Half-Life and it's failed OS 9 port

Half-Life should have existed on the Mac. To be fair, it does, and it did, but it could have much sooner. This an adapted script to a blog post. Below is the original video. This written version includes entire quotes whereas the video version includes more interview clips and actual captured gameplay footage of Half Life.

Half-Life has a strange relationship between OS X and macOS. During the hey of Mac Gaming, popular franchises routinely were ported to the Mac, and of course, Half-Life should be one of those games. In gaming, there are few PC games as critically acclaimed as Half-Life. While it may not have been revolutionary, it certainly represented the evolution as it exhibited a level of polish games rare for the games of its era, where cutscenes were largely integrated into the game through scripted segments, environmental storytelling, subtle cues to enhance immersion and featured fully voiced characters. It even considered pacing as it featured puzzle breaks between action sequences. While it wasn't the first story-driven first-person shooter or the first cinematic game, it encapsulated the best game design of 1998.

It was natural for the game to be ported to Mac OS and OS X, as other high-profile first-person shooters from the era, like the Doom series, Hexen series, Quake series, Dark Forces, Deus Ex, Duke Nukem, and Unreal series, were all ported to the Mac.

Announcement and Cancellation

In April 1999, Logicware under Sierra Studios announced that a Mac OS version was in the works, but by October it was completely canceled. The official reason why the port was axed was given by Gabe Newell, president of Valve, citing the lack of Team Fortress Classic and multiplayer with PC users and fear of releasing an inferior product.

Gabe said the following:

There's been a lot of speculation about Half-Life for the Macintosh - its feature set, its compatibility with the PC version, and so on. Andrew Meggs at Logicware has been doing a good job on the port, and it's mostly done. At this point we've spent a bunch of money on the Mac product and have spent a lot of time thinking about what we need to do to make sure Macintosh users are happy with it when it ships.

Which is why we are canceling the Macintosh version of Half-Life.

When we started Mac Half-Life, there was a lot of optimism about the opportunity for Macintosh games. As someone who worked on Macintosh software starting in 1983 before the 128K Mac had shipped, it was pretty exciting to think that there was going to be a resurgence in the Mac gaming market.

However, as we got closer to shipping the product and reality set in, it was increasingly obvious that in order for us to break even on the Mac version, much less be profitable, we were going to have to cut some corners. OK - I guess we won't have Team Fortress Classic available at shipment. Maybe people will accept it if we update them with TFC later. OK - I guess I understand why we don't have an automatic update facility. Maybe people will accept that they have to manually update. OK - I guess I understand why we might carve out a separate multiplayer space for Mac users from PC users because of the on-going interoperability issues. Maybe that won't be the disaster I think it will be.

But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that this was nonsense. Our existing Half-Life customers are really happy with us. They were happy with the original game, they were happy when we released TFC, they were happy with our on-going investment in Half-Life, and there's even more coming for them in the next couple of months. They are happy because we do our best for them, and that's what they expect from us in the future. Given the realities of the Mac gaming market, our Mac customers were always going to be mad at us. They were always going to be second-class customers where we couldn't invest to the same degree in the Mac version as we did elsewhere. I don't want to be in that business. I would much rather we just eat the money we've spent so far than take money from Mac customers and short-change them.

It's disappointing to me on a personal basis that we won't ship Half-Life for the Mac. Everyone here, and I'm sure the people at Logicware are disappointed. The Mac gamers who were looking forward to Half-Life are undoubtedly disappointed as well. However that's a lot less disappointment than what would have happened if we had tried to get Mac gamers to accept second-class treatment on an on-going basis.

Source: Mac Half-Life Cancelled!

Logicware did shed some light on the situtation the next day. I understand that previous names can be a sensitive topic but I need to clarify in the sources to avoid confusion, the quotes are attributed to Bill are Rebecca. Rebecca of Logicware briefly spoke on the issue, releasing the following statement:

Sigh. Yes, Half-Life for MacOS is cancelled. I'm very disappointed that all the work that was done will not see the light of day or the Mac communities screen across the globe.

Sierra was a pleasure to work with. They have been very helpful and supportive through the entire project and I look forward to doing work for them in the near future.

I still have a glimmer of hope that Half-Life will eventually be on Macs, but for today that hope does not exist.
Please don't ask us for a copy of Half-Life. Please don't ask us to "finish" it. The game belongs to Sierra, not us.
I want to thank Jeff Pobst at Sierra for all the work he did in this project, and Andrew Meggs for all the tireless hours he put into this project to make Half-Life a true Mac experience.

We are still on track for Aliens vs. Predator and this does not affect the project in any way.

And after that:

Then I'll say it -- the game was nearly done. Sierra had labeled the most recent build as beta. Single player had been done for some time. We played on a PC server some weeks ago, and had been playing on a Mac server (with both Mac and PC clients) for the last week. The only things left to do were to add some UI screens in the launcher, get the memory usage under control so it could play on a 32MB iMac, and fix outstanding bugs.
Obviously, I can't release the code. It belongs to Sierra and to Valve. If you want to get together a petition to send to them, that's your business, but knowing the full situation I think they would respond mostly with annoyance.

Source: Logicware Staff on Half-Life Cancellation, Part II, Inside Mac Games

The Real Reason for Cancellation

For years, this was the accepted narrative. The port was nearly complete but didn't live up to Valve's high standards... that is, until recently, when Rebecca Heineman spoke on the Retro Tea Breaks podcast, covering the ill-fated original port of Half-Life. Below is a transcript of Rebecca speaking about Half-Life.

Apple pissed off Valve. That's the long story short. Because we did such a great job on Quake II, Sierra approached us. Valve was interested in porting Half-Life to the Mac because they had a conversation with someone at Apple, a games evangelist, who said they would sell 500,000 copies on the Mac. Valve thought it was a great market opportunity and decided to commission the port.

They came to us, we looked at the code, gave them a price, and they agreed. They even threw in an early completion bonus: if we finished the game by a certain date, we'd get an extra 20K. So, I dedicated three people to the project. We were all excited about working on one of the top franchises ever and getting it onto the Mac.

Then, three weeks from shipping, when the game was done and we were just fixing bugs, I got a phone call from Sierra. They told me they were canceling Half-Life for the Mac. I was shocked and wanted to know why. They said they couldn't sell the rights at any price but appreciated our work and would pay us in full, including the early completion bonus, on one condition: our silence.

I recommend watching the entire interview with Rebecca as she was formerly the lead developer for Interplay, and worked on games such Wasteland, The Bard's Tale, Out of This World, Wolfenstein 3D ports to the Mac, 3DO and even Apple IIGs. She also was responsible for the Linux port of Doom Legacy and Apple IIGs port of Sim City.

Valve didn't want the bad publicity and preferred letting people think the port was bad rather than revealing the real reason. The truth was that an Apple representative had initially told Valve they would sell 500,000 copies. But as the game neared completion, the actual pre-order numbers from retailers were only 50,000. The Mac gaming market wasn't healthy, and 50,000 copies were considered good.

Valve felt misled by Apple, especially since the original representative had moved to another company. The new Apple rep denied ever quoting potential sales numbers. This angered Valve, leading to an internal policy that no Valve title would ever be ported to the Mac.

We didn't know about this policy and neither did other Mac game companies like MacPlay and Aspyr. They tried to negotiate with Valve, but Valve demanded nothing less than a million dollars, effectively pricing their games out of the Mac market.

We archived everything, and there's a disc in my archives labeled "verboten." If someone finds it, they'll see familiar files and an executable for the 1999 version of Half-Life for Mac. Maybe one day it will see the light of day.

So, if you take Rebecca at her word, Valve canceled Half-Life on the Mac over sales figures quoted by Apple, a misrepresentation by a factor of 10x. You can watch the entire interview above. Rebecca's career is impressive as she was also formerly the lead programmer for Interplay, and very much worth the watch.

Other Canceled Ports and Later Developments

Interestingly, it was not the only canceled port of Half-Life as the Sega Dreamcast also faced similar treatment, except unlike the Mac version, it leaked online.

The reason given for its cancellation was changing market conditions, but it had already been delayed more than once. The near-complete versions of the port featured inconsistent frame rates and long load times.

It featured a sub-campaign, Blue Shift, that would be folded into future releases of Half-Life.

However, Half-Life wouldn't stay away from the Macintosh platform forever, as in 2013, Valve finally released Half-Life for the Mac.

Valve and Apple: A Rocky Relationship

A few years later, Valve again soured on Apple. Famously, Valve originally intended to release Proton for macOS. For those who aren't familiar with Proton, it is a compatibility layer that translates Microsoft's DirectX graphics library to Vulkan instructions, allowing Windows games to be played on Linux. It powers the SteamDeck and has ushered in a new era of Linux gaming.

Andrew Tsai has an entire video on the subject, in the description. Apple and Valve went as far as to feature SteamVR in the WWDC 2017 keynote, but then the relationship soured again due to Apple's moving goalposts. Apple dropped OpenGL and 32-bit support and did not adopt Vulkan graphics API. Valve wasn't alone in this complaint, as Apple has never been able to amass a library of games due to constant breaking changes in OS X and macOS.

Playing Half-Life on the Mac Today

You can experience Half-Life on the Mac today using Mac Source Ports - Xash3D FWGS. However, it requires a copy of the "valve" folder from a PC install of Half-Life to be placed into "~/Library/Application Support/Xash3D". This will work on modern macOSes.

• Intel Mac owners running 10.9 - 10.14 can install the official port of Half-Life on Steam.
• Intel Mac owners running 10.5 - 10.8 can install the legacy Xash3d port on Macintosh Garden. However, this port will not work under modern macOS.
• PowerPC Mac users can install the Xash 3D alpha on 10.4 - 10.5. It has a few asterisks as there are some texture issues and it requires an OpenGL 2.0 compatible card.

Xash3D isn't the only way to experience Half-Life on the Mac. With Crossover, you can play Half-Life and it's less picky about which version you use.

