macOS 10.15 Catalina on Unsupported Macs

[Starplayr]

Yes it's wrong. You probably wanted to write that you have a PCIe SATA III card:

"Update: The PCIe SATA III card can negotiate at 6 Gb/s. The hidden SATA ports are SATA II. My bad."

Whatever.

And instead of 'can', 'they are' even on a 4x slot.
[doublepost=1562385642][/doublepost]

Your screenshot show a SSD connected to a PCIe SATAIII card, you are using wrong terminology since you can't connect a SATA drive to a PCIe slot without a PCIe SATA card.

That is a given. And I don't think everyone on this board technically says everything 100% correct. We are not perfect. So don't expect everyone on here to be.

OMG.

I've tolerated a lot on here and I'm trying to be helpful. I may reconsider my thinking and get back to my iOS work instead.

It's so easy to correct somebody else. I guess that's something I don't do anymore. We are all human after all.

It doesn't take a genius to know that a drive on a PCI Express slot needs to have an adapter / card / interface to work. The average Joe can figure that out. Some things are given. And if they can't figure it out, they ask.

Technically all hard drives / SSDs go through some type of hardware interface. Like a USB drive internally has an interface to connect SATA drive. We used to talk about Hard disks having controllers, but no one talks about that anymore. But do we say my USB drive has this card that connects to a SATA III disk? No we don't.

At least there are not that many different types of drives anymore. Back in the day, all Macs used SCSI drives. Then they use ATA drives like PCs did. Now it's mostly Serial ATA. and some servers use SAS.

Anyways, I probably said 5 things wrong here, so go ahead and correct me. I'm starting not to care so much.

 

[Starplayr]

I am testing out Anka Build 2.0 with Catalina Beta 3 and Apple broke Anka's installer method. So I decided to try dosdude1's patched installer app on it to see if it would pass and it did with flying colors. Dosdude1's installer app went through the entire process without any user intervention on Anka Build 2.0.

And to be clear, I used the installer app with Anka and not the installer disk itself. To create it, I used a disk image on my server and had Dosdude installer put the app on that disk image and then I just copied the patched installer app from there. And then pointed Anka's installer process to it.

I won't recommend Anka Build for Catalina yet as there are some bugs with it, but their developers respond very quickly to questions. Anka is not cheap either. They gave me a year to play with it. I am using it to test CloneToolX out on different OS'. Anka fires up VMs very quickly. Everything is bare metal except for the display. For its speed it uses Apple's Hypervisor.framework. Anka is one of the fastest macOS VM's I've used. It makes Parallels and VMWare look like dog poop. And even though it is command line driven, it is very easy to setup. However, I may just make a UI for it. It would be cool. Its developers are working on bringing Metal to Anka. When they get there, it will be a great VM.

 

[TimothyR734]

I am testing out Anka Build 2.0 with Catalina Beta 3 and Apple broke Anka's installer method. So I decided to try dosdude1's patched installer app on it to see if it would pass and it did with flying colors. Dosdude1's installer app went through the entire process without any user intervention on Anka Build 2.0.

And to be clear, I used the installer app with Anka and not the installer disk itself. To create it, I used a disk image on my server and had Dosdude installer make put the app on that disk image and then I just copied the installer app from there. And then pointed Anka's installer process to it.

I won't recommend Anka Build for Catalina yet as there are some bugs with it, but their developers respond very quickly to questions. Anka is not cheap either. They gave me a year to play with it. I am using it to test CloneToolX out on different OS'. Anka fires up VMs very quickly. Everything is bare metal except for the display. For it's speed it uses Apple's Hypervisor.framework. Anka is one of the fastest macOS VM's I've used. It makes Parallels and VMWare look like dog poop. And even though it is command line driven, it is very easy to setup. However, I may just make a UI for it. It would be cool. Its developers are working on brining Metal to Anka.

That looks nice how expensive is it

 

[LuisN]

I agree If I was good with the terminal I would Julians patcher but I got so lost trying it I like things simple or use an install script

Here are two screenshots; one from supported MBA 7,2 which displays Drift OK and one from MP3,1 with GTX680 that does not. They both show the same Metal spec. Can someone else with an MP3,1 and GTX680 running Catb3 confirm Drift does not run?

View attachment 846911
View attachment 846912

I can confirm that. It DOESN'T even run in my supported MBP 2012...

 

[Starplayr]

That looks nice how expensive is it

"Hi Todd, Anka Build pricing is core based and is $600/core/year for the Basic tier. I can look into a personal use (non-company) licensing option for you. Can you tell me the cores on the machine that you would be installing it on?"

This software I think is meant more for business' to use to run automated testing with. And they used to allow running 2 cores on a 8 core box. But Anka's new model is if your box has 6 cores, they charge for 6 cores.

