My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii | Hacker News Reader

My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii

virtuallyfun.com

382 pointsDHowett110 comments

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

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.

> The Wii was truly the peak of gaming consoles.

everyone says that about their childhood :)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I suppose. 95%+ of the games I've played on my phone are one euchre implementation. I tried a couple of early space-shooting games (Motorola Photon Q era and earlier) and basically gave up on the idea. No joystick, trying to hit the right spot on a phone to actually do anything is hard (I type with one finger on a phone vs. 140+ wpm on a keyboard), etc. Plus, I rarely have sound on, so that part is also missing.

Games I currently play: SupermegaBaseball, Assetto Corsa (with wheel), Dirt series on gaming PC. Also various Mario etc games on Wii U.

Probably, but the Wii games are actually good, as well, not microtransaction slop factories.

While the Wii didn't have modern microtransactions, its surprise popularity led to a lot of poorly produced cash grab games. I'd count those as slop, even if they aren't AI-produced slop.

The term for those is "shovelware", and the Wii really did have a lot of it.

> _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.

>There's an objective argument behind this statement that could be made though

Everyone says that about their childhood too :)

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.

The Wii had possibly the best big screen UI I’ve ever used. I always thought having the live icon tiles on a regular TV with station previews would be incredible. The WiiMotes worked so much better than the Samsung and LG remote pointers do now.

There's been HTPC frontends that emulated that UI. I think no longer maintained.

These days, probably you could feed a video into Claude Code and have it spit out one which is pretty decent.

We bought the first Wii at 35. We still have a Wii U for the family and still play 4-player games, and have 8 WiiMotes for Smash Brothers.

Bought my first one 3 years ago. It's used occasionally -- I'm not a gamer at all but I have a little kid and she likes it.

Wii U is even better since it can play all the Wii games. And that's NOT my childhood - my childhood was audio cassette drives for storage.

In defense the Wii was popular with people that very likely died of natural causes years ago.

Not sure why this was offensive, the Wii had quite a bit of market success with the elderly.

I grew up playing NES and SNES games and DOS games like Doom and Quake, and while I have a lot of fond memories and still think very highly of many of the games of that era, there’s no way I’d call it peak gaming. I’ve revisited them a lot over the years and game development as an art has certainly come a long way since then IMO.

So, yes, I agree with you and I frequently make this point about music, that everyone thinks music peaked when they were in high school.

(And if I were to make an argument about a childhood console being peak, for me it'd be the 64 or GameCube!)

But I think the Wii was a singularly unique console because it brought a particular kind of casual gaming to the masses that no console before or after has been able to do. Looking back, it's wild that people wanted to buy a bunch of custom hardware to play Rock Band! And the Wiimotes are probably the best TV controllers ever made.

> everyone thinks music peaked when they were in high school

Nah. Music clearly peaked about 10 years before I was born.

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.

rare as an unicorn though, especially the smaller version

I've got one of those smaller ones in its box, bought back in 2016 from a GameStop I still frequent. Is it really particularly rare?

I don't know that I'd call them rare, but secondhand prices are a bit crazy. Knowledge of how cool modded 3DSes were spread on social media and the eBay prices all shot up. It's a similar cost to a Switch 1 IIRC. The non-XL New 3DS did come to America pretty late so they aren't as common over here. I got a Japanese one originally because they weren't out over here at the time. There's also the IPS panel lottery to worry about. If yours has an IPS panel for one or both screens, it's worth a bit more.

I’ve not been able to figure out if the Japanese ones will work for me so I’m always hesitant.

Yes if you jailbreak it

It removes the region lock and you can set the system language to english. The eShop was shutdown already so that doesn’t matter

Just seconding this real quick; I bought New 3DS systems in both standard and XL sizes from Japan. It's easy enough to jailbreak/install CFW on them and get it set up so you don't have to worry about it. (Note this was well before tariffs and other import problems, so I have no idea what the market looks like and if there are any caveats to be aware of if you live in the US.)