Conclusion

It's unlikely we will ever see the official port of Half-Life that was done by Rebecca and her team, which is sad. Due to the relationship between Apple and Valve, I wouldn't count on Valve making official Half-Life ports again.

If you're into retro Mac gaming, I've made a video about a cursed port of Grand Theft Auto 3 for PowerPC Macs and one about the history of Connectix Virtual Game Station, embedded below.

Additional Mac Gaming stories

What the Hell is a Neural Engine?

This following article is an adapted script from my YouTube Video: "What the Hell is a Neural Engine?"

If you've purchased an iPhone or iPad after 2017 or an Apple Silicon Mac, it has the Apple Neural Engine. The short answer to my rhetorical question is that the ANE was initially designed for machine learning features like FaceID and Memoji on iOS and debuted on the iPhone X with the A11 chipset.

Machine Learning uses the power of algorithms and statistical models that enable computers to perform tasks without explicit instructions. Machine Learning learns to make predictions or decisions based on data, known as training. The learning process generally involves feeding large amounts of data into the algorithm, allowing it to learn and improve its accuracy over time. It varies a lot, and training can take on many forms, such as using tagged data and/or unsupervised learning or Neural Networks. For example, Large-Language models use a mixture of unsupervised and supervised fine-tuning and, later, human reinforcement when stealing the collective works of humanity.

Machine learning is used in mundane tasks like email filtering to catch spam or more exciting things like computer vision, such as the ability to identify objects in photos. With the AI choo-choo express hype train, many machine learning and neural networks are being rebranded as AI.

Machine learning requires a lot of computing power, and CPUs are not the most efficient at training and executing machine learning. For example, GPUs are parallel processors that can quickly execute millions of certain math operations in a single clock cycle; thus, they are much better suited for the needs of machine learning.

Apple designed the Apple Neural Engine (ANE) to supplement certain types of machine learning tasks, both in training and executing, using CoreML.

It's essential to understand Core ML, Apple's machine learning API, doesn't exclusively utilize the ANE; it leverages the CPU and GPU and, if present, the ANE. To quote Apple,

"Core ML then seamlessly blends CPU, GPU, and ANE (if available) to create the most effective hybrid execution plan exploiting all available engines on a given device. It lets a wide range of implementations of the same model architecture benefit from the ANE even if the entire execution cannot take place there due to idiosyncrasies of different implementations." Apple.com - Deploying Transformers on the Apple Neural Engine

This means when using CoreML, it will automagically use all the tools it has available. The advantage of this approach is that developers do not have to worry about programming for various hardware configurations. If you use Core ML, you're likely getting the best performance, regardless of the device the tasks are being executed on.

Unlike, say, a GPU, there is no public framework for directly programming on the ANE. There are some esoteric projects designed to measure the Neural Engine performance, and so are not-so-esoteric ones like Geekbench ML, which does not seem to properly isolate the Neural Engine.

Apple has provided some graphs and has stated that the M1's Neural Engine could perform up to 11 trillion FP16 operations per second, the M2 and M3 neural engine process up to 15.8 trillion operations per second, and the M4 can do 38 trillion operations per second.

The ANE isn't just an accelerator for floating point math; it's better thought of as a low power consumption optimizer as it can be leveraged for certain types of ML tasks. It's faster and uses much less memory, less power allowing for on-device execution of machine learning tasks.

NPUs

The ANE is not unique to Apple as it is generally considered a neural processing unit, or AI accelerator, or NPU. Neural processors can be found in the AI engine of Qualcomm Snapdragons, the NPU of Samsung's Exynos, and the Da Vinci NPU of Huawei's Kirin. There's a common thread that many readers probably noticed with the aforementioned chipsets: they are all ARM-based. The lack of NPUs for x86 has to do with several factors, the first of which is that x86 hasn't been found in extremely low-power devices like phones and wearables, where every watt counts. The second reason is the existence of exceptionally powerful dedicated GPUs in high-end computers. GPUs can perform the same operations as an NPU and perform more operations, making them more useful for both training and executing machine learning tasks at the cost of a higher TDP. The M4 ANE has 38 Trillion operations per second, but high end Nvidia GPU can hit 1,300 Trillion operations per second.

Another reason why NPUs aren't typically found on x86 are the type of AI tasks that NPUs really excel at, like facial recognition and computation photography, which doesn't really exist on desktop computers. Lastly, for serious AI tasks like model training, buying expensive GPUs or leasing computer time on cloud services with hardware acceleration would be more effective than designing NPUs for x86.

However, we're seeing a shift in the role of machine learning on desktops with the rise of "AI" and more and more demand for the raw compute power required for AI. Windows 11's questionable Copilot + requires 40 trillion operations per second.

What is an NPU exactly used for?

Let's use a real-world example. Core ML is a foundation for Apple's computational photography. As everyone hopefully is aware today, when one snaps a photo, there is no longer anything such as "no filters," and billions of operations are performed to process the image, including everything from face detection to color balancing, noise reduction, smart HDR, video stabilization, emulating depth of focus in cinema mode, and scene analysis. This requires millions of operations to happen, in real-time or near instantaneously. Rather than send the matrices of floating-point operations to the CPU and GPU, the Neural Engine can take on heavy lifting.

These are incredibly dense operations, like scene analysis, which might sound simple, but Apple has developed an entire ecosystem called Apple Neural Scene Analyzer or ANSA. This is the backbone of many features like the Photo app's Memories, where images are tagged, aesthetics are evaluated, detection is done for duplicates or near duplicates of photos, objects detected, and locations are grouped. This is all done on the devices using another principle Apple calls differential privacy , where Photos learns about significant people, places, and events to create memories while protecting the anonymity of the users. Exploring how Apple's memories work probably should be an article in itself. While this feature makes extensive use of machine learning, it's not dependent on the ANE alone; instead, it assists in performing the analytics.

However, it's hard to evaluate how much of this chain occurs on the ANE. That's due to the lack of information Apple has published. One can find frustrated developers complaining about the lack of info. One of the main sources for information is The Neural Engine — what do we know about it?

The TLDR is that the neural engine is an on-device Neural Processing Unit part of Apple Silicon that is leveraged for machine learning along with the CPU and GPU. It's very good for certain math operations and is partially a power-saving mechanism designed to assist low power computing, rather than utilizing a more power-hungry GPU.

This is especially the case with the Apple Watch, which needs to be ultra-efficient. Since the series 4, the Apple Watch line has included a stripped neural engine to assist with faster on-device processing of inputs. In Apple's marketing material for the series 9 Apple Watch, Apple suggests that the Apple neural engine is even used for the double tap gesture.

It will be interesting to see how Apple leverages it in the future. It seems increasingly likely that Apple will be doing some of its AI using cloud services. Also, AI functions are very RAM intensive. In a recent video, I demonstrated the limitations of 8 GB of RAM when a Mac mini m1 was bested by a Mac Pro 2013. Apple may regret shipping low RAM configurations.

This year's WWDC was very focused on Apple Intelligence, Apple's branding on AI, a term that gets increasingly obfuscated day by day. Apple plans to bring AI on multiple fronts, running local AI models and upchaining requests to the cloud when local isn't enough. There are a lot of questions to be answered on how well this strategy will work, and perhaps when you read this, many of them will be answered. One minor reveal is that only M series Macs and the A17 Pro, as of recording, are confirmed to support Apple's AI strategy.

There are plenty of posts and videos breaking down the features of Apple Intelligence. Still, just as a refresher, they included generative text editing, generative AI for uninspired images and emojis, with one truly dystopian example on the iPad where a stylish sketch is turned into a soulless rendering, some very impressive natural language interactions, and personalized notifications. It's very unclear when and which interactions are on-device, but on-device services likely include dictation and personal contexts, and some of the textual generation; by that, I mean Siri responses. This, of course, will be revealed in the upcoming months. If executed well, it will be the most cohesive and useful AI strategy we've seen by any major company for everyday people, but I expect growing pains.

We should fully expect more emphasis on the NPUs moving forward, but companies haven't managed to communicate effectively the value of NPUs or what they do to consumers and are often cagey even towards developers. This is certainly not the first time a coprocessor was nebulous to its potential buyers, be it early GPUs or math coprocessors, and if anyone remembers the failed attempt at selling Physics processing units for gaming.

Training and FP16

In Apple's AI page, the Neural Engine isn't mentioned as part of the chain used for do-on-device training. This is likely because the ANE is primarily optimized for the execution (inference) of machine learning. This is evidenced by it only supporting FP16, GPUs and CPUs can execute FP32 which is higher precision, which is needed for many small adjustments from the gradients calculated during backpropagation. CPUs and GPUs can do mixed precision training, where FP16 data can be converted FP32 when more precision is needed.

To translate that back to human, NPUs in consumer devices are targeted for running existing models as opposed to creating new ones. The ANE is not for AI model creation for developers.

None of this should be a surprise. As I stated earlier in this article, typically if one was performing serious ML training, one have a very expensive GPU step-up or lease cloud computer time.

Without going too deep into computer science, 1 bit can store two values, 2 bits can store 4 values, 3 bits can store 8 and so on. 16 Bits can store 65,536, and 32-bit can store 4,294,967,296.

For non-whole numbers, such as those with decimal points, one would need to express where the decimal is. For example, 1245678 could be 12.345678 or 123456.78. A floating point format is used to handle this by specifying the decimal's position. This involves components like the mantissa and exponent, but in essence, it allows the number to 'float' to where the decimal is needed.

In machine learning, different bit depths are used, and a 16-bit floating point (FP16) is popular because it offers a reasonable balance of accuracy, memory usage, and processing power. Models can be quantized from 32-bit to 16-bit, trading some accuracy for performance. This process is similar to downsampling a 24-bit image to 8-bit rather than simple rounding.

Apple now provides developers with the App Intents framework, which opens up applications for interactions performed by Siri using the personal context awareness and action capabilities of Apple Intelligence. This allows developers to integrate features based on predefined trained models without having to create their own. How useful and widely adopted this is remains to be seen.

