macOS 10.15 Catalina on Unsupported Macs

[tsialex]

My iPad mini 2 which just got iOS12 added to it Nov. 2018. It was in iOS land for a couple years. Apple finally beefed it up but just yanked it again with iPadOS. I think mainly because it did have not a pencil. Only reason I can think.

iPad mini 2 have an A7 SOC and just 1GB of RAM, Apple removed iPadOS support with anything less than A8/A8X and 2GB.

 

[jbiser361]

Thx. I'd mention one in public beta, but don't want to promote on this thread. I'll just say and an X to my handle. Google. Has to do with SXM. Sort of a revival.


Good question. I am pretty sure he will make a patch tool for Catalina. I think the hold up is mainly no acceleration on non-metal GPUs. And we are only on Dev. beta 1. Pretty early.

I was not that involved the last go around. dosdude1 could be worn out as well. This stuff is pretty demanding for with people just doing this in their free time.

I did notice that Power Management is not working on MP3,1. No charging via USB. I am gonna try some manually patches from Mojave. And No still WiFi or Sound. haven't done any patches. I've been busy just coming up with good clone techniques. And deciding how committed I am to be using Catalina when I have production work to get back to. A lot of devs will be great new stuff! and then great old stuff that has to be at least maintained. If you keep the logic away from the UI though. SwiftUI should not be a big deal. However, I have some Apps were the UI is extensive even on a simple 4 page app and unless going to SwiftUI makes a lot of sense for awhile I will probably support iOS12 for at least a 6 months to a year. And then SwiftUI 2.0 will be out.

I am glad my MP3,1 should make it another year. It is too bad more machines will be cutoff.

My iPad mini 2 which just got iOS12 added to it Nov. 2018. It was in iOS land for a couple years. Apple finally beefed it up but just yanked it again with iPadOS. I think mainly because it did have not a pencil. Only reason I can think. I may get an iPad mini 4 just to stay current. Not sure yet.

I do hope Apple takes SwiftUI to the NeXT level: Android and Windows 10. It would take a lot but they could dominate the landscape. I mean if I have an App that runs on desktop, mobile, watch and TV, wouldn't you want it to run on the same size screens on other platforms? SwiftUI is a good first step but it could be just a glimpse of what Apple is up to.

yea, i never got around to switch from Objective-C, Swift to me is way to new, same thing with SwiftUI.

i wanted to switch to swift when it came up but once i got a hold of it, Apple changed a lot of things with it

so i’ll stick with Objective-C for one more year

 

[Starplayr]

Very cool and good strategy.

A part of my day job is managing full stack web development. So we're Typescript/Angular on the client stack and dotnet C# on the server on Azure cloud. Experimenting with a nice MEAN stack on the back end as well. The fact that Visual Studio Code rocks on the Mac allows us to do cross-development fairly easily (hate windoze based development). I would also add WebAssembly to your learning curve - it's the future - and many high level languages like Swift are supporting WebAssembly as a target. This basically means you'll be able to do full stack UI development in Swift instead of any of the Javascript based frameworks currently out there (Angular, React, Vue etc...) Look it up. Sounds like you should migrate to the West Coast pretty soon... Good luck.

Yup. I am already doing Swift server side with my own RESTful APIs using Perfect. My day job using ColdFusion and change is not the easiest there. There are several companies here in Charlotte, NC doing iOS via Swift which was a pleasant surprise after seeing larger companies do a lot of Cordova apps. Our company includes has one App on mobile that uses Cordova. I did do a Swift POC for my company and I have 5 Swift projects in the works. A medical app, 2 2d games and 1 3d AR game. With the latest AR, I have one really cool game in mind that I wanted to do a couple years ago. And I have one music app. Lots to chew on. Catalina sorta got in taking a break.

At my day job its AngularJS, HTML, CSS, SCSS, SQL, ColdFusion Script and hopefully Swift or at least React Native, but if I had to do choose it would be Swift.
[doublepost=1560135540][/doublepost]

yea, i never got around to switch from Objective-C, Swift to me is way to new, same thing with SwiftUI.

i wanted to switch to swift when it came up but once i got a hold of it, Apple changed a lot of things with it

so i’ll stick with Objective-C for one more year

Wow. I gave up on Obj-C when Swift 1 came out. I did get a game in the App Store and it do ok. It got pull from not maintaining it. My kids said it was too hard to play, so a simpler version is in the works. And it uses a lot less RAM and resources.

