jamiethemorris Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 I found this link recently: http://www.jabbawok.net/?p=47 It's a step-by step guide for installing mountain lion on an older model Mac Pro. What's strange is he's using Chameleon, complete with an smbios, boot.plist, etc... Which basically turns it into a semi-hackintosh. I was under the impression that installing Chameleon on a real mac would make it non-bootable. How does this work? Is it the fact that he's using --legacy when blessing the partition? This is strictly out of curiosity as my Macbook Pro is 100% Mountain Lion compatible and I have absolutely no reason to do it. 1 Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kervich Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 Old mac pro doesn't have 64-bit EFI required by ML to boot so Chamaleon is used to emulate that. Second, he' s using smbios.plist to change the platform-id to fool the ML installer, that would refuse to install the OS on Mac Pro 1,1. 1 Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/#findComment-1866316 Share on other sites More sharing options...
jamiethemorris Posted November 12, 2012 Author Share Posted November 12, 2012 Ok. I understand that, but I'm also wondering how it's bootable with chameleon. I thought it was only bootable on a PC. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/#findComment-1866324 Share on other sites More sharing options...
p.H Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 Old mac pro doesn't have 64-bit EFI required by ML to boot so Chamaleon is used to emulate that. Second, he' s using smbios.plist to change the platform-id to fool the ML installer, that would refuse to install the OS on Mac Pro 1,1. I remember chameleon teams has ever announced that chameleon should NOT be installed on real macs. It's still a little bit curious how does the owner made it. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/#findComment-1866332 Share on other sites More sharing options...
jamiethemorris Posted November 12, 2012 Author Share Posted November 12, 2012 Yep. I'm thinking it has to be the --legacy thing... AFAIK that's what bootcamp uses for legacy bios compatibility Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/#findComment-1866340 Share on other sites More sharing options...
meklort Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 Macs still emulate standard pc bioses, this just uses that feature of the UEFI bios on the mac pro. The main reason why you wouldn't want to boot a mac with chameleon is because the apple efi drivers fro video and audio are not read, and as such the device tree is not populated with those. This means that you have to hope that GraphicsEnabler and other chameleon features do the right stuff to enable your hardware. Basically, no, installing chameleon will not make the machine unbootable *if you do it correctly*, it may however make graphics not work. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/#findComment-1866342 Share on other sites More sharing options...
ErmaC Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 . Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/#findComment-1866343 Share on other sites More sharing options...
3.14r2 Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 As I see it (after reading the article), it goes as follows: Native Mac EFI 32 boot > BIOS emulation mode > Cahmeleon EFI 64 emulation mode > OS boots up. Bit complicated, but seems (in a way) similar to booting on non UEFI BIOS PCs, via Tianocore EFI. This is used to install and run Windows 7 64bit from GPT disk on PCs without UEFI (with just plane old BIOS). Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/#findComment-1866444 Share on other sites More sharing options...
jamiethemorris Posted November 13, 2012 Author Share Posted November 13, 2012 Interesting. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/#findComment-1866534 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frank Nitty Posted February 19, 2013 Share Posted February 19, 2013 This would benefit me if I had an older real 64-bit Mac. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/#findComment-1890471 Share on other sites More sharing options...
theconnactic Posted February 19, 2013 Share Posted February 19, 2013 Out of curiosity, is it possible/useful to use DSDT injection on Macs booting from native EFI? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/#findComment-1890498 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gringo Vermelho Posted February 22, 2013 Share Posted February 22, 2013 Probably, but the question is then, what could you possibly want to inject?btw (to reiterate what the round one said) the MacPro1,1 has 32-bit EFI firmware, and therefore cannot run Mountain Lion.You can get around this Apple-imposed limitation by installing Chameleon on it. 1 Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/#findComment-1891110 Share on other sites More sharing options...
theconnactic Posted February 22, 2013 Share Posted February 22, 2013 Nothing at all, Gringo: i asked out of intellectual curiosity. It would be unpractical and unnecessary, i suppose, since all EFI-capable peripherals would be properly and automatically recognized by the native EFI without any need of inject them However, it just came to my mind as i'm writing this post: what about PC parts? Would they necessarily have be flashed with an EFI-compatible ROM to run properly or at all, or couldn't they just be dsdt-injected as is? Best regards. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/#findComment-1891113 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gringo Vermelho Posted February 22, 2013 Share Posted February 22, 2013 As far as I know, as long as there is a driver for OS X, PC PCI-E expansion cards work fine in a Mac. I guess if something needs an EFI ROM/boot-ROM to work at all, DSDT injection by itself won't help? 1 Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/#findComment-1891149 Share on other sites More sharing options...
theconnactic Posted February 23, 2013 Share Posted February 23, 2013 Thank you, you're obviously right. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/#findComment-1891311 Share on other sites More sharing options...
newhacker1746 Posted October 9, 2014 Share Posted October 9, 2014 You don't need to flash pc cards (GPU) if you use chameleon, once chameleon boots in a mac pro, it does precisely the same thing to enable your gpu and boot screen, since it uses bios to initialize the gpu. Therefore if you used BIOS only gpu on native efi boot, voila, no boot screen. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/#findComment-2067812 Share on other sites More sharing options...
MacSimizeDenver Posted February 13, 2017 Share Posted February 13, 2017 I was just browsing this topic and i was thinking of risking it and installing e.g. Mavericks on my Mid 2007 white MacBook with C2D 2,16GHz and 4 GB Ram. It was originally only supporting up to 10.7.8 and since these machines are not realy worth a dime nowadays why not trying this out. Any suggestions how I should do it? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/284305-howwhy-is-this-person-booting-chameleon-on-a-real-mac/#findComment-2367684 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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