Nah, the PSP. Being a die hard geek/nerd I played both Slashem at 50MHZ with the CFW, MSX/GB/GBC/NES/SNES/MD/SMS/NeoGeo/Who-knows games under emulators, GBA games (being better on that far better than the GBA itself, savestates and a clear, big screen) and OFC its own PSP (and PSX eboots) games.

And Scummvm, too, to play some gems such as Broken Sword and Lucas Arts adventures.

And I my childhood I loved the Game Boy, but the PSP was almost the GBA I wanted in my early teen years, but enhanced. Oh, and it doubled as a portable media device, so I could watch videos on the go (before smartphones). I ripped up everything from a PC.

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

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.

Wouldn’t this criteria make PS2 and Xbox “peak gaming” also? I remember playing CoD online on PS2 and many praising Xbox for its online features.

Once PS3 and Xbox 360 came in picture, things changed slightly since they relied more heavily on their network services… albeit, PSN back then was free for online gameplay. These were on the same generation as Wii, but Wii was a winner for casual playing.

I wouldn't disagree with that!

Mind you, I broke my video game addiction shortly after that time-period - my last console was an Xbox 360 - and haven't got a firm grasp on what's come since.

A lot of aging millennials would agree with this statement. PS2 was peak Sony for sure and the original Xbox is one of the very few things Microsoft got right.

2001 for the PS2 was one of the greatest years in gaming history.

Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 2, Gran Turismo, and GTA.

> GTA

I'm guessing you mean GTA 3, but then we also had GTA Vice City... and GTA San Andreas. Which are all three in the top 5 selling games for the PS2.

Im going PS2 as peek as the sheer number of titles made for it and the ability to play PS1. First edition PS3 with hardware backward compatibility and running yellow dog linux might win over that if they didnt nerf it.

That being said I recently got the Analog 3d with 4 controllers and theres something amazing about the speed at which u can boot and get into a 4 player game.

Relevant video from one of my favourite youtube channels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwnphd_QUXo

and Katamari Damacy!

Xbox 360 was pretty great. My favorite game to play online there was fight night round 3. It was an incredible experience. Managed to climb to the top 50 on the leaderboards!

Also the peak console experience for me as an 80s kid, but the RRoD means MS definitely didn’t get it right.

Later revisions fully fixed RRoD. Not to excuse the original issue, but if you get one of the S models (Trinity or early Corona boards), they're extremely reliable in my experience. I even saw a guy pour a whole can of Mountain Dew Voltage into his Halo Reach edition 360 while it was on (not on purpose, can tipped over) and after some time in front of a space heater it was good to go again. The 360 aged like wine and is very worth modding and playing still today.

Make the console drink the Verification Can. I like the cut of his jib!

360 was excellent. Yeah RROD but the library actually is very impressive.

The 360 remains my favorite M$ console to date. The indie game store was a wild place with some real hidden gems, the controller is still good, and it had the last good iteration of Geometry Wars

Especially big kudos to the team that made XNA possible and the creative arcade, only to be killed later by the usual C++ advocacy group, replaced by the much less interesting DirectX TK.

some late system releases of games on ps2 were weaker ports of things on the ps3/360. But other than that ps2 is a solid consideration for peak gaming alongside xbox/dreamcast/wii

Xbox360 might not be the most important console out of ALL consoles, but I think it's the most important _modern_ console. Online gaming, online store, an indie game channel with XNA (which itself was revolutionary, even though some of its importance might be forgotten today), HD support. A lot of things it got right back when these were all brand new on a console. Plus it had geometry wars.

It was the first system of a modern design in a lot of ways.

Six hardware threads, so the thread per subsystem model didn't really work. Instead you got the best results from a DAG of tasks submitted to a job stealing scheduler running on most of the CPU resources. But beside that, no little DSPs that you had to separate work out onto other than the GPU.

And it had the first consumer GPU to incorporate unified shaders (so vertex and pixel shaders ran on the same cores, dynamically scheduled to improve utilization).

The 360’s GPU was very modern, but I’m hesitant to give the 360 the “modern design” label because of how esoteric those CPU cores were; And the major hoops developers needed to jump through to get them preforming at peak performance, along with offloading work to the GPU.

