Modder Installs Mac OS On The Nintendo Wii And Tries To Play Doom, Watch Here

As you may well know, the original Nintendo Wii is based on fundamentally the same CPU as Nintendo's previous home system, the Gamecube. That's an IBM PowerPC chip known as "Broadway," which is essentially the same thing as the PowerPC 750CL. It's a 32-bit CPU that runs at 729 MHz, and is a very close relative to the PowerPC G3 that was used in the Macintosh systems of the late 1990s.

With that in mind, it should be relatively easy to set up MacOS on one, right? Not so much, actually. Just like the presence of an x86-64 CPU does not make the PlayStation 4 a "PC", the presence of a PowerPC G3 does not make the Wii compatible with the Macintosh. You can still put MacOS on one, though, and that's exactly what Pierre Dandumont has done in this video on his YouTube channel.


You'll see a Linux boot screen in the video, and the reason for that is because this boondoggle makes use of the venerable MacOnLinux open-source project to run a psuedo-virtualized MacOS 9.2 inside Linux. That's necessary for all kinds of reasons, but most of all because while there are numerous Linux distributions available for the Wii, there are no MacOS drivers for any of the Wii's hardware.

Even using Linux as an end-around, nothing works completely correctly, with distorted on-screen fonts and poor audio quality—to say nothing of the performance, which is abysmal. He loads up The Ultimate Doom, which runs, albeit at around one frame per second.

If you'd like to read the full story of how Pierre got MacOS 9.2 to boot on the Nintendo Wii, you can hit up his blog, where he explains the whole convoluted process—although you'll want to bring along Google Translate if you don't read Français. We don't recommend trying it for yourself, though, and neither does he.