Noobish Journey in hackintosh

So my first hackintosh was years and years ago. I think the time of leopard so around 2007. That was when I had messed around with hackintosh as that’s when it was really an iffy thing to try and make. Anyhow I ended up making one with he spare parts I had laying around and built one on an x58 intel motherboard with a 980X and I think some random Nvidia videocard. Fast forward to 2020 and I decided to look into it again after all these years as YouTube started popping up some suggestions. I had a few parts laying around again, due to my compulsive need to upgrade to the better stuff but this time were some AMD parts. Then I dug deeper into the AMD OSX forums and started my first decent into the ryzentosh. Long story short I ended up building 3 hackintoshes. 1 intel based 9900K with a Z390 and the other two were the x570 based 3900X and 3950X. So hear are the few things I learned and mostly about what things meant in open core and what each thing meant and I figured I would break it down into something really simple for all to understand as I found it hard to understand some terminology and saw that others had the same issue.

I saw the video about ryzenshine from snazzy labs and was like oh I remember about hackintosh and looked at how it had progressed. I had a MacBook but the extra parts I had laying around in AMD I thought hey I could build a beastly hackintosh as well. So I looked around for more videos and ran across Morgonaut, Techonolli and Techtuner. IMO stay away from morgonaut, it’s more of a showcase of her hackintosh running programs but doesn’t really explain how anything is done. So let’s get into what I discovered.

If you have been to the dortania guide located here: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Desktop-Guide/ you can see that it’s pretty much one guide for either intel or AMD chips which means there’s a huge compatibility on getting the Mac running on PC parts. So let's start with my setup. I had already gotten windows installed on my machine so I went about the installation on a windows based system. I won’t get into the details as the open core guide tells you that in detail so it will be quick steps on my part.

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1. Get GibMacOS, GenSMBIOS and Propertree.
2. Open GibMacOS to download the OSX version you are looking for and in my case it was 10.15.4 Catalina. Once that is done it was time to make the USB install.
3. Within the GibMacOS download there was the makeinstall that helps in creating the USB install stick. After that is done it’s the EFI creation which I think was the part I had the most difficult time in getting it just right!
4. The EFI folder if using open core would consist of 2 folders once you open up EFI which is BOOT and OC.
5. In BOOT you should have just one file the BOOTx64.efi file and in OC is where the rest and more important things go like your kexts, drivers and ACPI.
6. In the drivers for my AMD hackintosh I only needed two things which were the OpenRuntime.efi and Hfsplus.efi
7. In ACPI I had just one file which was the SSDT-EC-USBX that was on the open core guide.
8. Now kext there are a few things you need for sure which are whatevergreen, lilu, AppleALC and VirtualSMC.
9. There is one more kext you need and it is based on either your motherboard has an intel lan or a Realtek lan so you need the proper kext for that.
10. These are just the bare necessary stuff to get your install to work and this works for Ryzen series and and boards from the 300 series to 500 series.

Now getting into the config.plist is where there are a few issues I ran into and seems like there are others experiencing the same thing as just watching the videos and not really knowing what each step is meant to do is the problem. So with the config.plist I see it as like a list of contents in a book. It tells the system what is in your OC folder and each time you add a kext or driver you need to take a new snapshot so it knows what is in the OC folder. There are also tweaks you need to do in the config.plist which you need to change depending on what you want and have. The 3 things I see in building an AMD system based hackintosh was the AMD power plan, GUI Picker for OC and the GPU arg that needs to be added or deleted.

After getting that done and loading up Mac is when more tweaking needs to be done. USB Mapping and maybe cleaning up the config.plist some more by running it in OC Sanity Checker (https://opencore.slowgeek.com/) and seeing what else it was that needed to be done.

Well thanks for reading this so far and just wanted to thank you guys for reading this far. Also I wanted t thank the countless people that have posted and answered my questions here on reddit and also on the amd-osx forums and discord channels. Thanks all!