Become an art legend with your Mac, iPad or iPhone

This blog post is adapted from a video version of my Draw Things Tutorial, a stable diffusion application avaliable on the Mac, iPhone and iPad via the App Store.Using any of these devices, you can follow this tutorial. Draw Things is a frontend, or a graphical user interface, for Stable Diffusion.

AI art generation is pretty CPU and GPU intensive, so for anyone using older devices, this may or may not work. The screen captures are from an iPad M2 but the Mac version looks exceptionally similar.

When you first launch the application, you will need to download what is known as a model. A model in machine learning, such as Stable Diffusion, is a trained neural network that has learned to generate images by analyzing extensive sets of images and text. To translate this back into human-peak, each model uses different sources for images and text. This radically changes the sort of images that a model can generate based on prompts. Some people create different models based on art styles or content. Some of them are really good at people, some are general-purpose, some are really good at meme-making, different styles of illustrations, and some are photorealistic. They also vary quite a bit in quality.</p

> If you click on the model, you'll see quite a few models available, but what we want is to start with SDXL Refiner. SDXL Refiners is by Stability AI, the people who created Stable Diffusion, and it's very general-purpose and generally pretty high quality.

The interface looks kind of confusing, but we can see that there's a default prompt. The text on the screen, the prompt, is the thing we'd like to see. Right now, the default prompt says, "A samurai walking towards a mountain, 4K, highly detailed, sharp focus, grayscale.". If I click generate, I will see the following:

We could continue to use this same prompt and generate more images that would be similar in nature. If we were to change the prompt, it would change the content of the images that it's rendering. To reiterate that, if you type something in and hit generate, it'll spit out an image. That's pretty simple, so let's do something a lot more advanced. Since we are just talking about models, let's download a different one. This is done by tapping the model name to bring up the menu.

I can switch the model and download a new one. For my example, I'll use "Realistic Vision version 3." Realistic Vision focuses on rendering images of humans. Then I'll generate an image with the same prompt again.

The results again are fairly interesting.

Now, let's try altering the prompt and adding a negative prompt. Prompts are the results you want to see, and negative prompts are the results you don't want to see.

Inpainting lets us fill in missing pieces to an image. However, you need an inpainting model, so let's download one. I hope they change this in future versions of Draw Things, but right now, the grid layout is worthless. I can't read the full file names, so let's switch to list view and search for the inpainting. This is still not perfect, but at least now we can see 1.5 versus 2.0. By the time you watch this, some of these version numbers may have changed, so just keep that in mind. Usually, the newest version is the best, so I'm going to download the 2.0 version.

Draw Things has a few basic image editing options, and one of them is the erase tool. Click on it and let's erase this guy's face. Now that I've completely erased his face, it's time to adjust the strength. I could put this at 100%, and it'd probably do a reasonable job of filling in this guy's head. I am going to adjust this to 90% because I want it to look somewhat like our samurai. One last step, I'm going to adjust the text guidance. The on-screen description is a very good explanation. The higher the text guidance value, the more it will try to follow your prompt. If you want to know more about it, there's a fantastic article on GetIMG.

It can't always do a perfect job. Some models have inpainting versions, so you can download the matching inpainting version and have much better results. In this next section, we're going to try to incorporate real-world photos that we've already taken. I have a picture of my cat, Jeff, in Pixelmator on my iPad, and I'm going to remove some unwanted stuff from this image. Now that I've saved it, let's import it into Draw Things.

First, let's click the new page to create a new canvas, then click the camera icon so we can import Jeff's photo from our photo library. I'm going to speed through switching the model, typing up a description, resizing the image, and then setting the strength to 70%. Now it's time to finally talk about steps.

Get img.src: Time over time, Stable Diffusion improves the image, but there is a law of diminishing returns. This interactive graphic explains this better than I can do with words. Get IMG recommends roughly 25 steps. This number of steps is generally a good balance between quality and time. Each step is essentially a refinement of the image. The more steps, the more refined the image becomes. However, after a certain point, the improvements become less noticeable, and you reach a point where additional steps may not significantly enhance the image. It's important to experiment with the number of steps to find the sweet spot for your specific image and desired outcome.

I'm going to lower mine to 28. Let's speed through a few more last-second updates, and now we're ready to generate. While it's not Jeff, it definitely took some inspiration from him. Now, I like this image, but I wish it just wasn't square. Well, we can fix that. If you notice, when we zoom out, there's still the carpet background from the previous image. I could use the eraser tool, but it's just easier if I save this image and start a new canvas.

So, let's re-import the generated image. As we previously explored with the samurai, the inpainting will paint in the missing pieces of the image. Let's resize the image and move back to inpaint as our model. On second thought, I think I'm going to change the image size just a bit. I decided to off-center this image slightly so it would render more to the left of the cat. The final step is to change the strength back to 100%, which might seem counterintuitive, but watch the results. The results are actually pretty good, except for there's a line in both the images. I've zoomed in so you can really see it.

Since I'm rendering all my images to my iPad, I can go into a program like Pixelmator, open up the image, and start touching it. In Pixelmator, I can use tools like the heal tool to remove the line, use the sharpen tool to give the face a little more detail, and then even go through with the warp tool and give the cat a bit of a tummy tuck, since this is kind of a weird render. The end result is impressive, although the cat only has three toes now.

Let's revisit models once again, but this time, we're going to download models that aren't included in Draw Things off the internet. If we click the models, we can then click manage. Realistic Vision 3.0, I know for a fact, has a later version. I'm going to delete the Realistic Vision 3.0 by clicking the trash can. There are a lot of options when importing models into Draw Things, and that's unfortunately just a quirk of Stable Diffusion. I'm not going to go into all of these because it gets really complicated, but just be aware, some models do require tweaking these settings. The thing we're most interested in is "Downloaded File." If we click it, we can enter a URL to a model.

Let's cancel out of this and go to Safari. Probably the most popular host of AI models is Hugging Face's Model Hub or another similar platform. I'm not sure how it's said. From this website, we will search for Realistic Vision. This particular model is right now version 6.0 beta 1, and if you notice, it also has an inpainting version, but for this video, we're just going to download version 6.

We will do this by clicking the download icon and then copying the link. For the Mac users, you can just download this file. Now, let's switch back to Draw Things. We will click "Enter URL," paste the URL, click continue, and it'll start downloading. Depending on the model, Draw Things might download supporting files. Realistic Vision is pretty good for people, so let's just do a quick one of a woman reading a book in a coffee shop at night, and it's peaceful. The results are pretty good until you look at the cursed AI hands; it's just a thing with AI.

Speaking of cursed, let me draw a not-so-good picture of my cat, Jeff, very quickly on my iPad. To my defense, I purposely wanted a bad drawing for this demo. If I go back to Draw Things, I can import this image and then use one of the models I already have downloaded; I can then use this as a source image to generate a new image. After refining my prompt just a little bit and changing the strength to 80%, I got a pretty good result. There are some striking similarities here because it mimics the pose on a flat background.

iOS, macOS, and iPadOS all have the ability to lift objects out of photos. I've already imported my cat Jeff, and we're using the inpainting model. Apple's ability to lift objects out of photos is impressive, but it's not perfect; it has some weird edges. So, to correct for this, I'm going to do something that might seem counterintuitive. I'm going to erase the entire image, then I'm going to scroll down and set the strength to about 25%. The Inpainting 2.0 model isn't that great, but we could always download a different one and see if we could find one that would produce better results. Maybe we could put the cat in a better sci-fi background, and probably we'd tweak this strength to be even lower.

Now for our final main topic, and that's LORA or Low Order Rank Adaptation. Think of these as expansion packs for Stable Diffusion. LORAs can contain quite a bit of different stuff like characters, poses, or visual effects. Also, generally speaking, they are a lot smaller than models. I know of one that's really cool that works with Realistic Vision, and we already have version 6.0 downloaded. The process is pretty much exactly the same as importing a model. We are going to go back to the website CivitAI, search for Vector illustration, and go to that LORA. I'm going to copy the URL and then go back to Draw Things and import it by clicking manage next to the LORA. Mac users again get off easy; they just click download and then can import the downloaded file. Once it has been downloaded, we will click import. Often LORAs need trigger words. This one is a vector illustration, but if for some reason we forget it, we can go back to the website. If I click the info button, I can see the prompts used to generate this really sweet monster truck. Note the use of the word Vector illustration. I'd like to see a vector illustration of a palm tree, so we're going to use the prompts for vector illustration and palm tree. Note that I have the LORA weight set to 100%. When using LORAs, you have to pay attention to the documentation. Some will recommend settings of like 60% for the best results. Some have multiple trigger words to produce different types of images. Some were designed to work really well with a certain model, like this one, which was trained on Realistic Vision. The results are pretty cool.

There is a lot of trial and error. I tried to generate pictures of the Oregon coast in Vector art style. Some still came out as photos, and some did not. There are some topics I didn't touch on, like Samplers, and there's an amazing article all about Samplers and how they affect the image quality at stable diffusion art. If you haven't put it together by now, a lot of those scammy apps on the Mac App Store, iOS Store, and iPad Store that let you generate AI images are just using Stable Diffusion. I'm debating making a full-fledged course on this, but it wouldn't fit under this channel. I do have my Patreon, and I could also put it on Udemy or something. That way, people could really dive in with me because there are a lot of topics I didn't cover, like Control Nets or even making your own LORAs and training, because this program goes deep. If that's of interest, just let me know in the comments. And I think that's it.

The best games for late PowerPC G4/G5 Macs - OS 9 and OS X (100+ games)

How to Play Blu-Ray Movies on a Mac Using VLC (Apple Silicon and Intel)

Since macOS does not natively support Blu-Ray playback, the best solution is VLC, an open-source video player that has been around for nearly 25 years. However, you cannot simply insert a disc and expect it to play. Video playback relies on libaacs, for Advanced Access Content System, the digital rights management system used by Blu-Ray and the now-defunct HD-DVD format.

