Hacker News

Wasn't the old Linux joke, don't ask "how do I do X with Linux" (because you'd get ridiculed for not reading the docs) but instead, just state "X isn't possible with Linux" and then someone would show you how it's done?

I almost think such projects are worth it just to immortalize comments like these. There's a whole psychology of wrongness that centers on declaring that not-quite-impossible things will definitely never happen, because it feels like principled skepticism.

I have a project on my desk that started as a response to a line in the Adafruit docs for their RP2040 based MacroPad

     It is not possible to add BLE or WiFi at this time to the MacroPad.

> Readers with a keen eye might notice some issues:

> - Everything is magenta.

was fun too

So much has happened in the tech world because someone wrote at one point, "You can't do that"

My favorite part of our online world.

The missile knows at all times where it is, by knowing at all times where it isn’t.

I had the same reaction.

Gotta love that particular Redditors follow up comment:

>Go ahead and downvote me. I am correct on every single thing I said

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.

IOKit was actually built from the ground up for OS X! NeXT had a different driver model called DriverKit. I've never coded against either, but my understanding was they're pretty different beasts. (I could be wrong)

That said, indeed, the abstraction layer here is delightful! I know that some NetBSD devs managed to get PPC Darwin running under a Mach/IOKit compatibility layer back in the day, up to running Xquartz on NetBSD! With NetBSD translating IOKit calls. :-)

And there are enough parallels to Linux's stack, I'm thinking about looking through the Linux on Wii project more and comparing how it handles fb issues in comparison. I loved reading this whole post, crazy how many OSes have now been run on the humble Wii!

I guess having targeted multiple architectures and in the case of OPENSTEP also operating systems early on certainly helped.

This is the most incredible part. I cannot even use a laptop adequately in an economy class seat, I cannot position the screen so that I could see it, and the keyboard so that I could type on it, at the same time. (To say nothing of connecting a Wii.)

And the guy next to him is just staring at his phone, probably thinking, "I'm not even gonna ask".

Although if it were me I'd probably annoy the heck out of him asking why he had a Wii on the airplane!

Which means no access to Claude.

Can’t wait for his sequel “I received a Cease and Desist Letter from Apple; Feeling encouraged, I registered the trademark ‘Wii subsystem for macOS’”.

I can't imagine concentrating on a complicated project like that on the go, but I went back to stare in awe at said picture and I think its a train or bus. Still a flex.

What's flex-worthy about this? There's a lot of dev work that goes on in economy class airplane seats. Or are VC valley programmers so rich they fly business everywhere?

Imagine if he was developing it on a laptop found at a refuse site that was still charged, just hiding in the hedge so that guards wouldn't see him.

I probably have rose colored glasses, but this is what I associate with Hacker News when I first started coming to this site. Truly absurd projects for no reason other than the love of the game and detailed write ups.

I'm not an LLM post hater, but it definitely has been a bit draining lately. This is exactly what I love to see here.

Get to submitting! Be the change you want to see.

I’m SOO happy but also wistfully sad when I open a post like this that I am desperately excited to read and it’s not muddled-thinking- and LinkedInese-riddled slop.

Thank you for the kind words :)

Good news, just today a bypass was released to allow any EFI bootloader to work on the original Apple TV https://github.com/DistroHopper39B/ATV1sm

The original one does run a modified OS X Tiger. I jailbroke it a while ago to run custom stuff, but didn't do much with that. Just remember being able to VNC or SSH into it.

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

If it's not working on Chrome nor Firefox, it's safe to say it's incompatible with almost all browsers.

Whoops, thanks! Fixed.

Oof linkrot :(((((

I remember reading this back then. Amazing story. All the secrecy, and needing to be a very small team.

This solution’s COU cost can be significantly improved by using memory protection. You protect the frame buffer from writes. The first time it is written, you take a fault, and start refreshing every 60 Hz and leave it writeable. After some number of refreshes, you protect it again, the idea being is that the UI may now be quiescent. I do this in my Palm OS port for the same reason.

There is a zero percent chance of that ever happening.

I wonder if you can place an A18 from a Neo onto an iPhone board, and then make that work somehow... You wouldn't be able to use the one originally from the iPhone because it's differently fused to only accept iOS images.

Or better yet, an iPad!

I'd say there is a zero percent chance of this ever happening :D The original Apple TV was an Intel Core Solo with 256 MB of RAM and an nVidia GPU, running a modified Mac OS X 10.4 that booted into something similar to Front Row instead of Finder.

Apple TV came after the switch to Intel processors, so you would have to have some kind of reverse-Rosetta layer to run it on a PowerPC Wii.

There was a PPC version of Windows NT, and yes someone put it on the Wii!

https://github.com/Wack0/entii-for-workcubes

See also: https://gbatemp.net/threads/windows-nt-ported-to-wii.667959/

How about a piezoelectric buzzer? That's how the firmware on some iPods were first dumped.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050828114013/http://www.ipodli...

I was - incredible views indeed!

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

>better option than Linux

I'm not sure why it would. Why would anyone want to hack on different proprietary software with no supplier support and whose days are clearly numbered (Apple's move to ARM)?

For usability I mean. It's clearly an interesting technical feat.

Thank you for the kind words!

I like using it for disassembling UIKit (for my day job working on iOS apps), and overall, I like the UI/UX and how it feels like a native Mac app.

I've tried Ghidra, and while extremely impressive and capable, it might be the most Java-feeling app I've ever used. I'd love for someone to whip up an AppKit + SwiftUI shell for it.

“entii-for-workcubes” is a pretty good pun!

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 :)

looks like they did use AI, swing and a miss for the luddites once again!

Ah, the Procrustian definition of "real hacker", where using AI disqualifies you but using Github pages is considered only a minor infraction.

The build-in-public era of hacking has really turned this field into an influencer economy.