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Built my first Hackintosh

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trents

Senior Member
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
System specs below. This is a dual boot Windows 10/El Capitan machine. Seems to work perfectly with the exception of not being able to boot into the Mac OS without the installation USB plugged in. Can't seem to get a functional installation of the Clover boot loader on the Mac OS system disk.
 
Building one of those has been on my list for a while. Ive read enough that I think I can do it once I get all the parts together. How do you like it? Would you reccommend it over VM ?
 
Haven't tried it via VM so I can't comment on that. Check out tonymacx86.com for parts purchase guidance. Seems like the Z97 Haswell Gigabyte motherboards are the best choice for playing hackintosh right now. There may be more choices when the new Mac OS (Sierra) comes out. It may have better support for Skylake.
 
So, I am now running El Capitan via VMWare Workstation 12 player so I have something to compare the Hackintosh approach to in answer to your question above, knoober.

1. Both approaches have about the same amount of installation challenges. Neither is simple and straightforward. This will vary depending on the compatibility of your hardware when it comes to building a hackintosh.
2. Mac running in a virtual machine environment bypasses most of the hardware compatibility issues that doing a hackintosh presents and should even work just as well with AMD based systems. The only thing I can't get to work just right in the VM environment is the SATA optical drive drive which works except no audio. So music CDs appear to be playing but no sound. However, an external USB optical drive seems to be fully functional including audio. Maybe it's because my SATA optical is Blueray. If it was a normal DVD it might be different. Or maybe it needs to be physically connected to the motherboard before via an audio cable before the audio will work with it.
3. There are noticeable delays in reacting to input from the mouse. Definite lags much of the time and very noticeable when scrolling up and down web pages. And I have a pretty potent machine hardware wise. So for my purposes, the VM Mac works well. All I need it for is a learning environment to get more up on the Macs my customers bring to me. But for someone wanting to game in the OS X environment, I should think the Hackintosh would be better.

By the way, this is the best tutorial I found for doing the VM mac: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/to...s-in-vmware-workstation-12-on-a-windows-host/
 
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Did some interesting hackintosh projects, a few years ago.

At the time the GA EP35-DS3R motherboard was one popular hackintosh friendly board.

My hackintosh:

 
These machines have been kind of an obsession of mine ever since I found out that Apple was so crazy about their own hardware. I still havent looked much beyond the name but am greatly looking forward to perusing the links provided :)
 
Building an h-tosh was a fun thing, doing the research, hunting for custom kexts, getting all the hardware working properly.

My OS of choice is Linux, but I enjoyed tinkering with the OS X.
 
Woof! I was hoping to put this together with some old hardware for grins, but it seems like I might have to move to the newest platform (and I wont even do that for my main rig). Good reading though, and I will probably get a chance to try once Z97 gets old enough to be affordable in a decade or so :)
 
I ran quite a few Hackintosh in the past, just for the challenge, as there is no point IMO of running MacOS unless you use very specific apps like Logic.

I had a 2600K, a 3770K and a 4790K running Mac OX 10.xx flawlessly on P67, Z68, Z77 and z97 Asus/Asrock boards, and GTX580, 7970 and 780/780ti. Only thing that was not working properly is the wheel on the mouse (inverted direction). Evrything else was running fine (GPU, sound...), except for the 6970 which was never supported IIRC.
 
There is a setting in System Preferences to change the direction of the mouse wheel scroll. It's in "Mouse" and just uncheck the "natural" box to make it scroll the way we are used to in Windows. The "natural" direction in Apple contexts is unnatural to Windows users. In OS X System Preferences is like Control Panel in Windows.
 
There is a setting in System Preferences to change the direction of the mouse wheel scroll. It's in "Mouse" and just uncheck the "natural" box to make it scroll the way we are used to in Windows. The "natural" direction in Apple contexts is unnatural to Windows users. In OS X System Preferences is like Control Panel in Windows.
Man, I did't know about that!!! Thanks!

Might give a try one more time, for the fun of using GarageBand :p
 
Decided to launch a second Hackintosh project. This was spawned by the discovery that every time I booted into the Mac side of the dual boot Windows/Mac OS X system and then back into Windows the system time was messed up. Through it off about 10 hours I think. Research revealed that this is a universal problem with dual boot machines. All the proffered solutions do not work when the Windows side is Windows 10.

