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OSX86 on any computer no matter what the hardware is


Ryuichi Sakuma
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Some odd reason I cant install OS X on my laptop. It's a Presario V2000, not even 3 months old. Much of the hardware matches OS X but diffrent versions for diffrent parts. Got a brainstorm last night though. Why hasnt anyone taken an install CD and Windows Drivers and put the two together. Sounds nuts and impossibile i know. But if a person can hack OS X why cant they reverse engineer a driver for a video card or sound card or whatever the case maybe and put it in a format for OS X and put it into the install disc. Yeah thats alot of work i know. If i knew how to do it i would.

 

By doing this it would open up a whole new door of possibilities. OS X on any desktop or laptop. Sounds far fetched but its just a thought. Oh well whatever. I give this idea to everyone on here to think about and talk about. It would also allow any OS to be put on any machine if a person really wanted to have it done. Oh well. I must be off. I got work to do. keep up the work though. Project OSX86 should live on forever. as i like to say... DOWN WITH MICROSOFT.... oh and please help me boycot their products if you can... it would drive up the cost of their products and drive down the cost of Apple computers. Wow... that was a novel idea coming from me.

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You can't even use drivers designed for actual macs for most hardware in X86. You need SSE2 to run OSX86, because it needs it to run.You can't run it without it.Hell, if it werent for patches, you'd need SSE3 just for rosetta, which is Itunes, quicktime, and I think the dashboard.

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You can't even use drivers designed for actual macs for most hardware in X86. You need SSE2 to run OSX86, because it needs it to run.You can't run it without it.Hell, if it werent for patches, you'd need SSE3 just for rosetta, which is Itunes, quicktime, and I think the dashboard.

 

Im sure thats true. except one thing. go back in time to when the apple was reverse engineered by microsoft and then rebuit but in a windows format. I am more then 75% sure the same thing could be done for drivers. if my theory is correct though one could rebuild Windows Drivers for Mac OS X on a PC. honestly think about it. developers make these drivers and firmware for Windows and some for mac. Some hardware is Mac and Windows. ATI, Nvidia, and Intel to name a few. So if you can have one piece of hardware work on two operating systems that are totally opposite from eachother whos to say you can "rebuild" mac os x.

 

Its a long shot like i said. Its also just an idea. and no one can say something is impossible when it comes to anything thats digital. code can be wrote to make this work i know it can. and im sure Mac drivers for mac computers could be used if someone would really take the time to look into them. Hardware cant really be changed too much but software and drivers can be changed completely. because software is made up of letters and numbers among other symbols. kinda like the pixel. it can be changed to match certain colors. think about it long enough and you will understand my theory. anything digital can be hacked and modified... everyone knows that. its just a matter of doing it or someone trying my theory. i cant do it because i dont mess with that stuff... music, videos, pictures, html, and other document files fine but system files i dont mess with. find someone who knows how to do this kinda thing and run it by them... its not impossible... just highly improbable. sse would work with a little modifying im sure of it.

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Of course it is possible to reverse engineer the drivers from windows, and of course it is possible to write new drivers for osx.

 

But!

 

a) If you have never tried reverse engineering anything, you should try and you will easily find out why it isn't done for anything with size above the smallest parts.

B) What can you do with reverse engineered windows drivers in a mac?

c) Mac osx driver model is an many ways fundamentally different from windows.

d) and last "Yeah thats alot of work i know. If i knew how to do it i would." Here is the real culprit, lots of ideas -- not a single clue how to even start it.

 

There are a few people here who have started with doing things like this, like omni with his callisto drivers. And those who have tried, while getting some kind of fame, the only reward is a constant cry for support and new versions and can-i-be-a-beta-tester.

 

As OSX86 project is enticing, it is still a legal greyzone, and cannot be out in any production system (i.e. it is unsupported). If you have time to do real coding beyond the occasional diy/sparetime hacking you do it as work for money. And unless apple release osx to the general public, there won't be a lot of stuff specifically for non-apple hardware.

