Roon 2.0 - Any way to run it on an unsupported Mac OS?

I would not run a core on a VM or some similar relatively fragile setup. Clients ok.

I too have had a 2010 Mac Pro which I bought second hand in 2012 and pimped it up with faster dual CPUs, more RAM and SSD boot drive. it’s been s great desktop machine and I’ve had Roon Core running on it without an issue, other than having to have the machine on. I swapped over to an SSD on my Syno NAS and that also works well.

Sadly my Mac Pro finally karked it a couple of months ago I wanted to patch Catalina on it, but I had problems with the graphics card and there were one or two other problems. So, I now have a base model Mac Studio, which is great. Still have Roon on the NAS for the time being and I was doing a little bit of beta testing for v2.0 and ARC, all good.

Go for Open Core Legacy patcher!! Real awesome, good instructions.

I am running 2 Mac mini’s 2011, i7 and i5 16/500SSD on MacOS Monterey 12.6.1 latest build.

Running dedicated ROON 2.0 server and PLEX Media server

And the other MAMP 6.1

I hear there is a problem with the graphics card if you upgrade the Mac Os, did you experience any problems? my Mac mini specs are as follows. I will appreciate it if you can confirm that I can go ahead to patch my Server using the patcher mentioned above. the Specs of my Mac Mini Mid 2011 are as follows:
-Processor 2.7 GHz Intel i7
-Memory 16 Gb 133 Mhz DDR3
-HD 1TB SSD
-Graphics AMD RadeonHD6630M

To my knowledge and experience I did not have issues with Mac mini i5 late 2011 as well as Mac mini i7 late 2011. Both do not have a Radeon chip, so no experience with that. Sorry.
Best regards Max

I would also recommend using OCLP: What is OpenCore? | OpenCore Legacy Patcher on your vintage MacPro.

I’m running a 2009 MacPro, firmware hacked to be a 2010 MacPro (they both have the same backplane). I have a Metal capable video card and I used OCLP to upgrade my MacPro to MacOS BigSur from Mojave.

I’ve been running Roon 2.0 without issue and considering the age of my MacPro it runs extremely stable, although it isn’t pushed too hard anymore.

I’ve done many upgrades to over the years. It started out life with dual 2.26GHz processors I upgraded to dual 3.06 GHz. Ram is at 24GB. I have three SSD drives in the bays and one 6TB hard drive, a 3TB drive for backups in the CD bay, below the CD drive.

I’ve upgraded the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth card and fitted an external antenna for the Bluetooth on the rear of the case.

My OS is on a Samsung 980 Pro NVMe in a PCIe slot.
It all sings along (touch wood) quite merrily.

If you do go down this route you will need to make sure that your Bluetooth/wifi card is compatible as well, although there are patches to help with this.

It took a while to work out but it was worth it.

Mr.Macintosh https://www.youtube.com/c/MrMacintoshBlog has some excellent tutorials to get you going and there is plenty of help on the MacRumors forum.

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I have a question about this. I now run Roon 1.8 build 1105 on Mac OSX 10.13.6. It runs fine.

Roon tells me there is an update ready and I can install it. But I do not dare to install it as Roon does not tell me what version this would be. Is this new install then 2.0 and will it not run with my OSX? Or is there a definitive 1.8 build that I should install?

You would be best to explicitly install Roon 1.8 (Legacy) on your remotes and Core to ensure you get onto that branch.

The links to download the installers are given here:

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I installed the open core legacy patcher and so far ROON 2.0 is running ok

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Were you able to upgrade or did you have to do an install from scratch?

Which method did you use?

Did you update your installation or did you do it from scratch?

Like you folks, I upgraded my 5,1 Mac Pro (actually two of them) with new processors, PCIe solid state drives and Metal-compatible video to happily run Mojave. When I followed the extensive guidance on MacRumors to implement Catalina, I did get it to work for a couple of weeks before failing to boot for unknown reasons.

-Back to Mojave and 1.8 Legacy with machines that have been successfully twisted this way & that over years before hitting this roadblock. I have been comfortable assembling hardware from scratch and trying all kinds of software as a hobby for decades, but OpenCore scares me.

If I could see what’s happening during boot up with my Radeon RX580 video cards, I might be willing to try again.

I too have a macpro5,1 with a GTX680 flashed card that is compatible with Metal. Works great on Mojave but there are apps I would like to update and I cannot (like the Adobe suite) because I am not on Catalina or newer. And obviously I would like to run Roon 2.0 client.

The dosdude1 method seems straightforward but it also seems like it doesn’t allow for GPU acceleration - not a good thing.

I saw the OpenCore video, but it seems like it is now a deprecated method. I downloaded the files and they don’t look like the ones in the video explanation. So I need to do some more research.

If anyone has upgraded a macpro5,1 from Mojave to Catalina with OpenCore I would like to know their experience.

Hi @miguelito

I’m not sure if you have looked at OCLP or just OC as OCLP allows for hardware acceleration. The GUI app is pretty straightforward to use.
As I said earlier in the thread my firmware hacked MacPro 4,1 has been upgraded from Mojave straight to BigSur and has no issues running Roon 2.0 but I have no experience with Catalina.

The OCLP app allows for patches to be added and there are plenty of knowledgeable people on the MacRumors forums if you get stuck. I also had my BootROM cleaned and reconstructed by tsialex, he is a legend on the MacRumors forums. This has probably been one of the reasons my old classic MacPro has been so stable.

Please point me to OCLP… Nevermind, found it:

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My post further up also had a link to Mr. Macintosh, who does some great tutorials.

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Actually watching one of his tutorials on OCLP.

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Update:

I have a macpro5,1 with an Nvidia GTX 680 Metal graphics card, 32gb RAM, SSD on PCIe slot as boot drive, running fine on Mojave.

I tried upgrading to Monterey using OCLP. This did not work well, lots of strange issues.

I tried installing Monterey from scratch. This worked fine initially but upon an update the graphics patch got screwed up - issue is Monterey final release does not support Metal and a graphics patch is needed.

Finally installed Big Sur (macOS version prior to Monterey) from scratch. Big Sur supports Metal natively. So far this has worked perfectly. No patches required so effectively all that OCLP is doing is being a bootloader (and does not require machine model spoofing for some reason). Once booted everything is natively running in macOS. So far this is working great.

Also would recommend using OCLP v0.5.1 (latest version right now) because the settings are further optimized for performance (eg no spoofing required for macpro5,1).

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If all you’re running is Roon, maybe throw boot camp on it and call it a day.