Ryu2.mind

That's right, I have a near 100%-functional Macintosh system running on my PC.

[Non-tech geeks can stop reading this now.]

After a day or so of downloading 1.2 gigs over my @#$@# China Telecom line, I finally had a copy of the "deadmoo" .img file that's all over the net now. After running it in VMWare (sluggishly) just to make sure it wasn't some wild dream, cloned the image file onto my second hard drive, and booted off that.

Worked like a charm right off the bat... networking, sound, etc. It's as responsive, or more so than the G5 Macs I've used. USB works... it recognized my flash card reader just by plugging it in, and iPhotos imported my pictures perfectly.

There was one speed tweak (more like a necessity): deleting the now-unnecessary "TPMACPI" system extension, which Apple apparently meant to limit it to their official X86 devkits. After that, it was completely smooth... even without 2-D/3-D acceleration. All the eye candy is here, although my resolution is limited to 1024x768 for some reason.

Now, it boots in about 15 seconds... literally, from the initial boot prompt to a usable desktop. I kid you not.

Rosetta is not working right now, but I'm working on fixing that next since I have a SSE3 capable CPU. It involves reverting the "hacked" CoreGraphics extension to the original SSE3-required one, apparently, but I read reports that this trashed peoples' installs, so I didn't try it immediately. Next up is trying iTunes, and maybe downloading some Mac apps to try out the PPC emulation.

My specs:

* Intel Pentium 4 (Prescott core), 3.0 GHz
* Micro-star MS-6788 mobo
* 2 GB PC2700 DDR DRAM
* 2x Western Digital SATA HDDs
* Intel chipset (82801EB south bridge, 865G/PE/P/GV/848P north bridge)
* NVidia 6800 Ultra video card
* Networking: Realtek 8139 onboard Ethernet, ordinary DHCP through a router connected to a ADSL modem
* Realtek onboard AC97 audio

The more or less de-facto portal, if you didn't know already: http://www.osx86project.org/

I'm hardly the first one to experience MacOS bliss on their PCs... so consider this not anything you haven't heard already, but rather a personal endorsement, that yes, the hype is true.

Too bad my parents' PC back home barely missed the specs, and I'm on a different continent than they are now... otherwise, I'd slap it on ASAP. =) Yes, it's that usable as far as basic email and webbrowsing is concerned.

Happy Tiger-ing!
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Update: Rosetta works! iTunes and Yahoo Messenger for Mac which I downloaded seem to work quite well. Basically, all the apps work now except for the DVD player (complains about video device not found or something...) XBench scores: native 41.85, PPC emulation: 16.16. Aww jeah...