Hello again everyone, I thought I'd check in.
So I've assembled all the parts I previously mentioned (new i9 CPU, new cooler, "new" Z690 MoBo, new 32GB RAM, new M.2 SSD's, new PSU, old 5700XT, old case) and I've installed both Win11 and Monterey successfully. Then I updated Monterey to Ventura, also successfully. I won't talk my various mishaps following the process(es); upshot is: OS installations done. Multiboot possible. Good stuff.
However not all is perfect; there is still work to be done- any help would be brilliant.
I'm scouring the forum as best I can for anwsers, but:
1. My Firewire 400 PCIe x2 card doesn't work.
This is something I rather expected as Firewire is very old now and we all know Apple hates supporting anything old when it comes to new OS versions. Without a functioning Firewire port I cannot connect my Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 audio interface, which is a major bummer as the whole point of having a dual boot hackintosh is to do music stuff via that interface. I expect I'll need a new interface (USB3?) but it would be nice to at least have one this working until then.
The odd thing is that the Pro24 shows up as a Firewire device in "System Information"... it just doesn't do anything.
2. The USB ports.
I'm definitely not using all the ports possible from the MoBo because my old case only has three USB ports (using the U32G1_78 and the USB_E34 headers). Someone did notice this and point out that I can get some un-disabled. This is much more important than I realised, because I use two USB 2.0 midi devices (one hand keyboard and one foot keyboard) and now thanks to needing a mouse & keyboard rather more, I don't have the active USB 2.0 ports to plug them in with. I tried using the "
SSDT-UIAC-ASUS-Z690-PROART-ALL-PORTS.aml" and that just caused much worse issues, so that's not really an option as a fix.
As far as I can tell according to CaseySJ's MoBo map, I don't need SS09 or HS09 (or HS11? I don't have any RGB to control) So it would be great if I can disable those and enable HS03 & HS04. But of course I need to work out how I'm going to do that... if anyone can point me towards "an idiots guide to editing your USB ports" that would be fantastic.
3. WiFi & Bluetooth
... to be honest they would just be a 'nice to have' seeing as I have the computer running just fine from Ethernet and I don't have any Bluetooth stuff that needs to work on MacOS. So I'm not too bothered about these at the moment. But the efforts to enable these have so far met with faliure (to boot). That's going on the backburner until I have the first two issues sorted.
And that's it. Remarkably few problems all said & done. I really must thank CaseySJ profusely for putting their guide together and all the hard work they've done (and continue to do) around this forum in the name of the Hackintosh. Not to mention everyone else that's part of this community. Awesome stuff.