Comment by johnklos
3 months ago
Some of the first Hackintoshes, and the origin of the term "Hackintosh", were from the practice of putting Mac motherboards in to non-Mac cases, often using non-Mac hardware. For instance, "Macintosh Repair & Upgrade Secrets" showed me how to use a TTL / Hercules monitor with a motherboard that came out of a Mac Classic with a broken picture tube. I used that machine for years.
> While I knew about and even tried various very early attempts to run macOS on non-Apple hardware [...]
Running System 6 / System 7 / Mac OS 8 on Amigas was also popular back then, both legally (by buying Mac Plus ROMs) and not necessarily legally (by loading ROM images from disk). If you had an Amiga with a PowerPC accelerator or a PowerPC BeBox, you could run PowerPC Mac OS, too. Early attempts to run macOS on non-Apple Intel / AMD hardware had plenty of precedent ;)
Will Hackintoshes be made using ARM computers running modern macOS? It's hard to say for sure, but considering how clever Opencore and other communities are, and considering how much can be done to virtualize / emulate hardware presented to virtual machines, I'd be willing to bet we'll see macOS VMs running on ARM systems at some point.
Have you read Bob Brant's Build Your Own Macintosh and Save a Bundle [1]? The man was a proponent of having the only Apple part in your build be the logic board, and using as many commodity PC parts as possible – I remember one of the builds started with a Macintosh SE logic board that ran "headless" with a (Radius?) video card in a generic AT/XT case, with everything else (drives, PSU, etc.) commodity PC. Pure wizardry, and he somehow managed to make the numbers add up cheaper than first-party Apple even when adding accelerators to your build.
[1] https://vintageapple.org/macbooks/pdf/Build_Your_Own_Macinto...
I had my library get that book, and it helped with all sorts of projects. What an awesome book :D