macOS 10.15 Catalina on Unsupported Macs

[ASentientBot]

Yes, I remember that issue with a "night shift" patch, it occurs because apple is constantly changing the offset in each minor Catalina update with their CoreBrightness , since the software update is still under testing, I uploaded a 10.15.1 pre-patched CoreBrightness and this should fix the side effect with keyboard prefpane.

open a Catalina Terminal and copy/paste this:
sudo mount -uw / ; killall Finder
open /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/

replace on-the-fly (do not merge) with this attached only valid for Catalina 10.15.1 build 19B88 (and maybe later builds).

I've never tried the Night Shift patches before but this works well! Although it definitely seems to cause a performance hit when the screen is changing colors. (Maybe why Apple disabled it in the first place.)

Thanks @jackluke! You're always the go-to guy for patched binaries. Great for lazy people like me

 

[Valerio G]

• Photos application is showing picture pixelized with weird colours in the viewer.

Hi Balur,
reading the blog I found your issue with Photos App after an installation of Catalina on unsupported Mac.
Attached you can see what my Photos App is showing when I click on images thumbnails. Colours are messed up and pixelized.

Did you somehow sort out the problem with Catalina or just rolled back to Mojave?

My primary usage of the Mac is for photos, so this is definitely a showstopper for me and I might evaluate downgrade to Mojave (patched) if it works there.
Previous OS was El Capitan. I'm running on a iMac 20-inch, Early 2008. Display adapter is ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro 256 MB.

Cheers

 

[jackluke]

I've never tried the Night Shift patches before but this works well! Although it definitely seems to cause a performance hit when the screen is changing colors. (Maybe why Apple disabled it in the first place.)

Thanks @jackluke! You're always the go-to guy for patched binaries. Great for lazy people like me

A bit of performance hit since the night-shift feature relies on GPU drivers and with Catalina not 100% accelerated probably is noticeable more, if I don't get wrong only gpu framebuffer loaded is suffice for enabling night-shift. Anyway I simply used the pikeralpha method.

 

[Macbookprodude]

Yes, I remember that issue with a "night shift" patch, it occurs because apple is constantly changing the offset in each minor Catalina update with their CoreBrightness , since the software update is still under testing, I uploaded a 10.15.1 pre-patched CoreBrightness and this should fix the side effect with keyboard prefpane.

open a Catalina Terminal and copy/paste this:
sudo mount -uw / ; killall Finder
open /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/

replace on-the-fly (do not merge) with this attached only valid for Catalina 10.15.1 build 19B88 (and maybe later builds).

Thanks will try this when I get home.
[automerge]1574474539[/automerge]

Yes, I remember that issue with a "night shift" patch, it occurs because apple is constantly changing the offset in each minor Catalina update with their CoreBrightness , since the software update is still under testing, I uploaded a 10.15.1 pre-patched CoreBrightness and this should fix the side effect with keyboard prefpane.

open a Catalina Terminal and copy/paste this:
sudo mount -uw / ; killall Finder
open /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/

replace on-the-fly (do not merge) with this attached only valid for Catalina 10.15.1 build 19B88 (and maybe later builds).

Jack Luke, quick question - have you notice Siri doesn’t work ?? That’s another issue that I am having.

 

[Nitram_knew]

I don't have the courage to go through the whole forum to see if someone has found a solution to this problem. I run Catalina on an old mid 2009 13" MBPro and I also cannot input japanese through romaji, only with the japanese hiragana keyboard layout. The romaji will just not convert into hiraganas. This is kind of a bummer for me since I live in japan and have to write in japanese quite often, for now I write on my phone but that's not very convenient. Any chance for such a fix ?

Hi MichelAngeloX
I could download the input converter from Google here:
https://www.google.co.jp/intl/ja/ime/
After installation it will show up alongside in the language menu in blue color.

It works like the orignal one on Mac.
My Mac is from 2009 and works well with Cataline patcher.

今日は！日本語入力できます！

 

[heero503]

Hi all, I have installed Catalina patcher and installed a copy of 10.15.1 in an internal SSD in Mac Pro.
It run normally and I try to solve the sidecar issue.
After I boot with the installation USB and do some post installation patch, I cannot boot in Catalina...
I can boot to my external SSD with Majave but I never can do anything when boot with any installation USB.
When boot with USB (no matter Catalina or Majave, all drive in mac pro is unmount and cannot mount or run any installation.
Please advise what I can do?

