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What is this? A Hackintosh is a non-Apple computer that has OS X installed. Is this legal? Maybe? No, there are not going to be SWAT teams busting down your door. Be smart, don't sell the computer with OS X on it or try to sell computers with OS X on them, don't pirate the OS, don't worry about it. Can I use it as my everyday computer? Yes! If installed correctly, it will be just as stable as a real Mac once it gets up and running. What are the minimum requirements? Anything Core 2 or newer from Intel will work (more about that in a minute) but a Sandy Bridge chip or newer and a GIGABYTE motherboard is strongly recommended. What do you mean, 'more about that in a minute?! And I like my ASUS board? Why does the board matter anyway?!?!?! Some chips are blacklisted, like certain Atom models, despite the generation of Intel processors that the Atom is of being supported. Some entire Intel generations don't work quite right in OS X, as Apple never used them (Haswell-E). Generally speaking, you want to stick to the consumer line (i3/5/7) of Intels current generation chips, and only upgrade to a new generation after Apple starts using it. If you want to go Xeon, only use processors of a generation that Apple also used. The Mac Pro (2013, trash can) uses Ivy Bridge-E, for instance. The motherboard is a tricky part. You want a board that has supported networking/audio/power management inside OS X, not just Windows. Gigabyte makes boards with that magic combo. Also, lots of cheap boards have a hosed up DSDT and just can not run OS X with a lot of hacking. If in doubt, go Gigabyte. Check the TonyMac recommended hardware list and go from there. If you are sure your board is good for OS X, use it, but don't be surprised if something isn't quite right. Bulldozer Forever! Can I use AMD processors? No. It is vaguely possible, but I don't recommend it in the least. The whole OS has to be hacked to hell and back to get it working on AMD chips. AMD GPUS? Please Good news: Most modern (7XXX and newer) AMD GPUs work natively. Google the specific one you have/want to get before hand, but it likely works. In some ways, AMD GPUs are better than Nvidia ones - the ones that work are supported natively by the OS. Bad and important: AMD cards can be problematic between vendors. XFX 2XX cards don’t work for the most part, despite other vendors working fine. This is just a problem with AMD GPUs; Nvidia is fine. Always Google potential hardware purchases to make sure there are no compatibility problems. I want to use a Titan X in OS X! Does that work? Yes, but with caveats. Newer Nvidia GPUs require a third party driver in order to work. The 'Nvidia WebDriver' is required for many cards, including but not limited to: GTX 750Ti GTX 780Ti GTX 960 GTX 970 GTX 980 GTX 980 Ti Titan Z Titan X Why does that matter? Install and done, right? Not quite. The driver needs to be updated each time a major OS X update comes out. Anything that changes the version number of the OS, including security updates, breaks the WebDriver. The officially Nvidia supported solution is to wait a day or two after an OS update comes out and get the new driver they release, which is an annoyance but not the end of the world. The biggest problem is if you plan on running beta releases of the OS - Nvidia takes a long time to support a current beta. If you want to run 10.11 DP1, you don't want to use a card that requires the WebDriver In post 2 I have a guide on how to remove the WebDriver OS version check, which will make it possible for you to take Security Updates without losing your driver. If in doubt, go for a card that doesn't require the WebDriver. Ask here or google! Can I make a hackintosh out of a laptop? Yes, but tread with caution. Google your model and find out if others have had success. If you can't find anything, post its specs in here, and one of us can probably tell you if it is worth trying. Generally speaking, making a HackBook is a world of pain and you should probably just buy a real Mac. Can I attach a 4k/Retina display to a hackintosh? Yes, but there are some limitations. You want displays that A: operate over Display Port and not HDMI and B: Use SST and not MST. Some background: first generation 4k displays used MST to operate, which is a nasty hack that barely works. Only a couple Macs ever officially supported MST: The Mac Pro 2013, the 15" MacBook Pro with Retina Display and some others. This does rule out the first 'retina class' 4k display - the Dell UP2414Q. Sorry, can't use it. SST, however, is universally supported. All modern 4k displays use SST - google before buying, but you'll seldom encounter MST anymore. The Dell P2414Q (which is essentially a cheaper UP2414Q) uses SST and as such works beautifully on a hackintosh, as do many other 4k monitors. Lots of choices. Do make sure your GPU can drive 4k - you need Displayport 1.2 support. All 6XX Nvidia GPUs and higher/most 79XX and higher AMD cards can drive it - if in doubt, Google. 5k is a mess - it can be made to work (with that one Dell monitor that costs as much as a 5k iMac) but sleep doesn't work and you have to do a power cycle trick and its hacky and don't buy it, please. - What's new in Hackintosh Land? You can now install OS X natively. USB installer sticks that work on real Macs, generated with official tools will work on a hackintosh. When OS X Weed comes out later this year, you can just update your bootloader, download the OS off the Mac App Store and upgrade like normal. That audio patch you have to after each update can be automated now - you'll never rollback AppleHDA again! Same for the TRIM patch for SSDs. You can use Boot Camp Assistant now, if you want to partition a drive or be able to boot a Windows hard drive in VMWare/Parallels. iMessage works, Startup Disk works, NVram values save correctly, you can boot into the Recovery Partition and restore from Time Machine, etc. Things are much more 'native' with the new, modern bootloader. Modern bootloader? What? Alright, so: boring technical stuff. When Apple was getting ready to ship the first Intel Macs, they needed to whip something together to sell to software developers, so they can port their apps to X86. That thing was called the 'Intel Developer Transition Kit'. It cost $999 and ran a pre-release version