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Mac OS X Running On Xbox

Posted by timothy on from the not-what-the-good-lord-intended dept.

PasteEater writes "The good people over at XBox Scene have the scoop. Mac OS X has been successfully installed on a modified Xbox. What does this mean? Well, it's no Xbox Media Center, but it does prove that nerds are at the forefront once again!"

6 of 343 comments (clear)

  1. Debate by StevenHenderson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wonder what M$ thinks is a bigger threat - Linux or OS X on the Xbox...

  2. Not too bad. by mrseigen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Even though it is running on PearPC (and thus slower than possibly imaginable), it is still impressive. Although, I just bought a used Beige G3/233 for $10 and I still have more memory (72MB) than the XBox in it.

  3. Re:An Apple First by Ford+Prefect · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The first Apple gaming system??

    That would be the Apple Pippin. ;-)

    Something odd about the MacOS Xbox screenshots - the last one has the 'About' window reporting 128MB of memory. Doesn't the Xbox have 64MB, then there's the overhead from the x86 operating system, PearPC etc.?

    All I can think of is that it's not all allocated, and PearPC will be swapping stuff to the hard disk in a frenzy of IDE activity. The word 'particularly' comes to mind when thinking how slow the system will be.

    (Oddly, I'm typing this while installing Windows 98 on my iBook, thanks to QEMU...)

    --
    Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
  4. They skirted around 1 legality when they wrote by antifoidulus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    the legal section in that in the EULA for OS X it states that you cannot install OS X on any non-Apple hardware(probably due to the whole clone thing that failed miserably), I'm not saying that it's right or wrong, but it's an issue they should have addressed.

    --
    Monstar L
  5. Re:XBOX2 by Matthias+Wiesmann · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Then you would be hacking the OS instead, becaus AFAIK Mac OS is limited to the chips that Apple want to run it on.
    This not really true anymore. Remember that the Darwin kernel is open-source, the code that makes up OS X runs on top of Darwin. If you have drivers that enable Darwin to run on the hardware, OS X will run. In fact OS X already runs on systems not supported by Apple.

    In fact, if OS X would check for the presence of approved chips, how the hell would Pear PC be able to boot OS X, except by duplicating the functionality of said chips which would be a) a lot of work b) probably illegal.

    To run OS X on a XBox 2, you would basically need the following things:

    • Install some kind of bootloader on the XBox2.
    • Write Darwin drivers for the XBox2's hardware.
    • Somehow build a bootable volume that contains OS X + those drivers.
    • Have the bootloader build a device tree and start the Darwin kernel.
  6. Re:Honestly.. by argent · · Score: 4, Interesting

    (I've always wanted to try out OSX, but I'm not going to spend thousands to buy a Mac..)

    Old Mac Martin regularly sells G3/233-300 desktops and minitowers for $30-$50 plus shipping, and they run OS X fine. You might want a better video card, and Old World Computing has some PCI Radeon 9200s for under $150, but you could get a feel for it for a lot less.

    My Mac at home is one of his, upgraded with a Radeon 7000, a G4/533 CPU (from OWC, again), and a 10/100 ethernet card.

    Go to lowendmac.com and subscribe to the swap list, and watch what comes through.