 

[ASentientBot]

Hi MichelAngeloX
I could download the input converter from Google here:
https://www.google.co.jp/intl/ja/ime/
After installation it will show up alongside in the language menu in blue color.
View attachment 878748

It works like the orignal one on Mac.
My Mac is from 2009 and works well with Cataline patcher.

View attachment 878749

* ** *は！* ** ** ** ** *できます！

This solution should be linked on the front page.

 

[TimothyR734]

Hi all, I have installed Catalina patcher and installed a copy of 10.15.1 in an internal SSD in Mac Pro.
It run normally and I try to solve the sidecar issue.
After I boot with the installation USB and do some post installation patch, I cannot boot in Catalina...
I can boot to my external SSD with Majave but I never can do anything when boot with any installation USB.
When boot with USB (no matter Catalina or Majave, all drive in mac pro is unmount and cannot mount or run any installation.
Please advise what I can do?

did you install the post install patches to the wrong ssd? did you try booting in the Catalina usb patcher and set your start up disk to your Catalina ssd

 

[Дмитрий Гребенников]

Good morning! After the last update, the following problem appeared. The computer after leaving the sleep mode goes into rebut after a few seconds of work.What could be the problem?

 

[nekton1]

Hi MichelAngeloX
I could download the input converter from Google here:
https://www.google.co.jp/intl/ja/ime/
After installation it will show up alongside in the language menu in blue color.
View attachment 878748

It works like the orignal one on Mac.
My Mac is from 2009 and works well with Cataline patcher.

View attachment 878749

* ** *は！* ** ** ** ** *できます！

Thanks for that Nitram_knew; it solved a long-standing issue for me too.

 

[LuisN]

Hi Balur,
reading the blog I found your issue with Photos App after an installation of Catalina on unsupported Mac.
Attached you can see what my Photos App is showing when I click on images thumbnails. Colours are messed up and pixelized.

Did you somehow sort out the problem with Catalina or just rolled back to Mojave?

My primary usage of the Mac is for photos, so this is definitely a showstopper for me and I might evaluate downgrade to Mojave (patched) if it works there.
Previous OS was El Capitan. I'm running on a iMac 20-inch, Early 2008. Display adapter is ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro 256 MB.

Cheers

Use a tool like switchresx, (https://www.madrau.com), to change color from 30 to 24 bit. It's a known problem with ATI cards in last version of macOS in unsupported Macs.

 

[0403979]

Hi all! Just checking in to confirm that 10.15.2 DP3 (19C46a) is working seemingly normally on a non-Metal MacBook7,1 with the new GeForceTesla patch and a stock IOSurface. I'll report back if anything weird happens, but fingers crossed that the next couple betas will continue to be smooth sailing
View attachment 878553

So, with the patched GeForceTesla, the stock IOSurface, IONDRVSupport, and IOGraphicsFamily work?

 

[0403979]

Hi all! Just checking in to confirm that 10.15.2 DP3 (19C46a) is working seemingly normally on a non-Metal MacBook7,1 with the new GeForceTesla patch and a stock IOSurface. I'll report back if anything weird happens, but fingers crossed that the next couple betas will continue to be smooth sailing
View attachment 878553

Can you also send over your patched binary please?

 

[heero503]

did you install the post install patches to the wrong ssd? did you try booting in the Catalina usb patcher and set your start up disk to your Catalina ssd

 

[Asperi]

Installed patcher on MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) successfully. Everything works more or less fine, but... have 2-3 kernel panic crashes per-day... not so much stopper for playing around with it, but a bit awfully to use as work system.

Graphics:
NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512 MB
Intel HD Graphics 288 MB

Crash log attached. Is it curable or ... or? )) Thanks!

 

[joelw135]

I installed 10.15.1 on my MacBook Pro 7,1 and the OS works great except that it doesn't always wake from sleep. Then I have to resort to the power button. Any ideas?

 

[dosdude1]

Installed patcher on MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) successfully. Everything works more or less fine, but... have 2-3 kernel panic crashes per-day... not so much stopper for playing around with it, but a bit awfully to use as work system.

Graphics:
NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512 MB
Intel HD Graphics 288 MB

Crash log attached. Is it curable or ... or? )) Thanks!

That's a hardware issue, nothing to do with Catalina or the patcher. I have a video here explaining that repair.

 

[Tucker28]

Thanks so much for your work on this. Catalina wasn't as big a deal for me as Mojave was. Dark Mode was a must. But Catalina is up and running great on my late 2011 17" MacBook Pro (8,3). Thanks!

