blkhp19

I started with CLion, and found the UX to be completely foreign (not at all Mac-like) and overall frustrating to use.

Xcode is definitely not perfect, but it's IDE I'm most used to, so I ended up doing my most of my editing in it.

I considered this! There were a lot of things I wanted to try but didn't want the timeline of this project to blow up any more than it already had. Now that I've done the hard part of writing about it and publishing it, I can revisit some of these ideas :)

Thanks! The project was mostly C for the bootloader and C++ for the drivers.

As for which part was the most challenging... probably understanding the IOKit driver model. I really would have benefitted from having an expert explain some of the concepts to me, and give me some advice about how to structure my own drivers.

Your ports were a huge inspiration - thanks for contributing so much to this space!

I'm intrigued by this technique! Will look into it, thanks for the tip!

Last I checked, the 60fps frame buffer conversion resulted in the system idling at 18% CPU. Certainly not ideal. I'd love to optimize this further.

Yes - this project (and countless others) would not have been possible without the incredible work to hack the Wii from Team Twiizers (now fail0verflow) back in the day. The work they did was a huge inspiration for me getting into computer science when I was a teenager.

I was - incredible views indeed!

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

Thank you for the kind words :)

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

Images now expand when clicked - thanks for the feedback!

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.

My Wii has been on many planes and trains - and yes, there is a photo of each in my post.

Looking for private API behavior or working around bugs?

Exactly this!

I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a very tiny part of my motivation :)

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 :)

There are bugs and undocumented behaviors that need to be understood in order to be worked around - I wish it wasn't the case but such is life developing for closed-source platforms.

I only tested on Safari - whoops! Fixed now.

Whoops, thanks! Fixed.

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.

I thought they rolled back all of those efforts. What devices shipping today come with Fuchsia installed?

*cost-effectively — confusing title without the proper adverb hyphenation

It's also a fun one to write an emulator for. There are plenty of example programs out there to test, and they draw graphics by writing bytes to a frame buffer at some offset in memory. You can read from that region in memory, interpret each byte as a color from a preset palette, and use it to display visual output / graphics.

I wrote one in Swift a few years back, and then ended up developing it further into an NES emulator capable of playing Donkey Kong. It was a great learning experience.

Why does Wine work just fine on an M-series Mac then?

"recently" as in nearly 25 years ago

Someone upgrading from an Intel Mac to an Apple Silicon Mac doesn't increase Mac marketshare.

Someone upgrading from an Intel Mac to an Apple Silicon Mac doesn't increase Mac marketshare.

I’d guess lots of people upgrading from Intel Macs

Why would you guess that? It's +22% Mac marketshare, not +22% Apple Silicon Mac marketshare.

Thoughts on https://partiful.com ?