Tutorial starts at the 5 minute mark

However, libaacs does not offer any keys or certificates to decode encrypted media, leading us into a legally grey area. So, let's walk through the process.

Step 1: Download and Install VLC

Go to the VLC media player's website and download and install VLC.

Step 2: Install HomeBrew & Libaacs

Homebrew is a command-line interface package manager utility. Think of it as an app store for open-source command-line software. Go to brew.sh and run the curl command by copying and pasting it into your macOS terminal. Once it's installed, you can test to see if it's working by typing brew into the terminal.

After installing Homebrew, run brew install libaacs to install libaacs.

Step 3: Download the keydb.cfg

This step's legality is uncertain, but you can go to the FindVUK Online Database and download the keydb.cfg file (decompress it if it doesn't automatically). You'll need to search for it yourself, but it's easily accessible.

Open ~/Library/Preferences (navigate to your user directory, open Library, and then Preferences). If you do not see your library, you may need to unhide it; Lifewire has a good tutorial.

Create a new folder in the Preferences folder called aacs (all lowercase) and drag the keydb.cfg file into it.

Nerd shortcut: mkdir ~/Library/Preferences/aacs and use the cp command to move the keydb.cfg to this directory.

Step 4: Copying Over Libaacs' Alias for VLC

The last step varies depending on whether you have an Apple Silicon or an Intel Mac. In the terminal, you can type brew --prefix to find where Homebrew is installed on your Mac.

Navigate to the root of your boot drive and press Command-Shift-Period to display hidden files.

Go to the directory specified from brew --prefix. If your Mac shows the opt directory, open the Homebrew folder.

Next, open Cellar, then libaacs. In this folder, there should be a version number like 0.11. Open the lib directory and find the libaacs.dylib file and copy it.

For Apple Silicon Macs, you will need to go to /opt/homebrew/cellar/libaacs, and for Intel Macs, go to /usr/local/homebrew/cellar/libaacs.

Paste (or copy) the libaacs.dylib file into /usr/local/lib.

Step 5: Open VLC and Play the Disc

That's it! You're now ready to enjoy your Blu-Ray movies on your Mac.

Sonoma Wallpaper Downloader

So I wrote a free application to download the video wallpapers found in macOS Sonoma.If you haven't seen it, Sonoma now offers the same videos that were used as screensavers on the Apple TV for use as wallpaper and screensavers. They are browsable from the terribly redesigned system preferences.

If you click one these, it'll download it. Apple does not make it clear where these land, but it is in:

/Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer/4kSDR240FPS

However, I wanted this to work on non-Sonoma nd to be a bit easier to download so I wrote an app to make it easier, Sonoma Video Wallpaper Downloader and the github page.

Wahclella Falls, Snowed in

Wahclella is generally a cupcake hike; there's nothing wrong with that. It's one of the better hikes in the Gorge. However, it's snowed in still, and more so, icy compacted down snow. I made it about a half mile in, before realizing I needed my microspikes and jogged back to my car. Surprisingly, the hike was actually a bit treacherous due to the ice

Install your Windows Steam games on Apple Silicon Macs Using Whisky (A free GPTK Front-End), a tutorial

Scenes from the Columbia Gorge Blizzard - 01/13/24

When the winter weather gets terrible, instead of seeing it as execuse to curl up indoors, I find myself grabbing my gear and heading into the storm. At this point in my life, I've logged enough hours driving in pretty abysmal conditions of just about every imaginable stripe. As a PNWer, I've rarely experienced blizzards in my home state so I saw a 16F day with 65+ MPH wind gusts as an opportunity.

Driving conditions started off not terrible, I84 was mostly clear of snow due to the winds. On my way on old Columbia Highway, I cleared a downed branch, and on the way up Multnomah Falls, I moved several logs off the trail.

The visibility dropped during my hike (as seen in the video at the end), and rather than keep venturing further, I decided to drive back as visibility was so poor. It was comparable to the extreme fog often in the Redwoods on 101, where 25 mph seems like a big ask. I ended up driving with my emergency blinkers back into town and taking the advise of TLC even though I wanted to check out Horsetail Falls.

On my drive back, I started seeing more evidences of the storm. Large swathes of Portland were without power and trees were downed. Each day during the snowpocalypse/icepocalypse I made my way out into Portland. I saw multiple trees on houses, downed power lines and houses without power. My neighborhood was relatively well off, despite lots of large branches falling and a few trees.

Apple designed a modular computer that they do not want you to service

Recently, Apple announced some pretty killer features for Final Cut Pro X, Motion, and Compressor, but they are Apple silicon only. The updates include machine learning based object tracking and faster exports for HEVC and H.264 by simultaneously processing video segments across available media engines but these aren't magical features that would be should be limited to Apple Silicon considering the GPU compute power that the Mac Pro 2019 offers and the ability to have multiple GPUs.

Video version of this post is attached above.

Apple wants to vector away from Intel Macs, which isn't news, but they're leaving the most dedicated Mac users or professionals in the lurch.

The Mac Pro 2019 represents inconvenient truth about Apple Silicon. To this day, Apple has not produced a GPU competing with AMD's highest-tier offerings. The highest-end GPU supported macOS still from the previous generation, the 6900 XT.

Apple’s GPUs lag in comparison to the power-sipping dedicated GPU market…

While Geekbench 6's metal benchmarks are not the only way to gauge a GPU performance, The 6900 XT in sheer compute is oodles above the current line up of integrated GPUs and almost certainly will outperform the M3 Ultra's GPU. Apple Silicon integrated GPUs have incredible TDPs (Thermal design power), which are fantastic for laptops but much less of an issue in the desktop space, where TDPs can be offset by power-consumption and arrays of fans.

Apple thus far has opted not to support the AMD 7000 series GPUs, aka Navi 31 (released December 13th, 2022). While AMD is lagging behind Nvidia, they managed to make the transition to a 5 nm Chiplet technology.

My wild speculation is Apple does not want to support these as it'd be an embarrassment for the Apple Silicon GPUs and Apple would like to move away from all things X86. For reference, the monstrous 7900 XTX is roughly 45-50% faster than the 6900 XT. Also, it supports hardware AV1 encoding.

This in itself isn't worth a blog post as Apple's lack of extended support is disappointing but not surprising or novel considering Apple's long history of abandoning computer support fast, be it the poor souls who bought PowerMac G5s 2x Dual-Core CPUs or worse, the earliest adopters of the Intel Macs, with the Core Duos, each getting 3-4 years of support before Apple abandoned them.

My absurdist Apple Store experience

The Mac Pro 2019 is completely modular, but it doesn’t matter.

The most curious thing about the Mac Pro 2019 is how much time and effort Apple spent making a modular computer, one that you cannot repair yourself. Replacing the PSU (Power Supply Unit) is a 5 minute affair, no more difficult than replacing an MPX GPU. This is wonderful... assuming you can actually buy one.

The only way to service a Mac Pro 2019 is via an Apple Store. I discovered this after my Mac Pro 2019 reported a fan issue in diagnostic mode. After trekking to a local Apple Store lugging my 50+ pound computer, it took Apple roughly a week to reach the same conclusion as me: the diagnostic mode is reporting a fan error and that Apple would need to service my Mac Pro. I learned several things:

• Apple will not sell you parts directly.
• Apple requires a technician to install the part even if you're not covered by Apple Care.
• Any parts removed become property of Apple. Under no circumstance will Apple give you your non-functioning part.
• Apple will not replace missing parts.

This is absolutely bonkers, considering the time and effort Apple took to make the Mac Pro 2019 serviceable by a novice, earning itself a 9 out of 10 from iFixit, as it requires only a Phillips and Torx screw driver. I was extra miffed that I couldn't keep my faulty fan array. It's functioning properly but may have a bad sensor. I wanted to see if I could fix it myself.

Apple may have backed a right-to-repair bill, but Apple itself is rotten to its core.

Encrypting USB Drives / External Media / External SSDs, a pictorial guide + troubleshooting

I'm sure there are many tutorials on the web, but I was a bit surprised how a simple UI quirk makes this a lot more confusing than it needs to be. Encrypting external media like USB drives (thumb drives/USB sticks), Hard drives, and SSDs can be a bit cumbersome in macOS. This tutorial will walk through the steps needed to create encrypted APFS external media.

Warning! This process will reformat the drive, thus losing all its contents. Be sure to have your data backed up on the drive you intend to encrypt.

Step 1: Launch Disk Utility

By default, disk utility doesn't present the options we need to properly reformat a drive to use encryption.

Step 2: Select Show All Devices

Show all devices will display the volume and not just it's partitions.

Step 3: highlight the drive you wish to format and click erase

Step 4: Set the scheme to "GUID partition map"

On the lower menu make sure you have Apple Partition app selected.

Step 5: Select an encryption option from the Format option

Select APFS (Encrypted) or APFS (Case-sensitive, Encrypted). I personally recommend case sensitive, but macOS can use pathing to files and ignore the casing used in the words to the file. In a non-case sensitive context /path/to/file is the same as /PATH/To/File. With case-sensitive pathing, these would lead to different directories. Apple recommends using case sensitive.

Step 6: Select password

Be sure to remember this password, as you will not have the option to recover the password. You can save your password in your Apple Keychain so every time the drive is plugged in, you will not be prompted for a password. You can also look up the password in the keychain.

Trouble shooting!

You may have problems formatting some drives. the following:

Mounting disk
Creating a new empty APFS Container
Unmounting Volumes
Couldn't unmount disk. : (-69888)

Fixing this requires manually unmounting the volume before formatting by clicking the eject button next the format drive (not the parent).

Umount, and repeat from step 3.

Gruber back on his BS

If Apple says they support California’s SB 244, it probably just means they actually support it. - John Gruber, Daringfireball

I've fallen out of reading Daringfireball daily (hence the delayed hot take), or even weekly when for years it was a must reads and I think these sort of defensive takes are probably why. When I penned my first line on my personal blog, I think I was trying to immitate Gruber's wit and quippiness. I even have a daringfireball shirt.

