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This was taken a few weeks ago, it’s amazing what a little practice can do.
The music is Tokyo Drift by the Teriyaki boyz… You cant beat that with a baseball bat!

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Hackintosh is the term given a computer with Mac OS but not Mac hardware (aka osx86). This has been going on for years, but this weekend I was curious enough to try it for myself. I started with three questions.
1. What will I need?
2. How hard is it to do?
3. How good is it compared to an Apple Mac?

Hackintoshing can be daunting for a beginner as there are many ways to reach the goal and some digging is required to understand how they are different.

The answer to question one begins with hardware. I decided to go for components that have lots of feedback on the net. Here is my list:

Motherboard: Gigabyte G31M-ES2L
Graphics card: ECS GeForce 9400 GT 512 MB
Processor: Intel E5200 2.5Ghz 800mhz 2m cache
Memory: Kingston 1G/800Mhz *2
Hard drive: Western Digital 320GB 7200rpm SATA II 16MB
DVD drive: LG DVD 22X SATA (Dual layer)
Wifi: ASUS WL-138G V2 PCI LAN Adapter
Power supply: Corsair 450W
Case: Cooler Master Centurian

Which hardware and software should I use?

I also used a USB Keyboard, a PS2 Keyboard and a USB mouse. The PS2 keyboard is only used when you need to get at the BIOS, this is because your USB drivers wont have loaded at this stage of the computers boot up. I used a standard Samsung monitor with a VGI connector and a USB keyboard because that is what Macs seem to prefer.

But how to make these choices? The starting point for any hackintosher should be the OSX86 wiki (known as the HCL). http://wiki.osx86project.org
They claim to be the undisputed leader in information regarding OS X on x86 hardware and Apple’s Intel transition.

Not all hardware is hackintosh compatible, check the HCL before you buy anything.

Next consider the OS media, two approaches exist, distributions or retail.

You may see the names iPC, iDeneb, iATKOS, Kalyway, Leo4All, Zephyroth, and probably others. These are all different distributions of a modified Mac OS DVD. If you take this route you only need to choose one, but which one? The installation notes in the HCL may tell you the distribution that was successfully used with your hardware. Usually these distributions are small enough to fit on a standard DVD (Mac OS requires dual layer) I don’t know what’s been sacrificed to make them smaller.

Unlike the others iATKOS allows you to run software updates direct from Apple without breaking your OS. For me that was the clincher. In simple terms it can do this because the custom drivers are kept separately to and given priority over Apples. iATKOS v7 10.5.7 is available as a torrent.

Another way is to use a retail version of MAC OS, and a very good guide exists with almost exactly the same hardware that I used above. http://an43.com/osx/

This uses the same dual layer DVD to install Apple hardware. Some people say this makes your installation legal unlike distributions because the Mac OS is not modified. In my opinion is this is nonsense, I modify things that I buy all the time so why should software be any different? With the retail method you can run updates without the fear of breaking your OS.

How good is it compared to an Apple Mac?

The installation of iATKOS was very easy, you will find the generic instructions here. http://iatkos.wikidot.com/instructions You will find the hardware specific instructions on the HCL. The HCL instructions for my motherboard were for another distribution (iPC) but I found they worked just as well on iATKOS. It got a bit trickier when I tried to setup my graphics card, this is where a quick search on the forums helped. Insanely Mac is one of the good ones http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=141072&st=0&p=999301&#entry999301

It’s been running about 72 hours without any problems. I’ve been browsing the web, playing DVDs and I’ve run the Apple software update. All in all I’m very pleased. I’ve even installed the iPhone SDK. If anyone reading is looking for a very cheap PC to develop iPhone applications on then this might be for you.

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