I also followed jackluke's instructions and got continuity enabled. Messages and phone calls work perfectly. AirDrop works but there are a couple of hiccups when using it with iDevices, but it works! I love having that feature back.

Handoff, SideCar, Universal Clipboard, Markup, Sketch, Camera, Auto Unlock with Apple Watch, Apple Pay, and Instant Hotspot don't work at all. I'd love to use them, however, I'm just grateful that this 8-year-old Mac is still viable with the current OS.

Is there anything else I can do to enable the rest of Continuity?

 

[jackluke]

Thanks so much for your work on this. Catalina wasn't as big a deal for me as Mojave was. Dark Mode was a must. But Catalina is up and running great on my late 2011 17" MacBook Pro (8,3). Thanks!

I also followed jackluke's instructions and got continuity enabled. Messages and phone calls work perfectly. AirDrop works but there are a couple of hiccups when using it with iDevices, but it works! I love having that feature back.

Handoff, SideCar, Universal Clipboard, Markup, Sketch, Camera, Auto Unlock with Apple Watch, Apple Pay, and Instant Hotspot don't work at all. I'd love to use them, however, I'm just grateful that this 8-year-old Mac is still viable with the current OS.

Is there anything else I can do to enable the rest of Continuity?

For continuity features (that are almost all those you mentioned apart Sidecar) from Catalina (and Mojave too) a Bluetooth 4.0 authorization is required, some 2011 machines do already have it, but if your machine is equipped with a Bluetooth 2.1 , then you can easily buy a cheap usb bluetooth 4.0 dongle and all the continuity features will work on your machine.

 

[TimothyR734]

[automerge]1574533436[/automerge]
Got macOS Catalina 10.15.2 Dev 3 installed iPhoto,Photos,Music,iTunes,Maps and they even fixed Airplay

 

[wbensalah]

I have used this to make a fully operational recovery partition: Catalina Recovery HD Partition

This works flawlessly on my MacBook Pro 6,2 (15’ 2010).

This solution should be linked on the front page.

@dosdude1 you should add this to your Patcher. And thank you for all this beautiful work.

 

[wbensalah]

That's a hardware issue, nothing to do with Catalina or the patcher. I have a video here explaining that repair.

@dosdude1 can I have the exact reference of the new capacitor please ?

 

[ASentientBot]

So, with the patched GeForceTesla, the stock IOSurface, IONDRVSupport, and IOGraphicsFamily work?

(I know I already replied on Discord, but that's not public.)

The new patches to GeForceTesla are just to make it work with stock IOSurface, they don't affect those other issues. There are multiple ways to solve the IONDRVSupport missing symbol issue: NDRVShim (makes a stub version of the symbol), binpatching NVDAResmanTesla (avoids calling the symbol), and just replacing the two kexts you mentioned. I tend to use the second option but they all work.

No need to incorporate my new patch into any automated tools yet, I just like it because patching the stock IOSurface is a bit gross. But my approach could easily cause problems.

 

[Peatwheat]

Installed patcher on MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) successfully. Everything works more or less fine, but... have 2-3 kernel panic crashes per-day... not so much stopper for playing around with it, but a bit awfully to use as work system.

Graphics:
NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512 MB
Intel HD Graphics 288 MB

Crash log attached. Is it curable or ... or? )) Thanks!

Pardon me if someone has answered this. It could just be my particular machine. I have the exact same model. It seemed the Nvidia Web drivers or the remains there off were causing it for me. I used "app Cleaner & uninstaller" nektony.com. and removed all traces. Any Cuda Drivers are gone as well. I have to say was was getting panic in High Sierra as well. No sign of them since the nvidia Software was forcibly removed.

I didn't compare out panics. an attempt wouldn't be invasive to any of your existing software. i can still trigger a panic while using benchmarking software. So, I don't do that.

Best of Luck

 

[Tucker28]

For continuity features (that are almost all those you mentioned apart Sidecar) from Catalina (and Mojave too) a Bluetooth 4.0 authorization is required, some 2011 machines do already have it, but if your machine is equipped with a Bluetooth 2.1 , then you can easily buy a cheap usb bluetooth 4.0 dongle and all the continuity features will work on your machine.

I forgot to mention in my post that I do have a Bluetooth dongle. This one:
GMYLE BCM20702 Bluetooth 4.0 USB adapter

Do I need a different one? This is the one I used all throughout the CAT years.