Has anyone built a Hackintosh? School me... (now including pics of my build)
 

Looking into the possibility of building a Hackintosh. Been running a custom built PC for years now, but am interested in migrating to Mac. Doing a new custom build sounds great and cost effective, but I'm trying to edumacate myself about the pros and cons and the dos and donts of going the way of the Hackintosh.
So... anyone with experience? I've gotten some great recommendations on hardware already but need to verify compatibility and of course any limitations I'll encounter once we're up and running.
Thanks in advance for the info...

I didn't know that the MAC software was so picky as to warrant specific hardware. Have you ever virtualized mac os on your PC?

Just pick up one of the hacked copies of X86 Mac OSX... you really dont need anything specific. I had MAC OSX running on my laptop not too long ago. I believe I had to put some kind of a hack file on a flash drive during the installation.

See here... all the info you could need. http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

i think at this point, as long as you have an intel chip and a cracked installation cd you should be good to go. i should check the chip on my Eee... wouldn't mind running OSx on it

the guys at gizmodo built one. search their site for hackintosh

like said above, shouldnt be to hard now that they moved to intel chips, etc.

The problem is that apple only has drivers for the hardware that they sell, so you might end up with an issue where your wifi or audio, or graphics card dont work. For example, apple only ships Nvidia cards... I dont think they have any driver support for ATI. So you do have to be picky with your hardware.

Other problem is with the bios apple uses for copy protection. The hacked versions try to bypass this but on some mother boards its a little hit or miss.

Not too long ago I remember reading about a special usb thumb drive that emulates apples bios. It cost about 150$, but the beauty of it was that you can install from a totally off the shelf osx cd with no hacking required!
Not sure if they are still available.

or you could just do what i said and look up the article on how to build one. lol.

here is one

http://www.osnews.com/story/21564/Bu..._t_Sue_You_For

can I ask why you want to do it?

The new iMac's make my dick hard http://www.apple.com/imac/

i would imagine it's for the stability of the OS with out the higher cost for the hardware.

may as well just build a pc and buy windows 7 ;)

windows 7 hasn't proven it self yet in my book.

it's proven itself to the tens of thousands of beta testers

My first hackintosh with an nforce2 based board with athlon64 was unstable. Programs randomly crashed, so I made a purpose built machine using the HCL lists on osx86.org using some board I forget an an Amd Phenom 720 I think? triple core and it's rock solid and damn close to as fast as my mac pro at work.

it certainly may have. OSX has proven it's self as well, to every mac owner, and costs the same as the home edition of 7.


I understand your position on the whole mac vs PC thing, i think you're jaded by lack of understanding and knowledge of OSX and it's abilities/customization. Aside from that there also lies the whole purpose behind the tool we choose. Your tool has specific features to do that job, other people have tools with specific features to do what they need. No one tool combines all of these needed feature sets. Granted apple does come close by offering the ability to dual boot.

But anyway I digress, this thread is about how to build a hackintosh, not a another Mac vs PC debate.

Thanks for the info so far everyone... I figured this would be a good place to ask about it. In my initial reading you do have to make sure that your hardware is compatible if you're building one. There are guides online for specific hardware and setup that make it a 1, 2, 3 process which might be a good way to go, but since I'm new to the whole thing I wanted to see if there were any TST members who have experience with this that I can bounce some ideas off of.

The reason for going this route is that I've had good experiences and found great value in a custom built rig, but I would like to move to the Mac platform after using it a bit and also hearing of so many happy customers. Don't want to get into that debate, I haven't had any bad experiences on Windows XP, just want to try something new here.

Whats the name of the latest custom iso that you used? I know there are a few hacker teams out there trying to make their version.