- 295
- IGN
- videogamesm12
Rairii, the legend behind the PowerPC Mac port of Windows NT, strikes again. He has been on a sort of journey to get the nearly 30 year old operating system running on extremely unusual systems for about a year now, and has released his port for the Nintendo GameCube and Wii. On February 26, he committed all his code for the project onto his GitHub and made the first public release. He has been updating it since then to improve performance and fix bugs.
This is actually real.
Under no circumstances should this be possible. The operating system at the point of the Wii's release was already 10 years old and was considered ancient by the time 2006 rolled around. Yet, it's installed and running on my Wii through what I can only describe as black magic and prayers. In its current state, it doesn't support audio or networking yet, but Rairii has mentioned that support is planned for both. Even still, it runs pretty good all things considered. Because the system is PowerPC-based and thus a completely different architecture from the standard x86-based computers, a lot of programs may not work out of the box even though NTVDM is present (which adds support for some 16 bit DOS and Windows applications), but you can add further support for some x86 Windows applications like SkiFree and Microsoft Office 95 using a program called SoftWindows32, which was developed by Motorola.
I actually recorded myself installing it and exploring it and put it on YouTube back at the beginning of the month, and you can watch it here:
Additionally, Michael MJD did a video on it, though definitely a bit later than mine:
This is actually real.
Under no circumstances should this be possible. The operating system at the point of the Wii's release was already 10 years old and was considered ancient by the time 2006 rolled around. Yet, it's installed and running on my Wii through what I can only describe as black magic and prayers. In its current state, it doesn't support audio or networking yet, but Rairii has mentioned that support is planned for both. Even still, it runs pretty good all things considered. Because the system is PowerPC-based and thus a completely different architecture from the standard x86-based computers, a lot of programs may not work out of the box even though NTVDM is present (which adds support for some 16 bit DOS and Windows applications), but you can add further support for some x86 Windows applications like SkiFree and Microsoft Office 95 using a program called SoftWindows32, which was developed by Motorola.
I actually recorded myself installing it and exploring it and put it on YouTube back at the beginning of the month, and you can watch it here:
Additionally, Michael MJD did a video on it, though definitely a bit later than mine:
