Nintendo GameCube modified to run PowerPC Windows NT and Doom (2025)

Earlier this month, a brand-new build of the long-deprecated Windows NT for PowerPC surfaced. It's now optimized for the Nintendo GameCube and Wii families of Nintendo consoles, of all platforms, thanks to their reliance on PowerPC architecture supported by the original Windows NT PowerPC releases. This build, called Entii for WorkCubes and on GitHub, also technically has Wii U support, but not in a sense that utilizes its two extra PowerPC cores, higher RAM pool, or more powerful AMD GPU— only through the virtualized Wii function. Early dev boards are either unsupported entirely or "theoretically" supported but not tested.

Fortunately for homebrew enthusiasts interested in seeing this Windows NT software run on a Nintendo GameCube, YouTuber @emukid_id has recorded footage of the Windows NT installation process, some basic use, and even some incredibly low-resolution (320 x 200!) The Ultimate Doom gameplay. Unfortunately, there is no sound in any of these videos.

But aside from lacking sound Windows 95 largely seems to work as expected— configuring classic Windows NT 3D wallpapers like 3D Maze, using Notepad, opening the basic Internet Explorer home page, etc) and intelligent support for a range of more PC-adjacent peripherals for Nintendo consoles (like a GameCube controller with a full-sized keyboard built into the middle, turning the original controls into a pair of distant handles) means that users on real hardware should have some input options, here. The regular old USB ports available on Wii and Wii U are also helpful for expanding into USB peripheral compatibility.

Unfortunately, there is definitely some compromise here—but even a user employing a standard Windows NT PC here in 2025 would be unlikely to find any usable web pages on the modern Internet. Even if compatibility with GameCube or Wii's Ethernet adapters is intact, online uses would seem supremely limited.

However, the system can still be a snapshot of Windows NT and PowerPC in the pre-Windows NT 3.5 days of PowerPC support on Windows. Doom is still playable on GameCube, which is quite impressive. At the same time, the Wii is effectively a CPU-overclocked GameCube with a new GPU compared to its predecessor.

Proper Wii U support for NT 3.5 or a later version of Windows could up the ante by utilizing its whopping 1GB of DDR3 RAM and triple PowerPC CPU cores versus the single-core design on Wii and GameCube. GameCube also operated on as little as 24MB of system RAM, though it also had other small dedicated RAM allocations for components like video and I/O.