They had SMT, but unlike every other implementation of SMT I’m aware of, memory stalls on one thread would stall both threads… which kind of defeats the primary purpose of SMT.

At least with the PS3’s Cell, the SPUs were designed to be esoteric on purpose. It seems like Xenon kind of just ended up being esoteric by accident. (Or maybe they ended up like that because Microsoft were cheating off Sony’s homework)

IME SMT is approximately useless if your code is any good and you have one obvious source of load (the foreground game, a trading engine, etc). I just reduce thread count to at most the number of physical cores if my software is the dominant workload. How did developers typically work around that xbox deficiency?

Geometry wars was very fun. I played on PC always trying to top my friends high scores.

PS2 is certainly a high-point in retro gaming via emulation. The huge, diverse game library spanning >10 years, a great emulator in PCSX2 and tons of community mods and HD texture packs make it amazing.

You've got the option of OG authenticity with CRT emulation (although I use a shader emulating a high-end analog RGB CRT so the effect is more subtle) or you can 'upgrade' games to looking and feeling quite modern yet without the modern cruft. Also want to give a nod to PS3 / X360 emulation as both have come a long way in the last ~18 months and I'm really enjoying working my way through a backlog of titles I never played back in the day.

not every console stays connected to my tv... and wii stayed. wii sports is still fun and get everyone moving during a rainy day which is quite an achievement all by itself

> so quality was at a higher standard

sonic_boom.jpeg.gif

Dreamcast came with a modem and an optional Ethernet adapter 8 years earlier. The GD-ROM was too clever by half. But perhaps it was the prototype of peak game consoles. I have a soft spot because the home brew scene on that started a full quarter century ago.

The whole Dreamcast was too clever by half. I regret that is what killed Sega as a (home) hardware company.

The "classic" console homebrew scenes are incredible. The stuff I've seen for PS1 never ceases to impress.

In some ways, it seems like the heyday of a console is long after it is commercially viable.

Part of why the Dreamcast was too clever was Sega letting Microsoft use it as an R&D vehicle for Xbox.

It's fascinating how close Nintendo got to doing the same thing with their Sony partnership while Sony was R&Ding early PlayStation.

The motion controls make it age really poorly imo (motion controls aren't bad, but forced motion controls to do anything is)

The pointing feature was snappy and worked well. The motion controls were pretty badly implemented.

Outside of a handful pf motionplus compatible games, there was no gyroscope. Everything relied on a 3axis accelerometer.

When they were shoved in yes, it's terrible. But the effortless way they were incorporated in games like Super Mario Galaxy is something special.

Agree to disagree on the Wii. It was fun, but the poor thing got a lot of dust in our households. A bit too gimmicky for us. Doubly so for the Wii U.

I'll forgive you for thinking Wii was the peak because people are obviously biased based on the time they grew up. For me it was the SNES/Genesis era. Or arguably PlayStation 1.

> Nintendo just shutdown Mariokart Tour on mobile.

Eek my son is not gonna be happy about that

I've played more MK Wii custom tracks, on split-screen multiplayer, than pretty much any other multiplayer game for the past few years.

The custom mkwii wiki has 17,000 articles https://www.mkwiiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

Same guy who made NT for Macintosh https://github.com/Wack0/Macintosh and GC/Wii https://github.com/Wack0/entii-for-workcubes if you're unaware.

> 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.

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

But in the early days, a lot of UI and OS frameworks were based on Carbon stuff ported from Classic MacOS with Cocoa wrappers on them.

One sibling mentioned the menus. Another sibling mentioned the Security framework. The SDK for macOS Golden Gate still ships with headers dating back to MacOS 8.6 (although they are mostly deprecated now) https://kalleboo.com/linked/macos86security_vs_macosgoldenga...

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

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.

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...

Most of the Security framework still dates from OS 9.

Is that so? Say more? Such fond memories of reading about Copland in MacAddict…. Then OS9…

These headers for the Keychain certainly do look familiar https://kalleboo.com/linked/macos86security_vs_macosgoldenga...