That said, my desire to hear a defense of Apple corrolates directly to Apple's more and more egregious clownery when it comes to the right to repair. These days I'm more Louis Rossman than John Gruber, for better or worse.

Also, I need to post more....

Getting XEMU to work on macOS (Intel / Apple Silicon Xbox emulation)

Getting XEMU on macOS running isn't super difficult but running games is as direct ripped Xbox ISOs will not work with XEMU. I've updated this guide with an Xemu video tutorial that dives deeper into Xbox emulation. I recommend using it in tandem with this guide. Terminal savvy users probably can follow the written guide but I'd recommend checking out the video if you encounter issues as there's a few quirks with the emulator.

• Homebrew - (it is possible to do it without Homebrew but for sanity's sake I will be using it
• Git. There are multiple ways to install git but I'd recommend using xcode-select --install
• The XEMU emulator
• System Support files
• extract-xiso to make converted ISOs

First, you need to download XEMU. It's updated frequently. Grab it from the official website here. It's a universal binary, so it runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.

After you need a few files, these are, legally speaking, the parts of the emulator that are copyrighted. I stumbled across them on Reddit. I own an Xbox, so I'll just say I extracted them myself. Please do not ask me about where to get these files or games.. I'll ignore your request.

The files are:

• Flash (Bios) - Complex_4627v1.03.bin
• MCPX Boot Rom File - mcpx_1.0.bin
• Hard disk Image File - xbox_hdd.qcow2

And the EEPROM, which will be created automatically. Leave the RAM at 64 MB.

You'll have to go to settings and manually assign each of these files; I found that placing them in the same directory as the emulator is recommended for whatever reason. It got confused when I didn't. Also, be sure to quit, as you'll need to reboot the emulator for the changes to take.

Next, it's running games. Games are generally in the ISO format. It's up to you to determine how your ethics work on this and please do not ask me for ISOs. There are places where people back up the games they own, like Archive.org.

This is where Xbox emulation gets tricky. You cannot just play ISOs. You first need to repack them into an ISO format that XEMU will understand.

For that, we have extract-iso, a command-line utility that is used to convert ISOs into playable ISOs.

First, we need to download, cmake so we can compile extract-xiso to run on our Mac. You'll need Git and Homebrew installed for this to work.

Open up a terminal window and do the following:

Step 1: Dependencies

Run the following, update brew and then install cmake, a utility to create the necessary files to build/compile the application.

brew update

brew install cmake

Step 2: Clone The Repo

From the terminal, you'll want to navigate or create a directory where you'd like XEMU to live, as by default, the terminal will open up into the ~/ (your user directory.)

git clone https://github.com/XboxDev/extract-xiso.git

Step 3: Go into the directory

Now we enter the directory where extract-xiso was cloned to.

cd extract-xiso

Step 4: Create a build directory

Next we need to create a build folder for camke as per the instructions for extract-xiso and run the cmake/make commands from the this directory.

mkdir build

cd build

Step 5 Building the app

Next, we're going to run cmake and after it completes and creates the makefiles, run make.

cmake ..

make

Now we're ready to prep Xbox ISOs

Using extract-xiso

From the build folder, we can run the CLI utility.

The utility has the ability to unpack Xbox ISOs and repack them into usable ISOs for XEMU.

There are two ways to about converting the ISOs. The easier method, which I had mixed success with, is to use:

./extract-xiso -r path/to/.iso

This will convert the ISO into the correct format. It'll rename the original iso to .iso.old and place in the build folder the converted ISO.

The other is a two-step process.

Step 1: extract the game contents

./extract-xiso -x /path/to/iso

Step 2: repack the game contents

./extract-xiso -c /path/to/extracted-files

A few tips:

XEMU is a fickle beast; quitting it and reopening it after changing settings is best. If you try an ISO that does not work, you must quit and reopen the app with a working ISO. Don't expect perfect emulation, as Xemu is still actively being developed. I found NBA Street Vol. 2 playable, but there are annoying crackles in the audio.

Other Emulation Articles I've written

• Emulating Mac OS 9.2 with sound on Apple Silicon and Intel
• Mac MAME Arcade emulation & NeoGeo using OpenEMU and SDLMame for Apple Silicon or Intel Native.
• Playing Dune 2 and Dune 2000 on Mac OS (and Command and Conquer Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert)

Apple's secret OS and the Secure Enclave Processor

OpenCore and OpenCore Legacy Patcher Explained

You're most likely aware OpenCore and OpenCore Legacy Patcher. It's a boot loader, whatever that means... .which we will get to in-depth, and it lets you run macOS on old Macs that are no longer supported by Apple. This blog post and vide is a high-level overview so you can understand how OpenCore works and what Open Core Legacy Patcher is.

Let's step back in time to a few years ago. When users wanted to run macOS on unsupported Macs, they'd turn to modify the operating system, the most common being preconfigured scripts like DOSDude1. These weren't perfect, as you generally had to reapply them each time you updated the OS, no matter how small. Even a security update could render your mac unbootable until repatched. It was simple until it wasn't. Here's what happened:

Over time macOS has evolved to be more closed at the system level. This started when Apple started following the industry trend of signed code in 2009 with the introduction of Snow Leopard. Signed code allows the OS to verify the identity of the software developer and ensures that the application has not been tampered with or modified since it was signed. This evolved in many ways, but the most important is the modern usage of integrity protection which exists as System Integrity Protection, introduced in 10.11 El Capitan, SIP or System Integrity Protection which restricts the actions of the root user / privileged processes that can be performed on critical system files and folders. Translation: a rogue app will have a much tougher time hacking your OS as it doesn't have permission to do so.

Apple began requiring signed code for applications distributed outside the Mac App Store with the release of macOS 10.8 Mountain Lion in 2012, not with Snow Leopard in 2009. Snow Leopard (10.6) introduced support for signed code but did not mandate it.

System Integrity Protection (SIP) was indeed introduced in macOS 10.11 El Capitan, and it restricts the actions of the root user and privileged processes to protect critical system files and folders. This makes it harder for rogue apps or malware to compromise the system.

Also, integrity protection exists in the file system itself in APFS with metadata integrity protection, which uses cryptographic verification of metadata, which helps prevent tampering and protects against malware attempts to modify the system. The system also now exists as a separate partition within the APFS container that is read-only during normal operation. All of this makes macOS a lot less likely to be infected with OS-level malware.

Apple File System (APFS) includes metadata integrity protection, which uses cryptographic verification to help prevent tampering and protect against malware attempts to modify the system. APFS was introduced in macOS 10.13 High Sierra.

The system partition's read-only status during normal operation was introduced in macOS 10.15 Catalina, further enhancing security.

Apple, in even more recent releases, has deprecated Kexts, small modules of code that are designed to extend the functionality of the macOS kernel and other system components, such as device drivers or filesystems. Kexts or kernel extensions are very powerful. Thus, they are a potential vector for malware.

Of course, the focus on security has complicated modifying macOS by 3rd parties; however, some very smart programmers and hackers devised impressive solutions.

On the Hackintosh side, users who wanted to run macOS on PC hardware had created a thriving software scene. Clover became the preferred and essential method of installing macOS on unsupported hardware. Clover was a boot loader and could inject Kexts into macOS.

A bootloader is a piece of software that is responsible for loading the operating system kernel and initializing the hardware devices during the boot process. We'll dig into this more in a minute.

Clover was essential but had shortcomings regarding security, compatibility, configuration and generally required additional patching. Hackintosh users and owners of unsupported Macs faced a similar problem when macOS was on unsupported hardware. A system update could break the entire setup until certain hacks and patches were reapplied.

OpenCore was developed as a way to fix these issues for both unsupported Macs and Hackintoshes, relying on its ability to inject changes as part of the boot process rather than modify the OS itself. The advantage is that the OS would be left intact without requiring altering of most security settings or patching/hacking the OS.

OpenCore and Kexts

OpenCore uses a feature called Kext Injection. When OpenCore boots the macOS kernel, it scans the system for all available kexts and injects them into the kernel as needed. This allows users to add support for hardware devices that are not natively supported by macOS or to modify system behavior in various ways.

OpenCore also uses the concept of "Kext Patches" to modify the behavior of existing kexts or to patch the macOS kernel itself. This isn't unique to Clover, but OpenCore's methods are improved. Kext Patches are small code snippets that are applied to kexts or the kernel at boot time, which can be used to modify system behavior or to add support for additional hardware components.

When the computer boots, OpenCore acts as middleware for the UEFI or EFI on the computer, a standard for computer Bios that macOS uses. It loads its own firmware and presents the user with a boot loader GUI allowing the user to select the OS. If the user boots macOS, it performs pre-checks, prepares for booting macOS by prepping necessary modifications, then loads macOS Kernel into memory and modifies it with the kernel patches and modifications, and loads kexts for additional hardware support or system modifications. Once done, OpenCore hands over control to the OS, and booting proceeds.

To summarize, each time you boot macOS with OpenCore, it is modifying macOS on the fly, meaning you can update your Operating system without worrying about losing patches or lowering security settings.

The Case for OpenCore Legacy Patcher

OpenCore is fairly complicated to configure. Thus, users would often share their configs for various hardware setups. For example, A very popular configuration for classic Mac Pro users was Martin Lo's OpenCore configurations. This worked well for users whose hardware matched or resembled the hardware the preconfig was targeting, as it created a template for other users to follow and edit, assuming their hardware similar to the preconfig file.

While this worked, it required a fair amount of technical know-how, reading, and research, especially if your hardware is different in a significant way, such as a different GPU or Network interface. OpenCore Legacy Patcher aimed to make this a point-and-click experience.

OpenCore Legacy Patcher is a community-driven project based on OpenCore designed with old Macs specifically in mind. OpenCore Legacy Patcher is a graphic user interface that automates installing OpenCore on Macs that Apple no longer supports.