There are many companies still maintaining Objective-C. Swift however is expanding. Server Side came when it was open sourced. Now SwiftUI which will take awhile to game traction. If you did your code base right and wrote common code in the library. Which is what I do on large projects, the only change is the UI and some things that are unique to AppKit and UIKit. So really it doesn't take a ton of work to port. And I don't even know how SpriteKit would do with SwiftUI because most SpriteKit apps don't even use UIKit.

 

[dosdude1]

yea, i never got around to switch from Objective-C, Swift to me is way to new, same thing with SwiftUI.

i wanted to switch to swift when it came up but once i got a hold of it, Apple changed a lot of things with it

so i’ll stick with Objective-C for one more year

Same. I have been using Objective-C for a very long time, and I personally see absolutely no need at all to switch to Swift. The syntax is extremely different (worse IMO), and anything you can do with Swift you can do with Objective-C, along with having an immense amount of compatibility (I've written an app that could run on iOS 5 up to the latest version of iOS, while also supporting all display sizes and looking "modern"). My macOS patchers have all been written on Objective-C, and as such work perfectly on as old as OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Compatibility is a huge focus point for me in any programming project, and the use of Swift unnecessarily takes away from that possibility.

 

[Starplayr]

Thanks! Now running Catalina on my MacPro5,1 like a champ.

Does USB Charging work? WiFi and Sound? Just comparing notes with MP3,1.
[doublepost=1560136233][/doublepost]

Same. I have been using Objective-C for a very long time, and I personally see absolutely no need at all to switch to Swift. The syntax is extremely different (worse IMO), and anything you can do with Swift you can do with Objective-C, along with having an immense amount of compatibility (I've written an app that could run on iOS 5 up to the latest version of iOS, while also supporting all display sizes and looking "modern"). My macOS patchers have all been written on Objective-C, and as such work perfectly on as old as OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Compatibility is a huge focus point for me in any programming project, and the use of Swift unnecessarily takes away from that possibility.

It did start with NeXT and Mac OS X with 20+ years. Xcode and NIB (NeXT Interface Builder).

My only issue for me with Objective-C was when I put it down for awhile and picked it back up, I would have to spend a day relearning things. I come from 20 years of AppleScript which is more English based like SQL and for me it's easier to remember things. Swift is very English like as well.

The weirdest language I have ever used was AppleScript Objective-C where the two were used in the same apps. It was not just separate languages it had its own syntax. Before that there was AppleScript Studio, Cocoa base UI Apps in AppleScript. There was a third party one like it called FaceSpan that came before it. Then came Swift. The language is doing well being it's only be 5 years, but it's also be open sourced which I think gave it a huge boost. SwiftUI is a little foreign to my right now.

But if you do a basic Objective-C App. And hook things up via its interface builder, it works exactly the same with Swift. No real magic. And you can do UI work in code just like you can in Obj-C. I think it just takes a little time to get used to using it. My Swift 1 apps have migrated well to Swift 2, 3, 4, 5, but you are right about compatibility. It's harder with Swift because it's changing and Objective-C is solid.

 

[jbiser361]

Yup. I am already doing Swift server side with my own RESTful APIs using Perfect. My day job using ColdFusion and change is not the easiest there. There are several companies here in Charlotte, NC doing iOS via Swift which was a pleasant surprise after seeing larger companies do a lot of Cordova apps. Our company includes has one App on mobile that uses Cordova. I did do a Swift POC for my company and I have 5 Swift projects in the works. A medical app, 2 2d games and 1 3d AR game. With the latest AR, I have one really cool game in mind that I wanted to do a couple years ago. And I have one music app. Lots to chew on. Catalina sorta got in taking a break.

At my day job its AngularJS, HTML, CSS, SCSS, SQL, ColdFusion Script and hopefully Swift or at least React Native, but if I had to do choose it would be Swift.
[doublepost=1560135540][/doublepost]

Wow. I gave up on Obj-C when Swift 1 came out. I did get a game in the App Store and it do ok. It got pull from not maintaining it. My kids said it was too hard to play, so a simpler version is in the works. And it uses a lot less RAM and resources.