The first Hack I built was based on a socket 1150 Haswell refresh platform. This new one is based on Skylake. Skylake is often more of a challenge since most Macintosh El Capitan systems produced were designed to run on Haswell. Sierra should provide broader hardware compatibility with Skylake boards and CPUs when it is launched in October. Skylake will have been around a good while by then. It's working out very well, however and so far the only issue is that audio will only play with a USB adapter. But that was also a problem with the first system. Both boards have Realtek ALS 1150 audio chips. The new Skylake/socket 1151 system is much pickier about having the right video card. So far, I can only get it to work with older AMD and Nvidia GPUs. It's an Intel Z170 Pro motherboard while the first build was made around an ASRock Z97 Killer board.

I need to get more proficient in implementing custom kexts and editing configuration files so I can solve some of the hardware incompatibility issues. Unfortunately, though there have more recently been some nice tools developed by the Hackintosh community, the ability of the community to support noobs is not what it is in the Windows world. Too few Hackintosh "gurus" exist and stuff is scattered here and there. You can post on forums but not get much response to your questions.
 
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Nice, I sort of did the same thing with a Mac Mini Solo some time ago. Put Windows XP Pro and Win 8 on it.

20160510_1314591.jpg
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So b60khansen, is this as dual boot Windows/Mac machine or a dedicated Windows machine now? What would you call the latter, anyway? A "wintosh"?
 
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My Macbook 5,2(mid 2009) with a bad display is hooked to a 42 in. LCD TV, for watching Youtube while on elliptical.

OS X wouldn't display on the external monitor, but installing Ubuntu remedied that. Reason? I don't know.

I guess that makes this laptop a Lintosh.
 
My Macbook 5,2(mid 2009) with a bad display is hooked to a 42 in. LCD TV, for watching Youtube while on elliptical.

OS X wouldn't display on the external monitor, but installing Ubuntu remedied that. Reason? I don't know.

I guess that makes this laptop a Lintosh.

How much trouble is it to install Ubuntu on a Mac? Does it take a lot of hacking of the Ubuntu OS?
 
No trouble at all, since Apple went with the Intel hardware Linux "usually" installs without any fanfare. The Apple hardware is well documented, so solutions to problems aren't hard to find. I used to dual boot OS X and Linux with a boot manager called rEFIt; it has since 'forked' and is now rEFInd.
 
I did the same a few years ago, had a Hackintosh running on that exact same motherboard, with a 8800GT and it was a pretty kick butt system. I played a lot of Star Trek Online on it until the video card physically died and I put it back on Windows 7. It would be fun to play around with a Hackintosh again, hopefully it's smoother than it was back then. There were always these little kext errors and warnings and such that would randomly appear that just gave the feel that it wasn't nearly as clean and integrated as a real in the flesh Mac.

Did some interesting hackintosh projects, a few years ago.

At the time the GA EP35-DS3R motherboard was one popular hackintosh friendly board.

My hackintosh:

 
I did the same a few years ago, had a Hackintosh running on that exact same motherboard, with a 8800GT and it was a pretty kick butt system. I played a lot of Star Trek Online on it until the video card physically died and I put it back on Windows 7. It would be fun to play around with a Hackintosh again, hopefully it's smoother than it was back then. There were always these little kext errors and warnings and such that would randomly appear that just gave the feel that it wasn't nearly as clean and integrated as a real in the flesh Mac.

Its is smoother. Some great tools have been developed by the Hackintosh community and there are a number of good websites dedicated to Hackintosh building and forums as well. Tonymacx86.com is maybe the place to start. He has a hardware recommendation list on that site that is updated maybe quarterly and a download section for key software tools. As Apple has turned out more and more versions of OS X there is a growing base of compatible older hardware that was once used in Intel based Macs.

The two foundation software tools are "Unibeast" and "Multibeast." Unibeast creates a "vanilla" bootable USB stick that installs OS X on the machine and allows you to boot into the desktop via the "Clover" bootloader. Multibeast then allows you to customize and refine the interaction between the OS and the hardware you are using. You can create a Unibeast USB stick with any existing mac or even a virtual machine mac.

I've been pursing this further since my original post, experimenting with a couple of other motherboards and video care combinations. The smart thing to do is to start with a motherboard and CPU that is known to be compatible with OS X. Unibeast will even permit booting with a lot of IGPs. Once into the desktop, you can tweak with Multibeast for various video cards and other nonMac hardware combinations.

Oddly, there is out of the box compatibility with many higher end Radeon video cards in the R9 79xx era but not with higher end Nvidia cards starting with the Kepler and Maxwell cores (6xx and 7xx).
 
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