Unlike PCs that come with an exceptionally wide range of configurations, Apple's product line is exceptionally small. This makes it predictable for OpenCore Legacy Patcher developers to create configurations for the user based on the hardware it detects rather than the user modifying the OpenCore configurations themselves. Power users can still modify OpenCore manually after using OpenCore Legacy Patcher.

With a few short steps, a user can install OpenCore on an old Mac, allowing them to run recent versions of macOS on hardware that Apple has elected to no longer support. Apple does not make money on old hardware and thus habitually drops support even if the hardware is quite capable of providing a pleasant experience.

Apple's yearly OS updates also have slowly required more and more developer support for Apple's security features and also have depreciated older technologies at a fast clip. The end result is an older copy of macOS may not support the latest and greatest software, even as crucial as a web browser that works with modern web standards. In contrast, Windows has a much longer support window with its less frequent overhauls.

It makes one realize the value of a paid OS update model, as seems to be the case for Windows for longer support.

OpenCore is the backbone of providing support to older computers. OpenCore legacy patcher is a utility used to configure and install OpenCore in a very user-friendly way.

OpenCore is a boot loader designed specifically to work with Apple's current security paradigm and avoids modifying the OS stored on the boot volume. It instead applies the patches on the fly during the boot sequence.

Looking for info on how to install OpenCore?

I've made separate blog post, The 10 Step Guide to OpenCore Legacy Patcher (with pictures and video) or you can check the video below.

Happy OpenCore-ing

The brute force Drupal 9 content query

SELECT * FROM node__body WHERE body_value LIKE ‘%string%’;;

SELECT * FROM node__body WHERE body_value LIKE ‘%string%’ AND body_value LIKE ‘%string2%’;;

The 10 Step Guide to OpenCore Legacy Patcher (with pictures and video)

OpenCore Legacy Patcher recently hit version 0.6.x, an important milestone. It finally added support for Non-Metal Graphics Acceleration, older wireless network chipsets, UHCI/OHCI USB 1.1 Controllers, and AMD Vega Graphics on pre-Haswell Macs (Mac Pro 2008-2012). It continues to be updated, with recent advances to support macOS 13.3.

The goal of this guide is to provide a very granular step-by-step guide to installing OpenCore Legacy Patcher on a supported Mac for users who are new to the world of OpenCore.

As a quick primer, OpenCore is a boot loader. OpenCore functions as middle wear between the firmware and macOS. This allows changes to be injected without modifying the OS. Through these modifications, discontinued hardware can be supported. OpenCore was designed to replace Clover and other Hackintosh solutions as a way to avoid repeatedly patching after minor OS changes. However, OpenCore proved not to be useful for Hackintosh owners but also for Mac owners as well.

OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP) is a utility that automates the installation of OpenCore on older Macs that Apple no longer supports and has matured to a point-and-click utility. Users do not have to understand esoteric software configuration in OpenCore and instead can rely on a community to test the latest developments from the OpenCore community and fold them into a package.

If you're looking for a detailed explanation of OpenCore, I wrote a separate article explaining OpenCore and OCLP or you can watch the video below.

OCLP's accomplishments are nothing short of amazing but also contradictory as it really should not need to exist. OCLP proves that Apple's decision to drop older Macs has little to do with user experience and everything to do with planned obsolescence, as OCLP proves that older Macs are more than capable of running modern macOS versions and even flourish. For a company that love to talk about it's efforts to be "Green", the best thing it could do to keep eWaste out of dumpsters is to continue to support hardware for as long as possible. Regardless of where you live, please support the right-to-repair in your city or state or province or country.

---

This guide also exists in video format as "How to install OpenCore Legacy Patcher in 5 minutes".

Requirements:

• 16 GB+ USB flash drive
• Supported Mac, see OCLP's website,

Before you install OpenCore Legacy Patcher on your Mac, go to the OCLP website and confirm your old Intel Mac is supported. Some Macs may not support the latest version of macOS. OCLP's team is chipping away at support for older Macs. Most Macs post 2010 are well-supported but with caveats such as non-functioning Bluetooth. Also, compatibility differs between OS versions, generally with the latest OS having the least amount of support. Users likely will have better results running a semi-recent OS vs the most recent.

Next, you will need a 16 GB or larger USB flash drive. Not all USB flash drives are bootable but most are. I used a SanDisk 128GB Ultra Fit USB 3.1 as can often be bought for $15 (the 64 GB version generally is $10), and while not the fastest drive, it's made by a reputable company and will be faster than most $10 USB flash drives.

Lastly, always check OpenCore's website when updating the very latest OS release. I highly recommend waiting a few weeks for point releases, ones that are a major revisions like 13.3 (Not 13.3.1) for the OpenCore community to test and vet the OS update with various hardware configurations.

Step 1) Format Drive

Plug your USB flash drive into your Mac (or a PC). Open up disk utility on your Mac. This is located in Utilities folder in your Applications folder, or easily found using spotlight. Highlight your USB thumb drive and select format. Format your flash drive to Fat 32. macOS lists this as MS-DOS (Fat). As a friendly reminder, Formatting will erase all the contents of your flash drive. If you have any important information, back it up before performing this step.

This is required so the OCLP utility will be able to recognize the drive, and will format it again later.

Step 2) Download OCLP

Confirm the support for your Mac, at OCLP's website, Download OpenCore Legacy Patcher from the OCLP GitHub page. As a general rule, you should download the latest version of OCLP. OCLP does receive semi-regular updates which may improve your Mac if you are already using OCLP you can upgrade it in the future.

Step 3) Launch OCLP

Depending on your OS/Browser settings you may need to decompress the zip file by double clicking it. Launch OCLP and select Create macOS installer.

Step 4) Download macOS

On the "Create macOS installer" screen, select Download macOS if you do not already have a version downloaded on your Mac, and then select the version of macOS you'd like to download. Downloading will take some time as the installer is 12 GB.

Step 5) Select your OS

The installer should forward you to the select macOS screen and select your downloaded OS. If the OCLP utility does not automatically take you to this screen, return OpenCore's first screen and select create the installer, and select existing macOS.

Step 6) Install to USB drive

On the Format USB screen, select your USB drive. This will likely require your admin password. Enter it. This will take a significant amount of time, depending on your flash drive's speed and your Mac. This is a two-stage process as after it's copied over it will verify. You can leave this process in the background of your Mac while you perform other tasks or leave your computer unattended while this process completes. The installer will warn that it will take roughly a half hour although I found it took less time.

Step 7) Install OpenCore To Disk

Once the installer has copied the installer to disk, it should ask you if you'd like to install OpenCore to disk. Select install OpenCore to disk. It'll build the OpenCore settings for your Mac. Select install to disk again, and select your USB drive.

Step 8) Reboot

Once the installer has finished, it should ask you if you'd like to reboot. It should display the following: "You will need to reboot and hold the Option key and select OpenCore/Boot EFI's Option". Holding down the option key while your Mac is booting will cause it to boot into the boot picker.

You can reboot now or later. When you reboot, you will need to hold down the option key on your computer and then select the OpenCore EFI partition. This will be the icon with the OpenCore logo behind it.

Step 9) Select OpenCore from the bootpicker and then the installer

Once you've selected the OpenCore EFI you'll be taken to another boot picker. Select the installer. At this point, you have booted into OpenCore, and thus all the configured hacks are loaded in that will enable your Mac to be able to install macOS.

Step through the installer as normal. With modern macOS installs, the installer will need to reboot several times. It may reboot and bring you back to the beginning of the install process. If this happens, you'll need to restart your computer and from the OpenCore boot picker, select the incomplete install and not the USB installer. This will resume your install.

Step 10) Post Install

Finish setting up your Mac. Run OpenCore Legacy Patcher one last time and confirm that post-install modifications have been installed.

More OpenCore Content!

I installed OpenCore onto my Mac Pro 3,1 using OpenCore Legacy Patcher and made a video about my adventure.

macOS Activation Lock Vulnerability discovered

iCloud with Find My Mac offers the ability lock your Mac if it's lost or stolen, placing it into a state known as "Activation Lock". Activation lock should prevent a user from being able to access the device without first re-entering a pin or password as it is a lock screen before the computer boots. This isn't nearly as powerful as the iOS version due to the lack of persistent internet connections. A stolen Mac will likely not have an active internet connection. However, if the thief can log in to the Mac and sign into a wifi access point or connect to a known WiFi access point, they would then find the Mac forcible rebooting and locking itself, leaving the Mac in a protected state. This was discovered on reddit, although failed to gain much traction as the initial report required a bit of sleuthing to fully understand the problem and the discoverer was a bit frustrated after Apple dismissing the problem when they submitted a bug report.

It will even lock a user out of booting into recovery mode (it slightly differs on Apple silicon). However, you can bypass this on certain Macs, thus far only Intel Macs seem to be affected. The original discoverer reported using a MacBook Pro 2019 (specs unknown) and I confirmed it on a MacBook 2017.

It requires the following steps:

1. Lock a Mac using iCloud's Find My (the Mac to have to Find My enabled and must connect to the internet after the lock has been initiated)
2. Wait for the Mac to reboot the activation lock screen. Reboot the Mac into recovery mode by holding command + R.
3. Reboot the Mac again. It will now get back to the login screen, defeating the Activation Lock.

I personally confirmed this on a MacBook 2017 (12 inch) multiple times, but was unable to replicate it on a MacBook Pro M1 Max. The affected Mac specs are as follows:

• MacBook 2017 - MacBook10.1 - Core i5 - 8 GB RAM -
• OS version: macOS 13.0 Ventura
• Firmware Version: 499.40.2.0.0
• OS Loader Version: 564.40.4~27
• SMC Version: 2.42f13

Was Snow Leopard 10.6 the greatest OS X release? Demystifying a legend

This is the adapted script from my "Was Snow Leopard 10.6 greatest macOS release ever? An OS X essay" as I know many people prefer written versions (often my self included). This version departs from the original script to better accomedate written word.