There are many companies still maintaining Objective-C. Swift however is expanding. Server Side came when it was open sourced. Now SwiftUI which will take awhile to game traction. If you did your code base right and wrote common code in the library. Which is what I do on large projects, the only change is the UI and some things that are unique to AppKit and UIKit. So really it doesn't take a ton of work to port. And I don't even know how SpriteKit would do with SwiftUI because most SpriteKit apps don't even use UIKit.

like what dosdude said it takes away from compatibility and to me it’s still new way to new unlike objective-C that was perfected for over 20 years, to me i’ll let Swift get more mature and older then i’ll switch. the only thing that’s appealing is the tableView can be created in 10 lines(maybe less)

 

[AaronE]

Catalina seems to be running fine on my 4,1 flashed to 5,1. The only thing I've noticed not working is the WiFi. It isn't showing in the network preferences. I never got around to upgrading the WiFi and Bluetooth card since I don't use them often. Bluetooth seems to work fine.

 

[jbiser361]

Same. I have been using Objective-C for a very long time, and I personally see absolutely no need at all to switch to Swift. The syntax is extremely different (worse IMO), and anything you can do with Swift you can do with Objective-C, along with having an immense amount of compatibility (I've written an app that could run on iOS 5 up to the latest version of iOS, while also supporting all display sizes and looking "modern"). My macOS patchers have all been written on Objective-C, and as such work perfectly on as old as OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Compatibility is a huge focus point for me in any programming project, and the use of Swift unnecessarily takes away from that possibility.

haha your right about your compatibility statement, my Xserve from ‘06 is running OS X server 10.6 and i use that as a backup in case my laptop decides to update its self and i use that to format the flash drive.

heck i’m thinking of having the thing at night check for new updates for the patcher and download new software when they become ready

 

[EdGlassgow]

USB charging is not working, but it has always been sketchy on this machine. Wifi is not working, with no wifi card detected. Sound is working fine (listening to Spotify as I type this).

 

[dosdude1]

Thx. I'd mention one in public beta, but don't want to promote on this thread. I'll just say and an X to my handle. Google. Has to do with SXM. Sort of a revival.


Good question. I am pretty sure he will make a patch tool for Catalina. I think the hold up is mainly no acceleration on non-metal GPUs. And we are only on Dev. beta 1. Pretty early.

I was not that involved the last go around. dosdude1 could be worn out as well. This stuff is pretty demanding for with people just doing this in their free time.

I did notice that Power Management is not working on MP3,1. No charging via USB. I am gonna try some manually patches from Mojave. And No still WiFi or Sound. haven't done any patches. I've been busy just coming up with good clone techniques. And deciding how committed I am to be using Catalina when I have production work to get back to. A lot of devs will be great new stuff! and then great old stuff that has to be at least maintained. If you keep the logic away from the UI though. SwiftUI should not be a big deal. However, I have some Apps were the UI is extensive even on a simple 4 page app and unless going to SwiftUI makes a lot of sense for awhile I will probably support iOS12 for at least a 6 months to a year. And then SwiftUI 2.0 will be out.

I am glad my MP3,1 should make it another year. It is too bad more machines will be cutoff.

My iPad mini 2 which just got iOS12 added to it Nov. 2018. It was in iOS land for a couple years. Apple finally beefed it up but just yanked it again with iPadOS. I think mainly because it did have not a pencil. Only reason I can think. I may get an iPad mini 4 just to stay current. Not sure yet.

I do hope Apple takes SwiftUI to the NeXT level: Android and Windows 10. It would take a lot but they could dominate the landscape. I mean if I have an App that runs on desktop, mobile, watch and TV, wouldn't you want it to run on the same size screens on other platforms? SwiftUI is a good first step but it could be just a glimpse of what Apple is up to.

I think we could do something really cool for dosdude1. Even if he says or goes, I think we should pool our money together and get dosdude1 an amazing gift. I can think of only 1 thing that would be fitting and I think there are enough people here to do it. With over 2.8 million readers on the Mojave thread. I don't think it would take much to get dosdude1 the ultimate Mac gift. Just throwing it out there because he has done so much for the unsupported Mac community. This is not to take away from anyone else, just a good nod to someone who is kind of a big deal.

Wow, well let me just say I really appreciate the support! I will say that creating, maintaining, and supporting all of my Patcher tools has been quite a lot of work, especially being a full-time college student. I, of course, also REALLY appreciate the work of everybody else who has worked to get these later macOS versions running on unsupported systems. I find it truly unbelievable and amazing that we were able to "squeak" THREE extra years of support out of the 2008-2009 systems, with very few issues.