So the cost for my 6 core Mac mini would be 600 x 6 = 3600 per year. Now if you were a very large company and developed Mac or iOS software, this probably would not be so bad. But where it starts to multiply is if you want multiple VMs running at the same time. Then you pay for each VM. Now you could just fire up a VM one at a time with an automated system and that would save some money, but it would move the testing over time.

Now I could have three VMs running at the same time and give 2 cores per each.

Not cheap by any regards, but even for my use case, I can run newer and older macOS VMs and test my software on each of them. And the VMs run so fast. And they even have instant on, it does save time.

Anka also has a system in place that lets you send your VM to other boxes. I think it works over GIT, but I could be wrong.

Update: The installer for Anka Build is 27MB's. And Anka Build itself uses very little RAM. I think the host app is around 14 MBs. The rest the RAM usage is the VM's OS.

[doublepost=1562390241][/doublepost]Mac Pro tip of the day! Does your Mac Pro randomly reboot? What gives? Well my question to you is did you just put a new video card in or just re-insert the card and its power cables? Does one monitor in a multi monitor system go out or does it just reboot at random?

Answer: check your Power cable connections to and from your video card because probably one of them is loose! Also make sure you Video Card is seated correctly. And last of all, your main video card on a Mac Pro 3,1 should be in the bottom slot. I have heard of people using other slot, but I've never had to do this. If you use the other 16x slot and your card is 2x, then you will give up a 4x slot that's right above it.

 

[0134168]

Whatever.

And instead of 'can', 'they are' even on a 4x slot.
[doublepost=1562385642][/doublepost]
No ****! Now your technically being an ******.

That is a given. And I don't think everyone on this board technically says everything 100% correct. We are not perfect. So don't expect everyone on here to be.

OMG.

I've tolerated a lot on here and I'm trying to be helpful. I may reconsider my thinking and get back to my iOS work instead.

It's so easy to correct somebody else. I guess that's something I don't do anymore. We are all human after all.

It doesn't take a genius to know that a drive on a PCI Express slot needs to have an adapter / card / interface to work. The average Joe can figure that out. Some things given. And if they can't figure it out, they ask.

Technically all hard drives / SSDs go through some type of hardware interface. Like a USB drive internally has an interface to connect SATA drive. We used to talk about Hard disks having controllers, but no one talks about that anymore. But do we say my USB drive has this card that connects to a SATA III disk? No we don't.

At least there are not that many different types of drives anymore. Back in the day, all Macs used SCSI drives. Then they use ATA drives like PCs did. Now it's a Serial ATA. and some servers use SAS.

Anyways, I probably said 5 things wrong here, so go ahead and correct me. I starting not to care so much.

I´m with you. Every has understood you.

Yes it's wrong. You probably wanted to write that you have a PCIe SATA III card:

"Update: The PCIe SATA III card can negotiate at 6 Gb/s. The hidden SATA ports are SATA II. My bad."

You only connect PCIe drives (SAS/PCIe AHCI/NVMe) to the PCIe slots directly.

C´m on!!!

Whatever.

And instead of 'can', 'they are' even on a 4x slot.
[doublepost=1562385642][/doublepost]
No ****! Now your technically being an ******.

That is a given. And I don't think everyone on this board technically says everything 100% correct. We are not perfect. So don't expect everyone on here to be.

OMG.

I've tolerated a lot on here and I'm trying to be helpful. I may reconsider my thinking and get back to my iOS work instead.

It's so easy to correct somebody else. I guess that's something I don't do anymore. We are all human after all.

It doesn't take a genius to know that a drive on a PCI Express slot needs to have an adapter / card / interface to work. The average Joe can figure that out. Some things given. And if they can't figure it out, they ask.

Technically all hard drives / SSDs go through some type of hardware interface. Like a USB drive internally has an interface to connect SATA drive. We used to talk about Hard disks having controllers, but no one talks about that anymore. But do we say my USB drive has this card that connects to a SATA III disk? No we don't.

At least there are not that many different types of drives anymore. Back in the day, all Macs used SCSI drives. Then they use ATA drives like PCs did. Now it's a Serial ATA. and some servers use SAS.

Anyways, I probably said 5 things wrong here, so go ahead and correct me. I starting not to care so much.

I´m with you. Everybody understand what you said and it´s full right. Don´t care of touchy people, especially when the say obviously nonsenses.

 

[TimothyR734]

"Hi Todd, Anka Build pricing is core based and is $600/core/year for the Basic tier. I can look into a personal use (non-company) licensing option for you. Can you tell me the cores on the machine that you would be installing it on?"

This software I think is meant more for business' to use to run automated testing with. And they used to allow running 2 cores on a 8 core box. But Anka's new model is if your box has 6 cores, they charge for 6 cores.

So the cost for my 6 core Mac mini would be 600 x 6 = 3600 per year. Now if you were a very large company and developed Mac or iOS software, this probably would not be so bad. But where it starts to multiply is if you want multiple VMs running at the same time. Then you pay for each VM. Now you could just fire up a VM one at a time with an automated system and that would save some money, but it would move the testing over time.

Now I could have three VMs running at the same time and give 2 core per each.

Not cheap by any regards, but even for my use case, I can run newer and older macOS VMs and test my software on each of them. And the VMs run so fast. And they even have instant on, it does save time.

Anka also has a system in place that lets you send your VM to other boxes. I think it works over GIT, but I could be wrong.

[doublepost=1562390241][/doublepost]Mac Pro tip of the day! Does your Mac Pro randomly reboot. What gives? Well my question to you is did you just put a new video card in or just re-insert the card and its power cables? Does one monitor in a multi monitor system go out or does it just reboot at random?

Answer: check your Power cable connections to and from your video card because probably one of them is loose!

I only have duo cores iMac 9,1 and MacBook 5,2 wow that is spendy but looks nice

 

[nekton1]

If you REALLY want to maximize SSD R/W thru'put in a MacPro 3,1, invest $300 in a Highpoint 7101A PCIe card, add support for NVMe to the bootrom (dosdude1 has a patch) and populate the HighPoint board with four fast 970 Pro NVMe PCIe blades. That will get you >2 Gbps throughput without squabbling over SATA II or III standards and ports. There's a thread on Macrumors on the HighPoint board.
Here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/highpoint-7101a-pcie-3-0-ssd-performance-for-the-cmp.2124253/
[doublepost=1562391011][/doublepost]

I can confirm that. It DOESN'T even run in my supported MBP 2012...

So Drift is buggy even on supported Macs.

 

[Starplayr]

I only have duo cores iMac 9,1 and MacBook 5,2 wow that is spendy but looks nice

Yeah, it won't run on Core 2 Duos. Unfortunately. My job is to blog about it. I will probably start one on my website.

I had an issue with the windows not dragging on Catalina with Anka. Their engineer responded within 10 minutes and he sent me a new build over their Slack that had the mouse dragging working. They said they are still working on the mouse in Catalina, but they were able to share were they are at very quickly. Things like that go a long way. Great customer service and I'm technically a free user, but I will be blogging about my experiences with it.

 

[jackluke]

And Ars says this:
"macOS_GPUFamily1_v3 is the official name for Metal 2 in High Sierra, which you can actually see in the System Information app under Graphics/Displays." so presumably Family1 v4 is Metal 2.

If so, something else is stopping Drift running.

Metal 2 infact was introduced in 2017 (with HighSierra externalGPU), and from these tables there is also Metal 3.0 (perhaps it's macOS GPU family 2) :

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/mtlfeatureset

https://developer.apple.com/metal/Metal-Feature-Set-Tables.pdf

 

[gbrot001]

• Ahhhhh, holy crap it worked!!! I'm in!!! @dosdude1, yet again, you are my hero!!!

 

[Alex-Microsmeta]

Hi @dosdude1 , are you experiencing problems with the APFS patch on your macOS Catalina patcher 1.0b7 ? I have also downloaded your APFS ROM Patcher but it isn't compatible with macmini4,1 , so my curiousity is killing me

:-D

 

[nekton1]

Yes, but my MBA 7,2 early 2015 reporting Family 1_V4 runs Drift fine with no problems and it is NOT Metal 3. My GTX 680 reports itself as the SAME Family 1_V4 and does not run Drift.

Metal 2 infact was introduced in 2017 (with HighSierra externalGPU), and from these tables there is also Metal 3.0 (perhaps it's macOS GPU family 2) :

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/mtlfeatureset

https://developer.apple.com/metal/Metal-Feature-Set-Tables.pdf

 

[karesake]

come on, where is the APFS Patch ? And please! please! Fix every1 this ***** Graphic Error in Light mode.

 

[Alex-Microsmeta]

Don't be rude please, @dosdude1 & @ASentientBot are working hard on bugs for all unsupported macs, if APFS patch it's not already out, it means that there is still something to fix... ;-)

 

[Larsvonhier]

As some others also noted, even with DP3 Photos App crashes, but on my MB Air 4,1 it first converted the existing library. Now crashes all the time. Interesting side notes:
Some background task of it seems to still run as it just sent me a notification message about an event in my timeline.
Crashes seem to be triggered (or end up being quit) by the same mechanism that logs a "Service exited due to SIGILL | sent by exc handler" both for Photos and Siri.