Intro

If you were to ask a group of long-time Mac users, what's the best Operating System Apple has ever released? It'd likely be nearly unanimous.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard It's one of the most loved products Apple has ever released, renowned even a solid dozen-plus years later as the king of Mac OS.. Many long-time users consider the high watermark of Mac OS to be Snow Leopard.

9 to 5 Mac wrote an article titled called "The Myth, The Legend: How Snow leopard became synonymous with reliability ." The article is a nice attempt to contextualize Snow Leopard in the greater narrative of OS X, but it falls a bit flat. It makes some decent points, and I don't want to take that away from those, but I think I have a better explanation for why Snow Leopard was so dearly loved. Plus, I have my own opinions about which release of OS X/macOS is the greatest.

A Brief OS X History

Mac OS X started its life with a lot of promise and not a lot to show for it. (I recommend both Ars Technica's OS X 10.0 and OS X 10.1 reviews) Yes, it was a brand new operating system that was based on the FreeBSD kernel, but 10.0 and 10.1 were buggy, slow, lacking critical software that most users depended on, and the hardware running it didn't do a lot of favors for it. To illustrate the incompleteness of early OS X, 10.0's public beta installer doesn't have a disk utility to format a hard drive so you could install the OS. You had to do this with Mac OS 9 first.

Native application ports were very few and far between in the early days of OS X., Many of the early applications relied on the Carbon Framework, which functioned as an intermediate way to port Mac OS 9 Applications to OS X with less friction rather than doing a fully native port to Cocoa. That's assuming they ran in OS X at all.

It wasn't until 10.2 Jaguar that OS X started to come into its own. Jaguar saw the introduction of HFS+, MPEG4, address book, Bonjour for Networking, Quartz Extreme, iCal, and iChat. Quick aside, I can't stress what a big deal it was when Apple released Quartz Extreme in 10.2.8, which used the GPU to accelerate the UI. This was huge as the Aqua user interface burned many CPU cycles live resizing and dragging windows.

By 2003, 10.3 Panther was the first OS X I used almost exclusively, as previously, I would dual boot between Mac OS 9 and OS X. My guess is this was the same experience for many other long Mac users. It was less to do with the new features like Font Book, File Vault, Exposé, much faster preview, and better stability, but rather most major applications had a Cocoa or Carbon version that could be run in OS X without using the Classic Emulation, and Apple started shifting to OS X only computers like the G5.

Then one of the biggest rumors came to fruition. In 2006 10.4.4 Tiger became the first release of x86 OS X, starting with the iMac Core Duo. This was on the heels of Tiger, which introduced some core technologies that are still with us, such as Spotlight replaced Sherlock, 64-bit support, Core Image, Core Audio, and some important improvements like Quicktime 7, and introduced a strategy we'd recognize today, Rosetta, a compatibility layer to translate PowerPC binaries to x86.

Mac OS 10.5 Leopard really brought Mac OS into the modern era, as it had Core Animation, Bootcamp, Time Machine, Spaces, Full Unix compliance, App Sandboxing, and app code signing. The UI was maturing. The security features were rolling in.

Snow Leopard

However, despite the significant changes in the previous OSes, 10.6 is the one that hangs above the rest. 10.6 wasn't devoid of features. In 2008, it introduced Multitouch support for trackpads, better Bootcamp support, improvements to Time Machine, the introduction of Grand Central Dispatch for better multicore performance and OpenCL, and the much-needed rewrite of many core applications to 64-bit. And while these features are great, these aren't the reasons why people love this damn OS so much.

That is because there's one absolutely huge asterisk I have not mentioned yet, and almost no one seems to remember.

Snow Leopard dropped PowerPC support. This was the CPU of choice for Apple since 1994. So remember the first intel iMac, the dual-core Core Duo? It was released on January 10th of, 2006. I don't think I'm making this point clear enough. Let me explain. At its release, the absolute oldest computer Snow Leopard was ever installed on was less than two and a half years old. The previous iMac G5 was a single-core CPU, whereas the iMac Core Duo was dual-core. Plus, the performance gap between PowerPC and x86 was wide. Secondly, Apple only shipped the Core Duo Macs for mere months. The new MacBook lineup shipped with a Core Duo in May, and by November, it already had the new, much faster 64-Bit Core 2 Duo. Oh yeah, Intel was making meaningful gains during this era. Snow Leopard never had to support shitty hardware for its day.

In 2009 alone, Apple refreshed its MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Mac Mini, iMac, Mac Pro, and the Xserve. Yep, that was the entire lineup. Between 2006-2010, this was basically normal. Each year, Apple would refresh entire lineup would be refreshed yearly sans a few outliers, like the MacBook Air since it was introduced in 2008, and the Mac Mini, Xserve with less frequent updates, so the chances are if you used Snow Leopard, it was likely on very new hardware.

It's easy to see why many Mac users also consider this the high watermark for Apple and the Macintosh platform. It's hard to overstate this, but the perception of Apple during this era was completely different.

While Apple was doing very well, it wasn't the world's richest company yet. In 2009, the iPhone was only two years old, and the iPad was still a full year out. This is why I argue that a lot of Snow Leopard's clout still commands has to do with the hardware it was running on.

A top-of-the-line Quad-Core (Dual cpu/dual core) G5 could barely playback 1080p without dropping frames, and then two years later, a 2008 Mac Pro could playback multiple streams of 1080p video without dropping a single damn frame. The biggest single hardware upgrade I've ever experienced in my time using a computer was going from a 2004 Dual CPU G5 to a 2008 Mac Pro. A lowly MacBook could watch HD Video. The differences in everyday performance were stark. The x86 Macs even booted faster.

Here's something for the youngins, it's easy to forget that OS updates used to cost money to the sweet tune of $129. Snow Leopard reduced its price to $29. I have to give 9to5Mac credit as this point is a good one. Many users probably went straight from Tiger, skipping Leopard, to Snow Leopard. Windows Vista had been driving users away in droves. Many first-time Mac buyers skipped out on Windows 7, which was only released to manufactures before Snow Leopard (although the public would not have it until September), and went straight to Apple. First impressions matter, and Snow Leopard was a fantastic one to have, especially coming from the frustrations of the often misaligned Vista.

Sadly, Snow Leopard was the last macOS that supported Rosetta, meaning some users stuck with Snow Leopard 10.6, resisting the tides of change. It was an optional download and allowed users to run much of the earlier OS X software at surprisingly usable speeds. In what is to become a reoccurring theme, Apple unlike Microsoft, was completely willing abandon the old without extending an olive branch by offering optional legacy support. Notably, it's been speculated that Apple did not renew a software license to continue using Rosetta 1.

Lastly, as previously mentioned, Snow Leopard represents a time when the Mac was still at the center of the Apple universe. The iPod lineup was still going strong but tied to iTunes. The iPhone 3GS was blowing the minds of consumers, journalists, and pretty much everyone who touched one after the introduction of the app store, but it still was a tethered experience and required a computer to set it up. The iPhone wouldn't become an untethered experience until iOS 5 in 2011. At the heart of it, all was OS X and iTunes.

Also, for many cultish Mac-acolytes, their savior, Steve Jobs, was still alive. Even today, it's still a trope to hear Mac users lament, "It wouldn't have happened if Steve were still alive." This was time of reverence as our modern cynacism still hadn't manifested. Social media in the late 2000s was nascent, darker side of smartphones addiction hadn't appeared, and Amazon and other large online retailers were only just started to gut main street America.

I'm certain that Steve's image would have slowly been ebbed away as the pervasive influence of big tech has turned the public image once prodigies like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk into megomaniacs, hopelessly out-of-touch and ruthless businessmen.

The end of the cats

Apple's 10.7 and 10.8 weren't total duds, but they had some early woes. 10.7 had a few bizarre installer issues like the CUI CUI CUI error, and 10.8 had permission issues that prevented Time Machine restores (and other Time Machine problems), much to the chagrin of troubled users. 10.7 Lion brought a lot of mainstays like auto-save, auto-correct, emojis, and push notifications, finally replacing growler, face time, airdrop, iCloud, and more multitouch gestures. However, two of these were negatives. The way Apple first introduced Autosave was confused and felt dumbed down. 10.7 also had to inherit the iCloud debacle, which added to its buggy perception. 10.8 Mountain Lion lacked many of the big features that OS X users were used to seeing in previous OS releases. Part of this was because macOS was maturing, but also, it felt like Apple was devoting all its resources to the iPhone and iOS. It didn't help that many of the big features of OS X were lifted from iOS. Things like notification center, game center, messages, airplay mirroring, and Gatekeeper felt like more iOSification of OS X.

One of the great ironies here is that macOS was actually getting faster. The legendary speed of Snow Leopard doesn't translate much into real-world performance. CNet showed that Lion outperformed Snow Leopard.

Mavericks

But now it's time we finally get to talk about the true king of OS X releases, the one, and only severely underrated Mavericks. It was the culmination of both the Lions and the total lack of additional notification, focusing strictly on performance. It felt like a hardware upgrade had shipped in a software update, and it was the first mac OS that was free! This meant anyone could update it without paying a damn cent.

It didn't feature any radical UI changes beyond the much-needed tabbed finder and the reduction of some of the skeuomorphism found in the address book notepad, iCal, but it did bring the UI into a glorious, whole new world of resolution independence, not just for retina Macbook owners but for everybody, including 4k displays. Big massive things happened under the hood. Timer coalescing was introduced, a massive win for power saving in the MacBook lines, but the much bigger win was Virtual Memory compression. Virtual Memory compression functions using lossless data compression for anything memory-related, RAM, virtual disk swaps, and save states. In short, this means you can make much better use of the RAM you have, and it requires less ram for daily use, especially in multitasking. This also speeds up virtual spaces as less disk space is required, thus fewer transfer times and less power usage. It drastically improves performance on multicore machines, thus, longer battery life. Virtual Memory compression is the gift that keeps on giving. It's also the driving tech behind App napping, which was also introduced in Mavericks! App napping puts apps not being used to sleep, so they're not using system resources, which improves performance and, you might have guessed, saves battery life!