When I initially started creating these patches, with the first Sierra patcher, I had no idea it would take off as much as it has. I have a TON of users, and quite a bit of support emails to match (about 10-20 per day). Needless to say, it's become a bit difficult to keep up with as a single-man operation. Regardless, though, I will still continue putting in any work necessary to keep my current patches up-to-date, and compatible with the latest minor systems updates from Apple.

As for the future of Catalina Patcher, there are a couple factors playing in to my consideration of not releasing one. For one, it's going to be a lot of work, which will take time that honestly I don't have all that much of. Secondly, I'd feel really bad releasing a patch that results in poor system performance due to lack of graphics acceleration. Yes, I know the majority of people on this thread would be fine with it, however, that is a VERY small portion of the users of my tools. The vast majority would not be pleased (as would myself), and this would result in and endless slew of support emails and messages (despite the many warnings I would include in the docs).

With that said, though, I'm NOT saying I'll completely stop working on creating patches for Catalina. I plan on getting an installer patch figured out, so Catalina can at least be downloaded and installed onto an unsupported machine without the use of a supported one, plus other fixes.

Once again, I REALLY appreciate the consideration and support from you, and many others. While these patchers have taken over a big chunk of my life, I think it was well worth it to help the hundreds of thousands of people who have benefitted from upgrading the machines that Apple unnecessarily dropped support for. Please don't feel obligated, though, to get me anything. I do this because I enjoy programming, and work on old Macs all the time. I already have a whole slew of Macs, ranging from an original 1984 Macintosh to my main machines, a Mid-2012 15" Retina MacBook Pro, and a Mid-2010 Mac Pro 5,1.

Thank you again, and I really wish I were more able to continue to deliver high-quality patching tools for Catalina.

 

[jbiser361]

yea i’m starting to lose hope on the acceleration for older Macs, i had a conversation with dosdude and he even said that

Wow, well let me just say I really appreciate the support! I will say that creating, maintaining, and supporting all of my Patcher tools has been quite a lot of work, especially being a full-time college student. I, of course, also REALLY appreciate the work of everybody else who has worked to get these later macOS versions running on unsupported systems. I find it truly unbelievable and amazing that we were able to "squeak" THREE extra years of support out of the 2008-2009 systems, with very few issues.

When I initially started creating these patches, with the first Sierra patcher, I had no idea it would take off as much as it has. I have a TON of users, and quite a bit of support emails to match (about 10-20 per day). Needless to say, it's become a bit difficult to keep up with as a single-man operation. Regardless, though, I will still continue putting in any work necessary to keep my current patches up-to-date, and compatible with the latest minor systems updates from Apple.

As for the future of Catalina Patcher, there are a couple factors playing in to my consideration of not releasing one. For one, it's going to be a lot of work, which will take time that honestly I don't have all that much of. Secondly, I'd feel really bad releasing a patch that results in poor system performance due to lack of graphics acceleration. Yes, I know the majority of people on this thread would be fine with it, however, that is a VERY small portion of the users of my tools. The vast majority would not be pleased (as would myself), and this would result in and endless slew of support emails and messages (despite the many warnings I would include in the docs).

With that said, though, I'm NOT saying I'll completely stop working on creating patches for Catalina. I plan on getting an installer patch figured out, so Catalina can at least be downloaded and installed onto an unsupported machine without the use of a supported one, plus other fixes.

Once again, I REALLY appreciate the consideration and support from you, and many others. While these patchers have taken over a big chunk of my life, I think it was well worth it to help the hundreds of thousands of people who have benefitted from upgrading the machines that Apple unnecessarily dropped support for. Please don't feel obligated, though, to get me anything. I do this because I enjoy programming, and work on old Macs all the time. I already have a whole slew of Macs, ranging from an original 1984 Macintosh to my main machines, a Mid-2012 15" Retina MacBook Pro, and a Mid-2010 Mac Pro 5,1.