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The way I see it, the best hope for drivers is from the companies that manufacture peripherals. Some of the peripherals that no company will develop an Intel OS X driver for (because Apple bundles their own hardware in the system) might be... Sound, Video, Lan, WiFi, Bluetooth, SATA, chipset...

 

That doesnt leave much else other than input devices.

 

Apple has of course no reason to include any sort of Intel or universal binary support for those peripherals above that arent in their Mac bag. And a good reason not to.

 

So, unless someone can convince nVidia to start writing Intel drivers for their cards, I think we're going to have to settle for macvidia.

 

(or nVidia might end up in the Mac Pro, in which case it's all moot)

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in one sense your sugestion has already been done by the people responsible for producing emulation software such as pearpc and vmware. however native support fow all windows supported hardware would require writing from scratch thousands of drivers, much of them undocumented for implementation on osx which lacks documentation for a number of device interactions. take for example the difficulty coders are having now producing a working airport driver for intel wireless on account that none of them have access to the apple kernel stack. implementing something such as sse support would require blindly reverse engineering and rewriting vast quantities of code ananlagous of not harder than writing a kernel from scratch. you vastly underestimate the dificulty of your proposal. before proposing bogus universal solutions to issues you have little comprehension of try to first appreciate all the hard work being done for free by the hackintosh community.

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  • 3 weeks later...
before proposing bogus universal solutions to issues you have little comprehension of try to first appreciate all the hard work being done for free by the hackintosh community.

 

HA! You think I don't know how hard it is to do what I suggested? You think that I don't appreciate the work that has been done? I love the work that has been done. Thing is it's something to THINK about. I am an idealist no more no less. I can't install Mac OS X on my computer at all. So I think of something that would make it work and then I share that with everyone else. If I knew how to do it I would do it. However, I wouldn't release it to anyone until I had fully tested it. As for the emulation of the drivers. That's yet again just another thought. All of what I said is a thought. I was taught how to think in school NOT what to think. I think outside of the box not inside of the box. I would gladly bow down to anyone that could pull off what I thought up, and I bow down to no one. I commend the people that have made all of this possible. And I thank all of you for your comments. Just please try not to insult my intelect again. I know nothing about you and you know nothing about me.

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hey there, i dont think they mean to insult your intellect, more or less they are bluntly pointing out the insane difficulty of making a square peg fit a round hole.

 

Well he should've insulted the guy. It seems as though the guy making the suggestion has no clue that each OS utilizes different instructions which is just the tip of the iceberg in the plethora of issues.

 

Not to mention that what he is suggesting is the goal of the whole idea of OS X86 which is running OS X natively. Look at the nForce SATA/Ethernet drivers and nVidia Video drivers. That is the product of his "idea" but they just aren't smart enough to use the windows drivers as a foundation... :(

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Well even if we had driver support for systems that don't support sse2 there would still be the problem of the sse2 commands filled in almost every binary of darwin / osx / osx apps. Drivers won't give AMD athlons, PIII, ect. sse2, sse3 or nx.

 

secondly, This might work for video card drivers, but we just got Nvidia Kexts... it would be a hell of alot easyer to mod these instead of writing our own drivers.

 

You might ask about Network drivers... but the truth is it would be better to port ndiswrapper(a linux app that adds windows network driver support) then write drivers for hundreds of network cards.

 

For all other drivers this could be helpful, but like what was said before the driver systems are completely different. Once you decompile / reverse engineer your drivers you will need to rewrite the whole driver and just use the calls to the hardware. So if the hardware is documented you can skip right over the windows drivers and save your self some time... reverse engineering would just be pointless.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hey OP, remember that when Microsoft reverse engineered Apple hardware (you claim) that there was much less hardware back then than there is now. Not only are there multiple kinds of devices, multiple clases of devices, new interfaces (PCI, AGP, PCI-X, PCIe), new way to interface (no one uses X-bus to talk to BIOS anymore, always look in shadow RAM), new standards to support (USB, Fast Ethernet, FireWire).

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