of 10.4.X. It wasn't really a Mac, persay - it had a normal BIOS and a Intel Desktop Board motherboard inside. To get OS X running on that platform, Apple wrote a series of tools nicknamed Boot-132, named after the three stages of boot it entailed. The tool was used to load boot the OS - a bootloader, because these boards did not support EFI. Apple would accidentally open source this tool with the release of the first 'Intel tarball dump' of Intel Mac source code. It is the basis of Chameleon/Chimera/older bootloaders. At the time of it's open source release, all that was needed to be done to use it right away was to add GUID support (it only supported MBR) and build. This is the basis of everything before the EFI-based bootloaders. So, we've been using hacked up stuff from 2005 to boot OS X on our computers? Yes, and it is as crazy as it sounds. Chameleon does have improvements, but they are minor. A fix here and there to get 10.8 to boot, one for 10.9 too. A broken NVRam implementation, added as soon as iMessage started requiring values to be set and not a moment before. It has a list of modern GPUs included inside, to inject their names (so System Profiler looks all nice). But at it's core, it is just a thing Apple threw away in 2005. It doesn't have support for booting disk images, which is required by the 10.7-10.10 installers. That is why you have to use Unibeast to rip the installer to shreds (and lose out on the recovery partition) - Chameleon can't boot the real installer. It doesn't support storing NVRam values in the way a real Mac does, so certain apps (mostly Parallels Desktop when trying to boot an OS X Guest) that actively try to prevent Hackintosh users from using them don't work. It's just generally old and bad. Chameleon is a way around using Apple's boot.efi, whereas the new things just boot boot.efi. Boot-132 was never intended to be be used this long. It has support for the things that were true in 2005 but those things just are not the case anymore - it doesn't have support for booting disk images, for example, because Apple wasn't using those in 10.4. So what are people using instead of Chameleon now? How does it work? They are, in short, EFI based bootloaders. Real macs use this thing called EFI - a replacement for the old 'BIOS' structure. The EFI, combined with one key the SMC stores are what make a Mac a Mac. They are what is different from a generic PC. The small OS on Apple's EFI just serves to do a couple things: Switch the startup disk. Trigger Internet Recovery, if there is no OS on the hard drive or that OS install is broken. Detect an encrypted FileVault 2 volume and offer to pass along the password, enabling booting. There is more to it but in short, it uses an HFS driver (stored in the EFI) to load boot.efi on the hard drive the user is attempting to boot. That's what the new bootloaders do. They include an HFS driver and a proper EFI implementation and just load boot.efi. It's a bit more complicated than that, they do lots of work behind the scenes but that is what it does as far as the user is concerned. So instead of reimplementing everything boot.efi does, they do it right the first time. I say they, but there is really just one: CloverEFI. In the past, a couple more esoteric bootloaders were maintained but Clover quickly won out and the other ones died. That's the history anyway. What matters to you is that more stuff just works using Clover than with Chameleon. How do I make a hackintosh? Check post 2! I want a hack! What hardware should I buy? Check TonyMac's recommended hardware list. I recommend current-gen Intel chips and as powerful as (Nvidia) graphics card as you need. I see these things called distros on torrent sites. Should I use one? No! They are  , and usually sloppily done hacks made by some 16 year old kid in Russia somewhere.There's this thing called Multibeast and Unibeast and I want to use them and Yeah, uh, don't. Those tools are for Chameleon installs. In the case of Multibeast, the kexts it installs vary between not working on a Clover install to being the wrong way to do things (working, but not the right tool for the job) Unibeast is even worse, being solely for Chameleon. It takes a Yosemite install image and rips it apart and hacks it to shreds and installs Chameleon on the flash drive. For Clover, you can use DiskMaker X to put Yosemite's installer on a flash drive - a tool for a real Mac. How do I make a hackintosh without a real Mac? It can't be legally done. The legal situation is complicated by the fact that OS X doesn't cost money anymore - it's free on the Mac App Store. The tools you need to use require access to a running Mac, which means either borrowing/buying a real Mac or pirating a VMware image of OS X. I recommend the former. Please no piracy. Sinestro fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Jun 29, 2015 |
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Jun 23, 2015 00:12
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Videm posted:I just finished installing Yosemite and getting my Lenovo T440s into working condition. From what I could gather my Intel 7260 BT ACBGN wireless card isn't supported and the BIOS only lets you install certain cards. Are there any good options for me for WiFi? USB? You should find online either a pre-patched BIOS or the information to do it yourself with a hex editor. If they've not changed it since I did mine for my old T420s, it's just one byte difference.
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Jun 26, 2015 08:46
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enMTW posted:Those kexts are identical to what CloverALC outputs. I wouldn't install them. You can't replace AppleHDA through Clover injection that way, it must be installed over the existing AppleHDA. Kext wizard can help with that. Thanks for taking this over, by the way. I'm sorry that I haven't been able to help much or at all, I've just been busy and know preciously little about all this new stuff.
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Aug 23, 2015 23:04
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oohhboy posted:Change the tag to Apple while your here! No one seems to get my Very Clever Joke. 
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Aug 24, 2015 06:01
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