Thank you again, and I really wish I were more able to continue to deliver high-quality patching tools for Catalina.

this is why i donate to you when i can, you put in so much effort and expect nothing out of it. thanks for all you do bro

wasn’t for you i’d be spending hundreds on a Mac when frankly this one works just fine
[doublepost=1560141369][/doublepost]so its like 12:35 here and we're trying to figure out accelerations. dosdude said that AppKit and SkyLight/windowserver use only Metal rendering instructions

so me and my friend thought that no problem just switch the code to be more friendly towards the cards, but that idea was quickly shot down like a plane entering a military base.

turns out we need the source code to do or someone can do some binary patch but I heard that its near impossible unless ur a pro even thin its gonna be hard

so even though its impossible we both think its easier to find the source code than that.

but like they say, when theres a will theres a way

 

[TimothyR734]

Wow, well let me just say I really appreciate the support! I will say that creating, maintaining, and supporting all of my Patcher tools has been quite a lot of work, especially being a full-time college student. I, of course, also REALLY appreciate the work of everybody else who has worked to get these later macOS versions running on unsupported systems. I find it truly unbelievable and amazing that we were able to "squeak" THREE extra years of support out of the 2008-2009 systems, with very few issues.

When I initially started creating these patches, with the first Sierra patcher, I had no idea it would take off as much as it has. I have a TON of users, and quite a bit of support emails to match (about 10-20 per day). Needless to say, it's become a bit difficult to keep up with as a single-man operation. Regardless, though, I will still continue putting in any work necessary to keep my current patches up-to-date, and compatible with the latest minor systems updates from Apple.

As for the future of Catalina Patcher, there are a couple factors playing in to my consideration of not releasing one. For one, it's going to be a lot of work, which will take time that honestly I don't have all that much of. Secondly, I'd feel really bad releasing a patch that results in poor system performance due to lack of graphics acceleration. Yes, I know the majority of people on this thread would be fine with it, however, that is a VERY small portion of the users of my tools. The vast majority would not be pleased (as would myself), and this would result in and endless slew of support emails and messages (despite the many warnings I would include in the docs).

With that said, though, I'm NOT saying I'll completely stop working on creating patches for Catalina. I plan on getting an installer patch figured out, so Catalina can at least be downloaded and installed onto an unsupported machine without the use of a supported one, plus other fixes.

Once again, I REALLY appreciate the consideration and support from you, and many others. While these patchers have taken over a big chunk of my life, I think it was well worth it to help the hundreds of thousands of people who have benefitted from upgrading the machines that Apple unnecessarily dropped support for. Please don't feel obligated, though, to get me anything. I do this because I enjoy programming, and work on old Macs all the time. I already have a whole slew of Macs, ranging from an original 1984 Macintosh to my main machines, a Mid-2012 15" Retina MacBook Pro, and a Mid-2010 Mac Pro 5,1.

Thank you again, and I really wish I were more able to continue to deliver high-quality patching tools for Catalina.

I really Love your work and effort you put into helping us and I am sure we will get macOS Catalina up and running it will take time but we will to do this and a lot of patience. I am one ifI can it installed even with out full acceleration I will be happy that can come later
[doublepost=1560145194][/doublepost]Just in case anyone who is running Catalina and notice free disk space is shrinking you might try this to recover some space There are 2 places now where the snapshots are stored due to the system being separated now.

In terminal list them separately with

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /

tmutil listlocalsnapshots /System/Volumes/Data

If you wish you can then manually delete them with

tmutil deletelocalsnapshots <snapshot_date>

 

[racerhomie]

Wow, well let me just say I really appreciate the support! I will say that creating, maintaining, and supporting all of my Patcher tools has been quite a lot of work, especially being a full-time college student. I, of course, also REALLY appreciate the work of everybody else who has worked to get these later macOS versions running on unsupported systems. I find it truly unbelievable and amazing that we were able to "squeak" THREE extra years of support out of the 2008-2009 systems, with very few issues.

When I initially started creating these patches, with the first Sierra patcher, I had no idea it would take off as much as it has. I have a TON of users, and quite a bit of support emails to match (about 10-20 per day). Needless to say, it's become a bit difficult to keep up with as a single-man operation. Regardless, though, I will still continue putting in any work necessary to keep my current patches up-to-date, and compatible with the latest minor systems updates from Apple.

As for the future of Catalina Patcher, there are a couple factors playing in to my consideration of not releasing one. For one, it's going to be a lot of work, which will take time that honestly I don't have all that much of. Secondly, I'd feel really bad releasing a patch that results in poor system performance due to lack of graphics acceleration. Yes, I know the majority of people on this thread would be fine with it, however, that is a VERY small portion of the users of my tools. The vast majority would not be pleased (as would myself), and this would result in and endless slew of support emails and messages (despite the many warnings I would include in the docs).

With that said, though, I'm NOT saying I'll completely stop working on creating patches for Catalina. I plan on getting an installer patch figured out, so Catalina can at least be downloaded and installed onto an unsupported machine without the use of a supported one, plus other fixes.