Pretty sure the menu bar was Carbon in Snow Leopard, which was the same release that discontinued Classic. Lots of Cocoa widgets called into HIToolbox under the hood. QuickTime wasn't fundamentally changed. And iTunes of course was Carbon code for a very, very long time.

NewPtr() and Delay() date back to System 1.0, and they're still present in macOS 14, at least.

UI-level Carbon is gone, but various low-level APIs persist.

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

Yeah I think you are right, I should say that some of that code was ported and still survives today in 26 uses some of the same APIs and naming, but isn’t necessarily the same code from classic Mac OS. One example is RegisterEventHotKey.

RegisterEventHotKey didn't actually exist in OS 9. It was added in CarbonLib only.

"CarbonLib" implies Mac OS 9 (or 8) — it's the classic Mac OS implementation of the Carbon API. The OS X implementation is Carbon.framework (or more precisely, various frameworks under its umbrella).

RegisterEventHotKey() is available "in CarbonLib 1.3 and later" according to Universal Interfaces.

They moved it to HIToolbox when Carbon framework was eliminated.

This was never provided by classic Mac OS and many apps hacked it in by hooking Get/WaitNextEvent. In Carbon they didn't support this sort of "mangle the global system callbacks" shenanigans, but there was a real developer expectation of this API, and Apple was begging developers to port to Carbon. This API filled that gap.

HIToolbox still lives in /System/Library/Frameworks IIRC

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

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

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.)

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

Soooo... can you make a Wii out of an Xbox 360? :D

Xbox Wii60

but why? :)

There's no point.

Doing things that are fun is the point

The author literally said that he did it for fun and to learn, at the beginning of the post

Apart from exporting experience to future endeavours with more "point".

And "fun", relevant as other are insisting noticing, is another thing you build and will return in the future.

Nintendo Wii have made for neat zero knowledge Nostr relays, mesh-net (CJDNS) routers, and other makeshift "underground" infrastructure.

USB hubs, USB SATA adapters and USB Ethernet interfaces for the win.

this reminds me of how the original xbox 360 dev kits were actually just powermac G5s. the mid-2000s were a wild time for cross-platform hardware.

Wii turns 20 on 19th November 2026.

I was 10 when it came out. I remember the hype being so crazy. It’s all anybody talked about at school. Wii was going to bring us into the future and make all of our dreams come true.

It was totally awesome. But the advertised promise of motion controls didn’t really land until Wii motion+ controllers. When I played skyward sword I thought “ok THIS looks like the ads”

My kids' mother (who lived overseas) won a contest. She didn't win a Wii, she one the opportunity to buy a Wii. She sent it to them for Christmas, and twenty years later I don't think I have ever seen them so excited.

For about a year, we played Rockband (especially the Beatles version) for an hour every day. We had the Rockband 3 keyboard, and one of the kids decided that he'd like to learn the piano. Twenty years later and a B.Mus. and M.Mus. later, we just attended the premiere of his musical (not, not a big one, but still...) in Toronto.

His career literally wouldn't have happened without the Wii.

If I can play Specter or Shuffle board air hokey, the BW boulder dash clone, Marathon, I'm game. Can I? You just cost me some, now a search for a Mac classic. The emulators don't do it for me.

What do you find lacking in the emulators? I don't mean to suggest that they leave no room for improvement — I'm asking how to improve them.

My own emulator (Advanced Mac Substitute) can run Spectre Challenger, by the way.

Emulators are lacking the "nostalgia" of the hardware. I've bought and returned many handhelds, like the Abernic *. Playing Tetris on my 2DS or TOTK on my Switch is a completely different experience than on any of these gizmos. Someone who never played on the original HW, sure, but I can't and have tried, with RetroPi etc. There must be a term for that.

oh geez.. I was not thinking about it, but if this piece of hardware runs PowerPC Mac.. then Amiga OS 4.x or MorphOS and Amiga baby... PowerMac is for sissies when you compare this opportunity!

For me, the finest PowerMac is the one that explored Mars: https://vechai.org/mars-rover-perseverance-runs-on-a-1998-im...

It's not PowerMac.

They're using a literary device for a better title. Everybody understands that it's not actually a Power Mac. No need to point it out, nobody is confused about this.

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