thank you, kind developer, for this literal work of art. But that'll do it for today's video. If you want to try any of this stuff for yourself, I'll put links down in the description below. And thank you very much for watching. And I just want to give a very special thank you to all of my Patreon supporters and channel members. Thank you so much each and every one of you for supporting me and supporting this channel and all the weird stuff I do. I am so very grateful and I just could not do this without you.