Random late-night idea: Hackintosh like it's 2005... Using VirtualBox?

[iWin32]

Hello everyone,

 

I'm hoping there's someone still lurking this forum way back from the Developer Transition Kit days (the Intel one, not the Apple Silicon one, if it wasn't already clear from my title), as I've just had a strange idea at 1:00 in the morning.  But to understand what I'm asking, it's going to take a bit of explaining.

 

So, way back in 2005, when Apple announced they were transitioning the Mac to run on Intel chips, they released a developer transition kit.  The Intel DTK had a weaker and substantially different DRM mechanism that any retail Intel mac does.  Rather than using proprietary power management controllers and encrypted binaries to lock things down, Apple's DTK used a TPM and a secret key to lock down Rosetta, and only supplying PPC code for crucial processes to get to the GUI/Desktop.  Apparently, according to the OSx86 Project's wiki's old article on the TPM, the key that Apple used (which I won't repeat here) is exactly the same as what the SMC has for DSMOS to function.  That key is well-known and even appeared in Apple's case against Psystar.  But I digress...

 

The newest version of VirtualBox supports emulating TPMs in Virtual Machines.  This is likely to officially support Windows 11 in VMs, which relies on a newer TPM 2.0 specification.  That post-dates the DTK AFAIK, and is probably too technologically different from what the DTK OS would expect.  However, you can actually specify 2 different versions of the TPM you want in VirtualBox: 1.2 or 2.0.  According to the docs, you can also specify to use your host TPM, use an externally-emulated TPM, or not use a TPM at all.  According to the TPM article, the DTK used TPM 1.1, which while one revision lower than 1.2, should be much closer to 1.2 than 2.0.  And even if 1.2 is still too new, we could always find a software solution to emulate a 1.1 TPM and supply that to VirtualBox.  I also have Vanilla versions of various DTK builds of Mac OS X Tiger.  Unfortunately, most of the patches that early Hackintoshers developed are now lost to time.  Right now, these early pre-release versions of Mac OS X Tiger have no way of being run outside of tracking down a DTK that wasn't returned to Apple.

 

But recently, I started thinking: What if we could emulate the TPM in a VirtualBox, supply it the not-so-secret-key from Apple, and attempt to boot the DTK installer inside the VM?  Here is how I envision the workflow:

 

1. Install VirtualBox and create a new virtual machine that emulates TPM 1.2.
2. Inside the VM, boot to Linux or some other Live CD environment.
3. Add the necessary keys to the VM's emulated TPM.
4. Reboot and boot up the DTK's Tiger install DVD.*
5. Install the OS.*
6. Profit!

 

*=May have to use some form of old OpenDarwin kexts in case of incompatibility with the virtualized hardware inside VirtualBox.  This may also require following part of old guides using Ditto to copy Tiger over an existing OpenDarwin installation.

 

Obviously, it may be more involved than that, and it may not even work.  But I'd be willing to give it a try.  There's just one small problem: I don't know how the TPM stored Apple's secret key.  Is it just like the SMC with the keys being stored in two halves: OSK0 and OSK1?  Or is it something different?  And what kind of key was used to add it to the TPM?  In case anyone wonders why I might want to use an ancient version of an ancient OS by 2022 standards:

1. It could prove helpful in terms of my still-planned YouTube video documenting the history (technologically and legally) of hackintoshing.
2. It could prove useful in terms of software preservation.
3. I just think it would be cool to do, mm-kay?

 

If anyone is still familiar with the old OSx86 patches that are now lost media and/or had an Intel DTK back in the day and remember how it worked, anything you can provide that may prove helpful would be appreciated.  Thanks!