@outlaw69uk
In short, I "should" be able to just install and go, but, struggling with the first part, which is getting things to boot in any way.
You are right: it's way more complicated now.
Maybe I can help develop your expectations.
If you are looking for a way of thinking like tonymax86 style beasts, the Apple shift to its own silicon sounded the death knell of such helpers.
As Intel silicon continues to evolve, general macOS suitability is in decline due to no Apple product evolution on Intel. So you're relegated to legacy boards. Some true hackers have been working to adapt newer boards to legacy approaches with great success, but the sands of time are against this.
At the time Apple announced its own silicon for macOS, the hackintosh scene was evolving from Clover / rEFI moddable UEFI bootloaders to a more public, general purpose approach known as OpenCore — where to my reading the bootloader is becoming a weird new sort of BIOS.
Along the way, OpenCore developers documented in detail how config packages like tonymacx86 beasts arrange bootloader modules to effect a hack. This know-how is the Dortania Guide.
The Dortania / OpenCore approach became the basis of the OpenCore Legacy Patcher which evolved from DosDude1's configurator for helping non-hackers run later macOS on unsupported Macs. It looks to me like DosDude's legacy mac configurator itself is modeled after tonymacx86 beasts, but I don't know the history.
Fate would have it that the shift of Apple away from Intel occurred right at the moment Beast style Clover configurators might have been made based on OpenCore, so these never got made. The Dortania Guide remains, and this is the level of hackintoshing in 2023.
Under the Dortania regime, you have to do all the configuration yourself, which is what is meant by "learning".
Some earnest attempts have been made to write configurators to assist with assembling an Dortania-style OpenCore EFI, but the growing permutations of hacks and ever declining support for Intel silicon has stymied these efforts. The problem of creating general purpose configurators is onerous due to difficulty of creating, and eventual dearth, of workarounds to missing macOS support of Intel silicon.
OK so there's the state of the union.
What every prospective hackintosher should know in 2023 is that this scene is now for legacy HW only, with the sweet-spot being kit from 2019 to 2021 — or older if you want to run older versions of macOS. The cutoff is kit from about 2015, before which point you are dealing with archaic issues. Pre 2015 are artifacts.
The easiest way to go is to find a golden-style build on these forums and start with its EFI. Your work will be lessened the more closely you copy the form-factor of a proven build. But that doesn't make it easy.
There's no avoiding the lay of the land of OpenCore, because solving problems will be done at that level of config. And there's a lot you need to know to work at this level.
To repeat: The Dortania Guide is a step-by-step reference for understanding how that proven EFI is put together. Read it.
Then find a proven golden-style build and obtain its parts list. You can fudge on parts in many ways but you have to face the work of accommodating your choices. This means grokking config at level of specific unit-level features, functions and compatibility of each part of the system. The Dortania Guide will inform your thinking.
From there, you work is laid out into 3 basic steps:
1. Boot Linux or Windows to prove your kit works.
2. Create and tweak an OpenCore EFI that will run the macOS installer appropriate for you build.
3. Once macOS is up, touch up features and functionality.
This site has tons of EFIs you can use as boilerplate, but start with a proven build.
After you have a Dortania Guide survey if the lay of the land, there are two configurators can ease certain chores: OpenCore Configurator and OpenCore Auxiliary Tools.
Note: It is pointless to use these tools without a commitment to understanding OpenCore at level of Dortania, so that guide is the bible.
From there drill into further details:
There's a reference guide for OpenCore itself in the distribution.
The Acidanthera github is the source for OpenCore the key supporting kexts. Just look at its list of packages. The Acidanthera WhateverGreen FAQ for Intel GPUs is key.
The Dortania Guide is the key source for boilerplate ACPI (SSDTs).
USBToolBox is the key for step 3 (above).
There are about 5-10 other essential tools some with variants:
- macOS Disk Utility / diskutil or Linux Gparted.
- an EFI mounter
- a plist editor
- script for obtaining macOS installers
- how-to use macOS installer package to prep a installer flash drive.
- ocvalidate
- IORegistryExplorer
- SSDTime for boilerplate ACPI
- ASL/.dsl ACPI editor
Hth
