A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing!

[ritalin]

How much do you think this upgrade to my hackintosh cost me?

If only it was true

[aquamac]

I nearly fell off my perch, 8 cores!!!! Did you strap 4 ihacks together?? Lol, If it came from the Apple store it would cost more than your average car, thats for sure!

Incidentaly, how did you change no of cores & L2 cache. The other thing I wanted to work out is how to show L2 cache in "About this Mac ( in the same way that L3 used to be shown on G4's.

[ritalin]

I have figured out a little bit about the System Profiler.

First, the "There was an error while gathering this information" message that some get in Hardware Overview. The easy fix for this is to replace the "SPPlatformReporter" binary found here-
/System/Library/SystemProfiler/SPPlatformReporter.spreporter/Contents/MacOS/SPPlatformReporter
With the 6.9 version from the OS X.4.2 Intel dev kit system (not 100% sure about the OS X version, but AFAIK that's correct).

Second, I couldn't understand why for some "System Profiler, Hardware Overview" would display details for:
*Processor Name *CPU Features *Boot ROM Version
and others would not?

I found this bundle responsible "SPiPlatformReporter.spreporter" (from Intel dev kit system, I believe).
With "SPiPlatformReporter.spreporter" installed:


Without "SPiPlatformReporter.spreporter" installed:


Next, from the text file "Localizable.strings" found here:
"/System/Library/SystemProfiler/SPPlatformReporter.spreporter/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Localizable.strings"
I get this info:

/* These strings link the model name returned by looking up the "compatible" */
/* property in Open Firmware in SPMachineTypes.plist to the localized marketing */
/* name for the same machine. Do not modify the left hand strings; they are */
/* what is returned by SPMachineTypes.plist. */
/* To add a new model, add its mapped name from SPMachines.plist and the */
/* localized marketing name. */

This means that SPMachineTypes.plist, found here:
/System/Library/SystemProfiler/SPPlatformReporter.spreporter/Contents/Resources/SPMachineTypes.plist
obtains the machine model (usually ACPI for a hack AFAIK) and applies a machine name, if a match is found. Then "Localizable.strings" replaces the machine name with a localized version. When no match is found the default machine name is used "Mac". Because of all this switching - by editing "Localizable.strings" you can make "System Profiler, Hardware Overview" display anything you like. As seen in my last post. ;D

More info may follow>

[ritalin]

admin said:

The other thing I wanted to work out is how to show L2 cache in "About this Mac ( in the same way that L3 used to be shown on G4's.

No chance I think

[ritalin]

admin said:

Incidentaly, how did you change no of cores & L2 cache.

Edit "Localizable.strings" in the following way:

"What you see now" = "What you want to see";

So in my case I added the following:

"2" = "8";
"1 GB" = "16 GB";
"2 MB" = "8 MB";
"1.07 GHz" = "1.33 GHz";
"1.87 GHz" = "3.0 GHz";

[aquamac]

I don't think I have the option to do this with the version of sys profiler that i am using. Can you send me a copy of the one you are using please. Many thanks, or if I just am not getting it correctly, show a screen shot of the actual edit. Thanks.

[ritalin]

admin said:

I don't think I have the option to do this with the version of sys profiler that i am using. Can you send me a copy of the one you are using please. Many thanks, or if I just am not getting it correctly, show a screen shot of the actual edit. Thanks.

I think it should work. The only difference is that on my machine I use an earlier version of the "SPPlatformReporter" binary executable. The method used to tailor the output for local languages via "Localizable.strings" is just the same.

Presuming your Mac is set to English in International you can edit this file to control the output seen in Hardware Overview:
/System/Library/SystemProfiler/SPPlatformReporter.spreporter/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Localizable.strings

Look at the German version and you can see how this translation works:
Andys-PowerBook:~ andy$ /System/Library/SystemProfiler/SPPlatformReporter.spreporter/Contents/Resources/German.lproj/Localizable.strings

See this line of code:
"PowerMacG4AGP" = "Power Mac G4 (AGP-Grafik)";

It translates the model name returned SPMachineTypes.plist "PowerMacG4AGP" to the localized marketing name for the same machine "Power Mac G4 (AGP-Grafik)".

Basically anything seen in Hardware Overview can be translated-replaced.
So if you see "2" in Hardware Overview and would like to see "4", you would add the following to you Localizable.strings file:
"2" = "4";

Hope that helps.

[aquamac]

Thanks Ritalin,

I finally got the hang of it: