macOS 10.15 Catalina on Unsupported Macs

[dosdude1]

Just updated Catalina Patcher to version 1.2.3, which includes @ASentientBot's latest patches for full transparency in light mode on systems with non-Metal video cards. The Legacy Video Card Patch contains this change, and is available via Patch Updater to current users.

 

[Macbookprodude]

Just updated Catalina Patcher to version 1.2.3, which includes @ASentientBot's latest patches for full transparency in light mode on systems with non-Metal video cards. The Legacy Video Card Patch contains this change, and is available via Patch Updater to current users.

Does this work in Mojave to fix this issue ? While I have you in suspense, when I try to get to the Catalina installer on my 2011 MacBook Pro 8,2 - I don't see wifi at all ? Is there a way to get the installer to connect the wifi ?

 

[Dilli]

it is not going to be perfect we are running macOS Catalina on old Macs with old GPU's that do not support metal I am just happy it works I do know there are those who run a clover boot loader on unsupported mac's or use the Catalina loader which can spoof the Apple servers into thinking you have a supported Mac like for example I can spoof my mid 2009 iMac 9,1 into a 2011 iMac 14,1 and get all the updates from the system preferences not have to use the Catalina patcher to install macOS Catalina updates and have transparency but what happens if I get a firmware update because the apple servers think I have a newer iMac poof my iMac is bricked and totally useless I am happy that the devs of this forum have got us this far on our old Macs as this could very well be the last one we can run but I can't wait to try the next macOS

i did not update the patch to 1.2.2 and my macbook air 4.2 is working perfectly with catalina 15.1 patched with 1.2.1. So far no issues with notification, bluetooth or wifi. So i took the right step by avoiding the pop up of patcher update of 370 mb everytime. Will wait till next major os update along with dosdude1 patch.
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I ran into the same problem on my MacBookPro4,1 and MacBookPro8,1 (except I tried waiting 45 minutes and not just 10). In both cases, this is with a clean install of Catalina 10.15.1 with dosdude1 patch 1.2.1. I tried again on the 8,1 a couple of hours ago, to verify that I'm still having this problem.

What worked for me (on the 8,1) was booting off a dosdude patch 1.2.2 USB stick, using Time Machine to revert to the most recent APFS snapshot (I don't know if it was necessary, but I figured I would be cautious), booting off that USB stick again, then running the post-install tool. (The 8,1 is a spare test system, but my 4,1 is more important so I'm still considering my options there, and I'll probably downgrade it to Mojave or High Sierra.)

I just avoided installing the 1.2.2 update patcher and so far my macbook air 4.2 is out of trouble. in my opinion please do not update the patcher and all is good to go.

 

[dosdude1]

Does this work in Mojave to fix this issue ? While I have you in suspense, when I try to get to the Catalina installer on my 2011 MacBook Pro 8,2 - I don't see wifi at all ? Is there a way to get the installer to connect the wifi ?

I have updated the Mojave Patcher as well. You do not need WiFi in the installer, just boot the installer drive made with Catalina Patcher, and install Catalina.
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i did not update the patch to 1.2.2 and my macbook air 4.2 is working perfectly with catalina 15.1 patched with 1.2.1. So far no issues with notification, bluetooth or wifi. So i took the right step by avoiding the pop up of patcher update of 370 mb everytime. Will wait till next major os update along with dosdude1 patch.
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I just avoided installing the 1.2.2 update patcher and so far my macbook air 4.2 is out of trouble. in my opinion please do not update the patcher and all is good to go.

That Legacy Video Card Patch update contains the latest of @ASentientBot's transparency fixes. I'd recommend you install it.

 

[Dilli]

Just updated Catalina Patcher to version 1.2.3, which includes @ASentientBot's latest patches for full transparency in light mode on systems with non-Metal video cards. The Legacy Video Card Patch contains this change, and is available via Patch Updater to current users.

Thanks Dosdude1 as always. I hope it will not crash my macbook air 4.2 patched with 1.2.1
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I have updated the Mojave Patcher as well. You do not need WiFi in the installer, just boot the installer drive made with Catalina Patcher, and install Catalina.
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That Legacy Video Card Patch update contains the latest of @ASentientBot's transparency fixes. I'd recommend you install it.

Ok Dosdude1. Now since you have updated the patch to 1.2.3 will try to install the update patcher.

 

[Dilli]

Applied @Dosdude1’s latest patch update 1.2.3 inclusive of @ASentientBot's transparency fixes and all is good. Only issue was after clicking on restart after applying the update install the busy coloured curser ball took a lot of time to disappear and had to force shutdown the MacBook Air . After restart all is good. thanks to all

 

[Subeffect]

Thanks to all the Devs working on this project. Your work has added much more life to the MacBook 6,1. The new Legacy Video Card Patch is a game changer. Thanks again.

 

[jackluke]

I think that some people may be quite happy about this.
View attachment 874639

Today I stumbled across a complete non-Metal transparency patch, menu bar included, that doesn't involve any material swapping -- just a couple bytes in SkyLightOriginal.

0x216c60: NOP

While it doesn't directly use your patches, thank you to @pkouame and especially @testheit for pointing me in the right direction with your discoveries involving materials in SkyLight. It was by looking at related code that I came across this.

The file is attached for testing Please report any issues.

You are a genius.

 

[ASentientBot]

You are a genius.

Nah, just too much free time and I really love my 2010 MacBook.

Thank you though

 

[OnawaAfrica]

I have updated the Mojave Patcher as well. You do not need WiFi in the installer, just boot the installer drive made with Catalina Patcher, and install Catalina.
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That Legacy Video Card Patch update contains the latest of @ASentientBot's transparency fixes. I'd recommend you install it.

You guys are geniuses.
Catalina rocking on my 15" mid-2010 MacBook Pro. Who says a 9 years old laptop is useless

Just Did A Clean install on my SSD for Catalina with the latest Patches and now Transparency and everything is fully working. Thank you DosDude1 & ASentientBot you guys rock.
Greetings From Kenya

 

[testheit]

@ASentientBot what a great job. Right from the beginning Material patches are considered to be just temporary fixes. I knew/hoped the will be a better solution 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

 

[ASentientBot]

@ASentientBot what a great job. Right from the beginning Material patches are considered to be just temporary fixes. I knew/hoped the will be a better solution 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

Well, without the starting point that you and @pkouame gave me, I doubt I'd have ever figured it out.

So happy to be able to work with all you smart people, I'm learning a lot! 😄

 

[olad]

You are a genius.

Seconded...

I like statistics also (way too much time on my hands!). Dosdude1's Mojave Patch 1.2.3 lasted 5 months; so did Patch 1.3.3 (5 months). Now that Catalina's is on patch 1.2.3, how long will it last, I wonder?

 

[OnawaAfrica]

is the source code for the Legacy GPU patches etc available?

 

[jackluke]

@ASentientBot of course your recent amazing "light mode" Catalina fix works on Mojave too, I just tested it unzipping the "transparency???????.zip" renaming your SkyLightOriginal to SkyLight and placing it in its Mojave /S/L/PrivateFrameworks/ path , even if my previous stock Mojave SkyLight was 4.6 MB, this one instead 3.8 MB (probably due to the i386 lipo) but it works quietly.

I guess the unsupported Mac's "darkmode early adopter users" will start to re-appreciate and enjoy the classic "OSX aqua theme" namely the "light mode".

Thanks once again for your incredible work.

 

[smokesletsgo]

Does this new transparency patch fixes dark mode issues, like the black outline on windows?

 

[telepati]

@dosdude1 there is definitely something wrong with this new Legacy Video Patch. I got this patch today again from patch updater and installed it, click restart and still waiting, it never makes a restart just like the yesterday. Patch Updater always makes easy restart but with this new patch it's just stuck.

 

[joevt]

- Collin (@dosdude1) has the most user-friendly and reliable patch tool. Julian (@0403979) has an alternate implementation (he recreated Collin's work but with shell scripts) that requires more knowledge but works better in some cases. Both are open source now! It's really just a matter of personal preference.

Open source is good because I can see what it's doing, which is nice. One strange thing I see in the source is that the post installer and the updater do patches differently.

1) The post installer patches are all inside the post installer and use code in the executable to install the patches.​

​

2) The updater patches are downloaded from elsewhere (the source code has the url) and use a shell script inside each downloaded patch to install the patch.​

Is there a reason the post installer can't use scripts like the updater? Maybe something about the installer environment makes it not possible?

There are some patches that are unique to the post installer. I don't know why these couldn't be included in the updater.
- "APFS Patch"
- "Platform Check Patch"

There are some updates that are unique to the updater. Why aren't they included in the post installer? Because they are not necessary for boot, and writing scripts to install these is easier than writing Objective-C?
- "Partial Trackpad/Keyboard Patch"
- "IOHIDFamily Stall Patch"
- "Night Shift Patch"
- "Backlight Control Patch"

There are some discrepancies between the post installer and the updater.
- Post installer says "Install Patch Updater" but updater says "Patch Updater".
- Patch IDs mismatch for "Broadcom BCM4321 WiFi Support Patch" (bcm94321Patch/bcm94321). This might be a bug which causes the updater to reinstall the patch even if it's installed by the post installer. This happens only once though because the updater remembers the ids of its patches. My '/Library/Application Support/macOS Catalina Patcher/installedPatches.plist' has both IDs : bcm94321Patch from post installer and bcm94321 from the updater.

The updater has descriptions for each of its patches, but these are only ever displayed once when first installed or when there's an update? It would be useful for the description to appear when a patch is selected. The post installer doesn't have descriptions for its patches so the user might wonder what they are for.

There is some other duplication of information between the post installer and the updater. The post installer has a macmodels.plist file which is a list of Mac models and their recommended set of patches. Conversely, the updater has a updates.plist file (not in the source) which is a list of patches and the Mac models that are supported for each patch. I did not check to see if the info in the two plists matches for the common patches (does recommended = supported?). Since they are different files, there is a chance for discrepancies. If the post installer used the same plist as the updater, then it could read version and name from the plist instead of duplicating the info in source code.

 

[Barry K. Nathan]

@dosdude1 I have a fix for the problem where the Mac won't restart after using Patch Updater to install the new Legacy Video Card patch.

Basically, the patch files need to be copied in using pax, not cp. cp is directly overwriting the old file in place and wreaking havoc with running processes that are dependent on SkyLight or CoreDisplay, whereas pax unlinks the old file and creates a new file in the same location. (If macOS had a newer version of BSD cp, I believe just adding the -f flag to cp would be enough to fix things, but unfortunately, even Catalina's cp is too old.)

Here's a modified install.sh that does this. I'm including the entire file instead of a diff, because most lines got changed in some way.

#!/bin/sh

copyAll() {
    pushd "$1"
    pax -rw * "$2"
    popd
}

copyAll videocardpatches/gfxshared/frameworks/ /System/Library/Frameworks/
copyAll videocardpatches/gfxshared/privateframeworks/ /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/
copyAll videocardpatches/gfxshared/kexts/ /System/Library/Extensions/

pushd videocardpatches/gfxshared
pax -rw IOSurface /System/Library/Extensions/IOSurface.kext/Contents/MacOS/
popd

copyAll videocardpatches/gfxshared/wrappers/CoreDisplay/ /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreDisplay.framework/Versions/A/
copyAll videocardpatches/gfxshared/wrappers/SkyLight/ /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SkyLight.framework/Versions/A/

copyAll videocardpatches/intelarrandalegraphics/ /System/Library/Extensions/
copyAll videocardpatches/intelsandybridgegraphics/ /System/Library/Extensions/
copyAll videocardpatches/legacyamd/ /System/Library/Extensions/
copyAll videocardpatches/legacynvidia/ /System/Library/Extensions/

chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions
chown -R 0:0 /System/Library/Extensions
chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Frameworks
chown -R 0:0 /System/Library/Frameworks
chmod -R 755 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks
chown -R 0:0 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks

I tested this on my MacBookPro8,1 and it successfully installed the patch, and I was able to restart afterward without problems, and I was able to see that the new patch made transparency work.

 

[Dilli]

@dosdude1 there is definitely something wrong with this new Legacy Video Patch. I got this patch today again from patch updater and installed it, click restart and still waiting, it never makes a restart just like the yesterday. Patch Updater always makes easy restart but with this new patch it's just stuck.

I too had similar issue on restart. After installation gets stuck with beach ball on restart and does not restart. Had to force shutdown. Now every time I start or shutdown takes lot of time.

 

[cb4ii]

Just registered to let you know of another successful installation of 10.15.1 via latest patcher 1.2.3 on an unsupported MacMini 5,1. Installed on top of a working 10.15.0 (inplace update) without any additional updates.
Since this installation light mode working. Only thing missing would be AirDrop what I could reinstall as much as I know but not needed at the moment.
Donation done for @dosdude1 for his exceptional work here.

 

[Dilli]

@dosdude1 I have a fix for the problem where the Mac won't restart after using Patch Updater to install the new Legacy Video Card patch.

Basically, the patch files need to be copied in using pax, not cp. cp is directly overwriting the old file in place and wreaking havoc with running processes that are dependent on SkyLight or CoreDisplay, whereas pax unlinks the old file and creates a new file in the same location. (If macOS had a newer version of BSD cp, I believe just adding the -f flag to cp would be enough to fix things, but unfortunately, even Catalina's cp is too old.)

Here's a modified install.sh that does this. I'm including the entire file instead of a diff, because most lines got changed in some way.

#!/bin/sh

copyAll() {
    pushd "$1"
    pax -rw * "$2"
    popd
}

copyAll videocardpatches/gfxshared/frameworks/ /System/Library/Frameworks/
copyAll videocardpatches/gfxshared/privateframeworks/ /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/
copyAll videocardpatches/gfxshared/kexts/ /System/Library/Extensions/

pushd videocardpatches/gfxshared
pax -rw IOSurface /System/Library/Extensions/IOSurface.kext/Contents/MacOS/
popd

copyAll videocardpatches/gfxshared/wrappers/CoreDisplay/ /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreDisplay.framework/Versions/A/
copyAll videocardpatches/gfxshared/wrappers/SkyLight/ /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SkyLight.framework/Versions/A/

copyAll videocardpatches/intelarrandalegraphics/ /System/Library/Extensions/
copyAll videocardpatches/intelsandybridgegraphics/ /System/Library/Extensions/
copyAll videocardpatches/legacyamd/ /System/Library/Extensions/
copyAll videocardpatches/legacynvidia/ /System/Library/Extensions/

chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions
chown -R 0:0 /System/Library/Extensions
chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Frameworks
chown -R 0:0 /System/Library/Frameworks
chmod -R 755 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks
chown -R 0:0 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks

I tested this on my MacBookPro8,1 and it successfully installed the patch, and I was able to restart afterward without problems, and I was able to see that the new patch made transparency work.

I had a restart issue but now after every restart or shut down the MacBook takes a long time.

 

[chris1111]

ASentientBot
Wonderfull !!!! 👋👋👋👋
Accept you are a Freaky Genius
Before Transparency patch


After Transparency patch

 

[Vyzantion]

Without VM flagging or machine spoofing I don’t think this will ever be possible for macOS updates. Each OS update comes with a machine I.d. check built in.

It’s not very hard to download the full installer and do an in-place install which will accomplish the update without issue.

I usualy download the installer, re-create the pen drive and re-install the OS on each major update. I had some issues on Mojave, although on I wasn't properly using system definitions (SMBIOS).

 

[Lardyboy999]

Any idea how to get Airdrop working on a MacBook 5.3? Currently installed 10.15.1 and installed all updates/patches and its running sweet. Only thing I can't get to work is Airdrop which I would like. iTunes for some reason doesn't let me log in which was odd and doesn't seem to work since I've updated to 10.15.1.