After a year of light use I've decided to sunset this project due to the advent of ARM Macs and the fact that I wasn't able to fix one last issue with text rendering in microsoft products at 4k60. Also updating opencore and all the kexts gets very tedious very quickly. I'm putting this repo in read-only mode for documentation purposes.
a Repository containing files for turning a Lenovo M93p tiny into a shiny hackintosh
Setting up Hackintoshes can be a pain and there is a lot to consider. In this Repo I want to document my journey of turning a Lenovo M93p Tiny PC into a Hackintosh running Catalina with the Opencore Bootloader.
M93p tiny PCs come in many different configurations and here's mine:
- Intel i5 4570T CPU
- Intel HD 4600 integrated GPU
- Q87 Chipset
- 8GB DDR3 RAM
- some SSD I had lying around
- Intel Wifi Card (replaced with a Broadcom BCM94352)
As far as I'm aware there are M93p out there that don't have any Wifi preinstalled, which would make upgrading the antennas and Wifi card a bit more cumbersome later, though if you don't plan to use Wifi you could save some money here.
Also there's quadcore configurations out there, which would give you a bit more power, so if you can get one of these, go for it. I found that the most crucial component is the integrated GPU though. My model uses the natively supported HD4600 variant. If yours uses a mobile iGPU like HD4400, prepare for some more fiddling.
- Catalina 10.15.7
- iMessage
- Airdrop
- 4K60 through DP
- Audio Out
- Energy Management
- FileVault
- App Store
- Wifi
This build is still a bit away from being golden. Here are my current issues:
- weird font glitches in Microsoft Product UI (Edge Chromium, Onedrive)
- no fan readout
- no sleep
- still a bit shaky energy management (though it could be that the CPU is just busy most of the time since it clocks up and down just fine)
- Bluetooth with my particular wifi card
https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Install-Guide/ - The OpenCore Desktop Guide is the most important bit of info for this build.
https://github.com/corpnewt/gibMacOS - gibMacOS lets you download MacOS recovery images directly from Apple.
https://github.com/corpnewt/ProperTree - ProperTree is a nice plist editor. It's cross platform, so you can use it both when preparing the files in Windows and later in MacOS.
https://github.com/corpnewt/GenSMBIOS - GenSMBIOS is used to create a valid serial number for your hackintosh so you can use iMessage and other iCloud services later.
Assuming you're using Windows the OpenCore Desktop Guide has a very thorough manual on how to use gibMacOS to obtain a legit recovery image of MacOS. I used Catalina 10.15.4.
If you follow this guide you should end up with a drive named "BOOT" with an EFI folder in it.
First you should clone or download this repo and the tools I recommended. If you have the same system config as my Lenovo tiny PC there's only one thing you have to set in the config.plist located under EFI/OC/
As you can see in
m93p-tiny-hackintosh/EFI/OC/config.plist
Lines 769 to 798 in caf13bc
<key>PlatformInfo</key>
<dict>
<key>Automatic</key>
<true/>
<key>Generic</key>
<dict>
<key>AdviseWindows</key>
<false/>
<key>MLB</key>
<string>PUT YOUR OWN HERE</string>
<key>ROM</key>
<data>AAAAAAA=</data>
<key>SpoofVendor</key>
<true/>
<key>SystemProductName</key>
<string>iMac15,1</string>
<key>SystemSerialNumber</key>
<string>PUT YOUR OWN HERE</string>
<key>SystemUUID</key>
<string>PUT YOUR OWN HERE</string>
</dict>
<key>UpdateDataHub</key>
<true/>
<key>UpdateNVRAM</key>
<true/>
<key>UpdateSMBIOS</key>
<true/>
<key>UpdateSMBIOSMode</key>
<string>Create</string>
</dict>
I blanked my own serial info in the config.plist. This means you'll have to create your very own set of serials.
The OpenCore Desktop Guide shows this in it's chapter Fixing iServices. Don't skip this step, it is very important! I've left the model iMac15,1 in the config, but you can also use iMac14,1 or iMac14,2 (these should technically work a little better since they're the exact CPU generation. I found no difference though.)
After you've created the SMBIOS with GenSMBIOS put in the values as described here in the Desktop Guide.
You can then follow this chapter in the OpenCore Guide to see where all the files have to be placed on your boot drive. If everything looks correct, see this chapter for info on how to boot and install MacOS. You should be all good after installation.
I'll loosely update the OpenCore Version and kexts in this repo. This includes Updates to the config.plist. I'll create tags for every OpenCore Version I use. This will include the most recent kext versions from the time I update my machine myself. Since updating OpenCore is a lot of work and my machine runs fairly stable I won't create a release for every OpenCore version.