Once again, I REALLY appreciate the consideration and support from you, and many others. While these patchers have taken over a big chunk of my life, I think it was well worth it to help the hundreds of thousands of people who have benefitted from upgrading the machines that Apple unnecessarily dropped support for. Please don't feel obligated, though, to get me anything. I do this because I enjoy programming, and work on old Macs all the time. I already have a whole slew of Macs, ranging from an original 1984 Macintosh to my main machines, a Mid-2012 15" Retina MacBook Pro, and a Mid-2010 Mac Pro 5,1.

Thank you again, and I really wish I were more able to continue to deliver high-quality patching tools for Catalina.

Thank You for the excellent work you have done.

 

[jackluke]

Catalina seems to be running fine on my 4,1 flashed to 5,1. The only thing I've noticed not working is the WiFi. It isn't showing in the network preferences. I never got around to upgrading the WiFi and Bluetooth card since I don't use them often. Bluetooth seems to work fine.

View attachment 842047

If your wifi card previously worked on HighSierra/Mojave, then you could try to use the IO80211Family.kext from HighSierra/Mojave on Catalina.

 

[jhowarth]

Wow, well let me just say I really appreciate the support! I will say that creating, maintaining, and supporting all of my Patcher tools has been quite a lot of work, especially being a full-time college student. I, of course, also REALLY appreciate the work of everybody else who has worked to get these later macOS versions running on unsupported systems. I find it truly unbelievable and amazing that we were able to "squeak" THREE extra years of support out of the 2008-2009 systems, with very few issues.

When I initially started creating these patches, with the first Sierra patcher, I had no idea it would take off as much as it has. I have a TON of users, and quite a bit of support emails to match (about 10-20 per day). Needless to say, it's become a bit difficult to keep up with as a single-man operation. Regardless, though, I will still continue putting in any work necessary to keep my current patches up-to-date, and compatible with the latest minor systems updates from Apple.

As for the future of Catalina Patcher, there are a couple factors playing in to my consideration of not releasing one. For one, it's going to be a lot of work, which will take time that honestly I don't have all that much of. Secondly, I'd feel really bad releasing a patch that results in poor system performance due to lack of graphics acceleration. Yes, I know the majority of people on this thread would be fine with it, however, that is a VERY small portion of the users of my tools. The vast majority would not be pleased (as would myself), and this would result in and endless slew of support emails and messages (despite the many warnings I would include in the docs).

With that said, though, I'm NOT saying I'll completely stop working on creating patches for Catalina. I plan on getting an installer patch figured out, so Catalina can at least be downloaded and installed onto an unsupported machine without the use of a supported one, plus other fixes.

Once again, I REALLY appreciate the consideration and support from you, and many others. While these patchers have taken over a big chunk of my life, I think it was well worth it to help the hundreds of thousands of people who have benefitted from upgrading the machines that Apple unnecessarily dropped support for. Please don't feel obligated, though, to get me anything. I do this because I enjoy programming, and work on old Macs all the time. I already have a whole slew of Macs, ranging from an original 1984 Macintosh to my main machines, a Mid-2012 15" Retina MacBook Pro, and a Mid-2010 Mac Pro 5,1.

Thank you again, and I really wish I were more able to continue to deliver high-quality patching tools for Catalina.

Won't the work required to maintain a Catalina Patcher be significantly reduced if the supported machines are limited to just those with Metal graphic cards?

 

[pkouame]

Same. I have been using Objective-C for a very long time, and I personally see absolutely no need at all to switch to Swift. The syntax is extremely different (worse IMO), and anything you can do with Swift you can do with Objective-C, along with having an immense amount of compatibility (I've written an app that could run on iOS 5 up to the latest version of iOS, while also supporting all display sizes and looking "modern"). My macOS patchers have all been written on Objective-C, and as such work perfectly on as old as OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Compatibility is a huge focus point for me in any programming project, and the use of Swift unnecessarily takes away from that possibility.