Mavericks also introduced minor features like centralized task scheduling, which made more mindful use of the battery, for example, not running Spotlight indexing when not plugged into a wall. Ars Technica measured Mavericks with an incredible 3 hours longer battery life than a MacBook Air over running OS X 10.8. I highly recommend reading the entire review.

Mavericks also get bonus points for being stable from the get-go. After, two OS releases that weren't Mavericks deserve kudos for that. Oh, for my Mac Pro, homies? It was also the first OS to support more than 96 GBs of RAM. I feel so strongly that Mavericks is the best macOS release because all these changes just happened as a user. You didn't have to know a damn thing about them. It was a huge performance boost, was more stable, got you more battery life, and unlocked the world of resolution independence. Everything just gelled with Mavericks. Let's not forget this upgrade was free. Like Snow Leopard, a lot of its perception and legacy has to do with the OS that follows it.

Mavericks was booked end by what I'd consider the worst release of x86 macOS ever, 10.10 Yosemite. It was an absolutely terrible overcorrection on the UI and had one of the most brutal bugs that resulted in the worst networking performance I've ever experienced on a modern OS. At least the networking eventually got fixed, unlike the Johny Ive flat UI.

The next California releases

After Yosemite is what I'd consider a successful string of OS releases, Sierra, High Sierra, and Mojave were all improvements, one after the other after the other. They also cleared some pretty good technical hurdles, like switching from HFS+ to APFS. We finally saw a replacement for OpenGL in the form of Metal, the UI was fixed, and the OS was fairly stable.

Apple accompanied a few lax hardware requirements that axed support for many older models resulting in the popularizing patching scripts that enabled support for older hardware, Pike's Script and DOSdude1 allowed older Macs to continue age gracefully into this era despite Apple's desires.

Of this string of releases, 10.13 High Sierra often is one of the more loved releases, like Snow Leopard. Due to Mojave dropping support for a significant amount of computers by not offering Metal drivers for old GPUs, High Sierra became one of the end-of-the-roads for many users until they upgraded. I encountered this as an end user, as I had invested in an Nvidia GeForce 1060 without realizing Apple in roughly 2 years would petchulantly block release of all future Nvidia macOS drivers. I'd later purchase an AMD Vega 56 after a year, when it was apparent Apple would not reverse course. High Sierra was not a bad release to be stuck on as I found it rock solid and snappy on an aging Mac Pro.

What didn't happen during this string was any revolutionary changes, Windows after some missteps like Windows 8 and 8.1, radically improved with the release of Window 10 and gained a lot of ground on macOS. Its UI might have still been mind-boggling, like what the fuck are there still control panels, but Microsoft on the same hardware was the clear performance winner over Apple in cross-platform benchmarks. It also boasts something Apple is terrible at Legacy support. Windows 10 and 11 can run via emulation layers, apps written for Windows 98.

A 2006 Mac Pro is forever locked out of modern macOS releases, but fear not, it will install Windows 10 off of an unmodified Windows 10 DVD and once installed, it runs surprisingly well. Windows 11 can even be hacked to run a 2006 Mac Pro. And during this dry time for Mac, Windows even gained proper Bash/ZSH support via Ubuntu as a virtual layer. It is convoluted, but at least common applications and environments like Git and Node can be run near natively now.

Windows also beat macOS to a few features that it shouldn't have, such as 10-bit support and HDR, after Apple clearly aced them with resolution independence. Apple has drug its feet in some really strange places. It wasn't until very recently that CoreAudio finally front-ended into surround sound in a sane manner (if you can find any software to use with it), whereas windows have had this for 15 years. It was until 10.15 Catalina that Apple added DRM support to appease the streaming services for higher resolution video, despite iOS devices having this for years. Meanwhile, Catalina was a step back with its security over corrections, dropping 32-bit support, which turned out to be a field burner for ARM support and not nearly enough meaningful updates. In a better world, Apple would have let x86 die with the ability to run 32-bit code. We know where Microsoft would have landed on this because they already have. They finally stopped developing a 32-bit version of windows but have made no moves to drop 32-bit binary support. In fact, Windows 11 on ARM supports Rosetta-like translation for both 32-bit and 64-bit applications.

The walls of the gated community

We cannot judge macOS releases in a vacuum. Thus, we must call out the narrowing gap between Windows and Mac OS. Older hardware also has a distinct advantage over windows, and this is through drivers and longer-term API support. Apple doesn't make it easy on developers because it constantly changes requirements. Or worse, Apple will actively block the release of drivers, like in the case of Nvidia.

Being a Mac user often feels like living in a gated community with an overbearing homeowners association.

Before I end on a downer for macOS, Big Sur and Monterey run seamlessly on x86 and ARM, which still can't be said about Windows 11. Microsoft is working on its answer, and it's only a matter of time before Windows ARM SoCs.

Whatever your concerns may be about the hardware, the software transition to Apple Silicon has been nothing short of amazing. Big Sur on an M1 did not feel like a first gen product, and Apple always has its eye on consumers. I hope Apple takes its professional-class users more seriously in the future. Apple Silicon has been exciting for its raw performance but offers nothing in the way of user serviceability, and an upgradable professional computer shouldn't cost $6000.

As a professional, I want the best from both Apple and Microsoft. I feel I shouldn't have to make the compromise between long-term usability and support versus a superior user experience, and why do I feel this way? We had it in the past.

Ultimately, I think when most people say Snow Leopard is the best operating system Apple has put out, or when I say its 10.9 Mavericks, we're saying that we want an Apple more focused on the Mac platform and meets our needs better, not theirs.

The Apple Silicon era thus far has been impressive, albeit imperfect. Without even the ability to swap out the parts most likely to die, like the RAM or, more importantly, SSDs, Apple Silicon is a cynical product, meant to be disposable technology, destined for eWaste bins when Apple decides they no longer are willing to support said computers.

Apple's long-term support has been spotty, especially during its architecture transitions. The difference is this time. We won't be able to service the machines long after Apple stops supporting them. If the planned obsolesce is our gated community's walls, they keep getting closer to our house.

Bonus content

This article is not anti Snow Leopard, in fact I'm quite the fan. Awhile back I took the time to upscale and hand correct all of the Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 Nature backgrounds and the Abstract backgrounds to 5k for use on your Mac /iOS device for free download. Enjoy!

Radeon RX 6600 XT and 6800 for the classic Mac Pros (4,1/5,1)?

Update: Syncretic has done it again, you can download the patched ROM from MacRumors for AMD RX 6600 / RX 6800 /RX 6900 XT cards.

Original article below.

It has been nearly a year since I wrote the end of the classic Mac Pro after selling my classic Mac Pros for a 2019 and yet here we are, OpenCore 0.7.9 can run macOS 12.3.1 with very good results.

The big news comes from MacVidCards.Eu and the 6000 AMD GPUs. MacVidCards.Eu is an affiliate of MacVidCards.com, but I'm not sure of the business relationship. MacVidCards.com is a service that flashes GPUs with custom firmware that is Mac EFI compatible.

In my excitement and haste to post a video, I incorrectly stated that it's a RX 6800 XT and not a 6800.

The Mac Pros EFI implementation predates UEFI, the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, which replaced BIOS computers. Apple's implementation uses Universal Graphics Adapter Protocol (UGA). The more modern UEFI replaced UGA with Graphics Output Protocol (GOP) Thus, any UEFI GPU will not output video before drivers are loaded. This meant for years, Mac users who bought any sort of non-OEM GPUs did not display a boot screen until OpenCore. OpenCore is a boot loader, meaning it launches before the operating system and has the ability to perform functions before the OS is loaded. It can inject the low-level driver support, thus giving classic Mac Pro users a boot screen, among many other features.

MacVidcards.com offered an alternative for aftermarket GPU upgrades. It would flash GPUs with its custom hacked ROMs for a fee. MacVidCards.eu had some business arrangement with MacVidCards.com, as MacVidCards.com didn't ship to Europe. MacVidCards.Eu is now selling flashed 6600 XTs and 6800 XTs for classic Mac Pros with screenshots to back up the claim. I'm inclined to believe these are real, and here's why.

Syncretic of the SurPlus fame had a look at the ROMs found on the 6000 series AMD GPUs and postulated it was due to bad code on the ROM. During the init, the ROM checked for UEFI HII (Human Interface Infrastructure) protocols but didn't have any error handling. Apple's EFI implementation does not have UEFI HII support. Thus the ROM on the card would look for these settings, and it'd fail to return a value. When the GPU hit the unexpected null state, it'd hang, thus interrupting the boot process.

Synchretic theorized patching this error in the ROM on the GPU would allow the boot sequence to continue, and thus you could use the GPU.

My guess is that MacVidCards.eu figured out how to do this and is now selling these GPUs. MacVidCards.com, interestingly is not. I have to stress that I haven't had any firm confirmations that these are real, but I'd most likely wager they are.

First, it's coming from a reliable source. The MacVidCards group(s) have shipped working EFI hacked GPUs for years. Even if the MacVidCards.com in the US has a negative reputation for customer service, plenty of people can attest their products work.

Second, thanks to community research, we know (at least part of) the scope of the problem for these GPUs. It's not an insurmountable fix

Third and final, the benchmarks pass the "sniff test" . They are about 6% slower in the Metal scores for a 6800 vs a 2019 Mac Pro with the same GPU. This checks out as PCIe 2.0 vs 3.0 generally only incurs about 5% hit for PCIe 3.0 GPUs as GPUs aren't as bandwidth-intensive as most people assume they are. Side Note: This will likely change with technologies like DirectStorage in Windows, where the GPU can bypass the CPU for accessing NVMe but for now, there's not a huge advantage for larger PCIe buses when concerning GPUs.

While currently this is only avaliable in Europe, this news should make all Mac Pro owners excited as it means there's just a few more drops left in the tank for the classic Mac Pros. Perhaps we will see a community solution for the ROM now that we know it's possible.