Issues with the HackBook

Hello, fellow redditors of the r/Hackintosh community. I have come here to get some help from all of you guys. Recently, I made myself a Hackintosh. I was pretty excited because this was my first time making a Hackintosh. This was part of a project I had in mind for a year. I installed macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 on my Acer Aspire 4738. Components are listed below.

Acer Aspire 4738

CPU: i5 480m (Arrandale)

iGPU: Intel GMA HD (1st Gen)

Ram: 4gb DDR3

HDD: 500gb WD Scorpio Blue

Motherboard: JE_41CP

Looking at the hardware, my plan was questionable. I still decided to go on with the plan. I did some homework and in the end I found a forum that had a guide which showed how to install macOS High Sierra on my hardware.

Link to the guide which I followed: https://olarila.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=6075

I was pleased and went on with installing macOS High Sierra on my laptop, which is now dubbed as the HackBook. After installation I setup Clover as recommended by the guide. I tried installing the recommended kexts but not all worked for my hardware. I decided to skip that and proceed with installing kexts on my own. At first, I did not know what I was doing and broke the OS. I had to reinstall and proceed with more caution and yet I still screwed. About a week and 12 reinstalls and lack of sleep and a lot of trial and error with a lot of patience and persistence, later, I managed to make macOS High Sierra on the HackBook somewhat stable without actually breaking the OS. I followed a reddit post which showed that placing the kexts in the EFI/CLOVER/Kexts/Other folder is a much better option than installing the kexts in the System/Library/Extensions folder. It has since become my go to method for installing kexts. I installed all of the necessary kexts via Clover's Kext Installer. I placed all of those kexts in the EFI/CLOVER/Kexts/Other folder and it worked.

Link to the reddit post which introduced me to this method: https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/3c2wgy/guide_how_you_should_be_managing_your_hackintosh/

I also got some other kexts from the Internet. Kexts which I knew that were meant for the HackBook. Unfortunately, not all of them work. In fact, some of the kexts worked like as if they were half assed. I tried following guides on how to install those kexts but the problems persisted. Then, there were problems which I could not find any solution to on the Internet. I looked high and low and found nothing. I realised that I had hit a major roadblock. That was when I decided to turn to the r/Hackintosh community for help. The most noticable issues are the outputs, mainly the display. I will list whatever issues I am aware of for now, so be ready for more in the near future.

Known Issues

1. The display is registered as an external display and because of that I do not get the option to adjust the brightness of the display. (I could not find a solution for this. The display is a LVDS display with a resolution of 1366 x 768.)
2. The animations are laggy and it looks very hacky. There is a lot of screen tearing. (I suppose Intel Quartz Extreme has something to do with this. I tried installing the right kexts but its still the same.)
3. Bluetooth does not work. (Bluetooth module is the broadcom BCM92070MD_REF. I have installed the right kexts for it but the OS still does not recognise my hardware.)
4. There is no audio although the OS detects the hardware and I can even change the volume. (In my case, I used the VoodooHDA kext. and it worked on first try, unlike AppleALC kext which never worked. After I installed VoodooHDA kext for the first time, I got the audio to work for about five seconds and then it never worked again. I tried reinstalling the kext many times after that but I never got any audio after those five seconds. I am using Realtek ALC272.)
5. The trackpad works but only the two finger scrolling action and the basic functions like moving the cursor and single tap and double tap and right click and left click works. (I had to update the VoodooPS2Controller kext to get the trackpad detected and the features to work. The trackpad is from Synaptics.)
6. HDMI and VGA ports do not work at all. (I suppose that it does not work because the main display is already registered as an external display.)
7. The OS has become a bit slow as the days have passed. (I just decided to put this one out there in hopes that there would be a fix for it.)

These are all the issues that I am aware of. As you guys can tell, tall of the issues are hardware related issues. Well that is because I am not not going to try to mess around much with the software until I get the software to become stable enough to run on this hardware without any issues.

Also, I mentioned everything I did and how it all came down to this because I would like you guys to correct me if I did something wrong. You guys can be brutally honest with me. It will help me get a better understanding of how Hackintosh works. This is my first Hackintosh project and it marks my entry into the world of Hackintosh and I do not plan on leaving it anytime soon and if that is the case, I need to get better at this and improve my knowledge on this overtime.

Cooperation and feedback from you guys are highly appreciated. In advance, many thanks.

-Kunaal (TheKROCZ)

This post was typed and uploaded with the HackBook.