Agreed. Now I go back to NeXT the days, where Obj-C started from and kicked off everything macOS is now. It's a great language and for those of us who grew up with 6502 assembly and pure C, a very welcome addition. There is nothing you can't do in Obj-C so it's not a question of capabilities. It definitely isn't dead and still used heavily by the gurus in Cupertino. While I never found it difficult, many did and Apple realized it needed an answer to the growing popularity of C#. In fact I can't tell you the number of young developers I encountered who didn't develop Mac because of the Obj-C "thing". Swift was a modern answer to that and I believe it shines in that respect. Just another tool. Those of us comfortable with obj-C have an extra weapon in our arsenal. But Swift is extremely powerful and pretty fun - is doing a lot to bring a whole new generation of developers on board...

 

[darthgeekonius]

Can we get a metal card only patcher?

 

[jackluke]

Won't the work required to maintain a Catalina Patcher be significantly reduced if the supported machines are limited to just those with Metal graphic cards?

I guess no, since many machines with "upgraded Metal graphic cards" still require many legacy patches, while the machines with "Metal cards natively" can use directly the "createinstallmedia" from a "Install macOS Catalina.app" .

The first step is to create a valid generalized Catalina USB Installer for unsupported Mac, hence the dosdude1 PostInstall patches can be shifted directly to Catalina.

While for those who already managed to install Catalina through cloning or editing packages or virtual machines, I guess can easily follow the OTA update process when Catalina beta 2 goes out.

 

[pkouame]

Wow, well let me just say I really appreciate the support! I will say that creating, maintaining, and supporting all of my Patcher tools has been quite a lot of work, especially being a full-time college student. I, of course, also REALLY appreciate the work of everybody else who has worked to get these later macOS versions running on unsupported systems. I find it truly unbelievable and amazing that we were able to "squeak" THREE extra years of support out of the 2008-2009 systems, with very few issues.

When I initially started creating these patches, with the first Sierra patcher, I had no idea it would take off as much as it has. I have a TON of users, and quite a bit of support emails to match (about 10-20 per day). Needless to say, it's become a bit difficult to keep up with as a single-man operation. Regardless, though, I will still continue putting in any work necessary to keep my current patches up-to-date, and compatible with the latest minor systems updates from Apple.

As for the future of Catalina Patcher, there are a couple factors playing in to my consideration of not releasing one. For one, it's going to be a lot of work, which will take time that honestly I don't have all that much of. Secondly, I'd feel really bad releasing a patch that results in poor system performance due to lack of graphics acceleration. Yes, I know the majority of people on this thread would be fine with it, however, that is a VERY small portion of the users of my tools. The vast majority would not be pleased (as would myself), and this would result in and endless slew of support emails and messages (despite the many warnings I would include in the docs).

With that said, though, I'm NOT saying I'll completely stop working on creating patches for Catalina. I plan on getting an installer patch figured out, so Catalina can at least be downloaded and installed onto an unsupported machine without the use of a supported one, plus other fixes.

Once again, I REALLY appreciate the consideration and support from you, and many others. While these patchers have taken over a big chunk of my life, I think it was well worth it to help the hundreds of thousands of people who have benefitted from upgrading the machines that Apple unnecessarily dropped support for. Please don't feel obligated, though, to get me anything. I do this because I enjoy programming, and work on old Macs all the time. I already have a whole slew of Macs, ranging from an original 1984 Macintosh to my main machines, a Mid-2012 15" Retina MacBook Pro, and a Mid-2010 Mac Pro 5,1.

Thank you again, and I really wish I were more able to continue to deliver high-quality patching tools for Catalina.

As one of the early birds on this journey, yes three years (amazing!), thanks for all your hard work and support. Maintaining tools like this is very hard work and we all appreciate it.

The Catalina Patcher would be a great limited version that could help us all. More power to you on that.

As always many of us can humbly contribute in our own ways so you are not alone, we all have different skill sets that could help alleviate your burden. Power in numbers... But good things don't last forever - I understand.

 

[PixelmonGalaxy]

How does one patch it to run on an older device manually, I got macOS Catalina running on my main PC as a Hackintosh, how can I get that SSD to boot on my MacBook Pro 2011?

 

[Syncretic]

Would some kind soul with a working copy of Catalina (on any Mac, supported or otherwise) please run the following command in a terminal window and post the results (either here or in a DM to me)? Thanks in advance.

otool -s __HIB __desc /System/Library/Kernels/kernel | head -16

(Note the two underscores in front of "HIB" and "desc". Cut & paste should work if you'd rather not type that.)
(This command should be able to run in a normal (not sudo/root) terminal window, and it's non-destructive (doesn't change anything on your system) - it's just dumping some info about the Catalina kernel. If it doesn't run in a normal window for some reason, please try it with "sudo " in front of it.)

