Open Core for Mac in Simple Words

Facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterestlinkedinmail

I have had a chance to use open core to install Mac OS into a PC recently.

There are a bunch of open core related tutorials outside, so I am not going into much details in this article.

However, the problem with many open core tutorials, as far as I saw when I put my head down last time, is that they get into too much details, and people could easily get lost the big picture when they get the hands dirty.

So, I just mark down some basic concepts and workflows here:

First of all, the most authoritative website is, of course, this one.

Simply put, what you fundamentally need to do is:

  1. Verify your machine can actually install open core (or set up a machine that support open core)
  2. Set up the mac installer on USB (easy)
  3. Go to EFI partition of USB, and prepare the open core base files based on you CPU model (not hard, essentially just cherry pick files to download)
  4. Go to EFI partition of USB, and prepare the config.plist file based on your CPU model and display card (not hard, but time consuming, need to launch a few third party tools)
  5. Boot the machine
  6. If failed to boot, double check configurations and repeat steps 3-5 (and pray)
  7. voila, Mac OS booted on machine successfully!
  8. copy the open core files from the EFI partition of USB drive to the EFI partition of you PC (easy)
  9. fix all kinds of remaining misc stuff (e.g. audio), if you want, by further playing with config.plist

Yes, basically that's it. Despite all the warnings in the document, the single most important thing you need to know beforehand is the model name of your CPU (e.g. Ivy Bridge, Coffee Lake, etc...), that would directly affect your decisions in the work.

Also, you need to know if you are using an integrated display card or not, but I guess that's trivial for every one.