 

[jackluke]

Yes, but my MBA 7,2 early 2015 reporting Family 1_V4 runs Drift fine with no problems and it is NOT Metal 3. My GTX 680 reports itself as the SAME Family 1_V4 and does not run Drift.

I wasn't arguing you, I agreed that "Family1_v4" is a Metal 2.0 GPU, but I'm 99% sure that apple will fix Drift.saver to run at least on Metal 1.0 , about OpenGL fallback I don't know, but until Catalina .0 it should work too as Flurry.saver did.

 

[jackluke]

Anyway @nekton1 I guess Metal 1.0 and Metal 2.0 are together supported on any Metal GPU:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205073

It's Metal 3.0 the new entry, that I didn't knew, that's why I posted before, not about Drift.saver, in general.

 

[Althiometer]

Can someone post the exact commands and instructions to make the Siri patch? Also, how do we update our patches?

 

[startergo]

Well, for one you shouldn't be using this as your main OS, Catalina is still quite buggy. Secondly, at the very least, you should be doing a clean install on a separate hard disk or partition.

I used it on top of my HS-->CatDP2-->CatDP3 without reformating. Works great so far.

 

[jackluke]

Can someone post the exact commands and instructions to make the Siri patch? Also, how do we update our patches?

First download this: Siri non-metal patch for Catalina beta 3

Then open a Catalina Terminal and copy/paste one line at once:

sudo mount -uw / ; killall Finder

(type your password)

open /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SiriUI.framework/Versions/A/

now replace directly from Finder your downloaded patched SiriUI with the one in that path

then back to the terminal and type:

killall Finder ; open /System/Library/CoreServices/Siri.app

 

[Pinarek]

please to solve Transparency Problem

 

[Flacko]

@ASentientBot is your HID timeout patch still needed on Beta 3? Just wondering. I'm still using it.

Just installed B3 over a B3 installation to check out dosdude1's latest patcher (with fix for intel PATA) and used the opportunity to miss out the HID timeout patch. All seems ok. No noticeable delay during startup. No problems so far with mp3.1

Here are two screenshots; one from supported MBA 7,2 which displays Drift OK and one from MP3,1 with GTX680 that does not. They both show the same Metal spec. Can someone else with an MP3,1 and GTX680 running Catb3 confirm Drift does not run?

Just a black screen for me with GTX680. Hopefully just a beta problem.

Just released a new update to Catalina Patcher! This new version includes the following changes:

• Added support for the legacy Marvell Ethernet controllers found in iMac7,1 and 8,1, as well as MacBookPro4,1 systems
• Added support for legacy Intel Parallel-ATA/IDE controllers, now allowing the stock IDE/ATAPI optical drive to work correctly in iMac7,1, 8,1, MBP4,1, and MacPro3,1 systems
• Updated the Legacy Video Card Patch with @ASentientBot's latest wrappers
• As an added bonus, the program is now fully signed! You should no longer get the "unidentified developer" warning upon opening the application.

Great, PATA seems fixed and CD/DVD drive now recognised on mp3.1. Great work, thanks.

 

[dosdude1]

Hi @dosdude1 , are you experiencing problems with the APFS patch on your macOS Catalina patcher 1.0b7 ? I have also downloaded your APFS ROM Patcher but it isn't compatible with macmini4,1 , so my curiousity is killing me

:-D

You probably don't have the latest official system ROM version installed. To update your system to the latest official version, download and run this package. Ensure your system is plugged in to power, or it won't work.

 

[smokesletsgo]

What are the key drawbacks of running this? It would be usefull if first post would have a list of issues running newer macOS on unsupported systems.

So far what I got is:

- Graphical glitches (raw edges of windows, black outline on windows and sidebar, worse font rendering);
- Photos.app doesn’t work (Catalina only);
- One guy repored worse performance on apps such as Final Cut Pro.

I mean that I'd tested in real life with final cut pro x and quicklime player by exporting different videos watching iGPU load, and the result was way faster almost half time faster compared to Mojave. Tried different versions of final cut and all is the same. Even quicktime player on high Sierra loads the GPU fully but not on Mojave... Everything is in terms of time. If you just need some Mojave cosmetic go for it but if you need better performance in terms of video acceleration and so on stay with High Sierra or even better with El Capitan where everything is the fastest but unfortunately new software support is dropped and you are pushed to run High Sierra. But if you don't need new software the best option is running El Capitan the most reliable and not demanding OS I guess. SO have a good choice It's up to you what to use. I just share my thoughts with you guys. Have a nice day or night)

Although, on the last point I could partly disagree, I have not tested specifically Final Cut Pro, but overall MacBook Air 2011 13’ with HD3000 really does work faster on Mojave than on High Sierra.

Any other observations of issues? Any input is really usefull.