 

[osvaldoasn]

Alright, so for those who were wondering, myself and @parrotgeek1 have been working on this acceleration issue on our own, and have come to the conclusion that it is not going to be possible to achieve graphics acceleration on non-Metal video cards in Catalina. This is for various reasons, but the main one is the SkyLight and CoreDisplay dependencies. In Catalina, SkyLight and CoreDisplay have been changed greatly, and are interdependent on each other. Meaning, if you replace one from an older version of macOS, you must replace the other, otherwise you'll be left with a ton of unresolved symbols. The problem with doing this, though, Catalina's AppKit relies on all the new functions present in the Catalina CoreDisplay framework. You cannot use a copy of AppKit from an older macOS version, without causing a ton more unresolved symbols.

TLDR, based on this analysis, non-Metal GPU acceleration is not, and will not be possible on 10.15 Catalina. With that said, I will not be releasing the "usual" patcher for 10.15. I do not believe the general public should be using a copy of macOS without full graphics acceleration (I sure as heck know I wouldn't want to), and I'm not going to release a patch that results in extremely poor system performance for the end user (not to mention I would get thousands of complaints per day about it if I did).

I will, however, more than likely make somewhat of a "cut down" patch, designed for use only on Mac Pro systems and some iMacs that have had their video cards upgraded.

I'm as disappointed as you all are about this discovery, and deeply apologize I won't be able to provide a patcher because of it.

This patch fix iMac12,x AMD Radeon HD 5xxx and 6xxx series GPUs issue? Mojave ou Catalina?

 

[pkouame]

Would some kind soul with a working copy of Catalina (on any Mac, supported or otherwise) please run the following command in a terminal window and post the results (either here or in a DM to me)? Thanks in advance.

otool -s __HIB __desc /System/Library/Kernels/kernel | head -16

(Note the two underscores in front of "HIB" and "desc". Cut & paste should work if you'd rather not type that.)
(This command should be able to run in a normal (not sudo/root) terminal window, and it's non-destructive (doesn't change anything on your system) - it's just dumping some info about the Catalina kernel. If it doesn't run in a normal window for some reason, please try it with "sudo " in front of it.)

Here you go.

EDIT: another quirk with this beta. otool won't work without command line tools which it attempts to download and install automatically (like xcode-select), but the installation fails for some unknown reason.

I had to download the Xcode 11 beta cl tools directly from Apple.

 

[tsialex]

Would some kind soul with a working copy of Catalina (on any Mac, supported or otherwise) please run the following command in a terminal window and post the results (either here or in a DM to me)? Thanks in advance.

otool -s __HIB __desc /System/Library/Kernels/kernel | head -16

(Note the two underscores in front of "HIB" and "desc". Cut & paste should work if you'd rather not type that.)
(This command should be able to run in a normal (not sudo/root) terminal window, and it's non-destructive (doesn't change anything on your system) - it's just dumping some info about the Catalina kernel. If it doesn't run in a normal window for some reason, please try it with "sudo " in front of it.)

/System/Library/Kernels/kernel:
Contents of (__HIB,__desc) section
ffffff8000106000    d0 13 30 00 80 ff ff ff a0 97 19 00 80 ff ff ff
ffffff8000106010    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 30 14 30 00 80 ff ff ff
ffffff8000106020    20 14 30 00 80 ff ff ff 70 14 30 00 80 ff ff ff
ffffff8000106030    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 1c 30 00 80 ff ff ff
ffffff8000106040    e0 19 30 00 80 ff ff ff 90 1f 30 00 80 ff ff ff
ffffff8000106050    30 22 30 00 80 ff ff ff a0 1f 30 00 80 ff ff ff
ffffff8000106060    80 20 30 00 80 ff ff ff 60 21 30 00 80 ff ff ff
ffffff8000106070    20 24 30 00 80 ff ff ff 00 24 30 00 80 ff ff ff
ffffff8000106080    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
ffffff8000106090    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
ffffff80001060a0    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
ffffff80001060b0    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
ffffff80001060c0    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
ffffff80001060d0    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

 

[Syncretic]

Here you go.

Thank you. I'm not going to have time to mess with Catalina for a while, and I wanted to get a heads-up on certain structural changes they might have made in the kernel. On this level, at least, the kernel is probably similar or identical to Mojave, which makes my life a lot easier.

EDIT: Thank you as well, @tsialex.