25 November 2009

FakeSMC : MacBook Air Me Too

In attempts to get closer to the real thing - and by "real thing" we pertain to MacBooks and in particular to the MacBook Air, I'm yet in another tinkering stage. I was reading prasys.co.cc and with his newest post being about editing FakeSMC to reflect "real" SMC versions for the MacBook Air, I decided to check my About This Mac > More info and saw an SMC version that was not a MacBook Air - it was an iMac I believe with 1.30f3 SMC version. I have my MacBook Mini showing as a MacBook Air and having the correct SMC version displayed won't hurt.

I decided to skip SMC version 1.23f20 and checked Apple's website for the latest available SMC Firmware update and here's what I found:


The latest SMC version for the MBA is 1.34f8.

So off I go to edit fakesmc.kext's Info.plist (right click on the kext file to show "Package contents" then dig inside the "Contents" folder in the resulting window). I used Plist Edit Pro as suggested by prasys. 
Why use Plist Edit Pro when we've been editing plists in regular TextEdit or Apple's own Plist Editor app that you get when you install the Mac OS X Developer Tools?

Well, it appears that we can't just type in 1.334f8 as value for the data string for the REV key; it needs to be converted to an alpha value (I don't know what it's called really). To better illustrate, see image below:


Actually, there are two conversions going on here:
(1) "1.34f8" is input as "01340F00<space>0008"
(2) and "01340F00<space>0008" is converted finally to "ATQPAAAI"

If you don't wanna edit your own fakesmc.kext, you can download mine here. It's based from FakeSMC version 2.5 by netkas. 

Also, notice that I put the bolean value to "NO" for debug mode. Some say it contributes to better start up times but in my case, I didn't experience any drastic improvements in start up excepting for not seeing anymore the error message "key not found"which is a welcome change in verbose mode.

Install to /Extra/GeneralExtensions or /Extra/Extensions (which ever you have) and after restarting, you should be able to verify that the correct SMC version is shown in System Profiler:

Ergo imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Also I didn't realize how important FakeSMC.kext is for hackintoshes or plain SMC for real Macs:
"As we all do know that netkas has released the latest version of FakeSMC which adds temperature sensors , that allows applications such as iStat to get CPU temperature and to do display it. It kinda makes it one step to the real thing."


1 comment:

Levitra said...

I have the feeling that if I try to do that myself I would end up busting my mini. I do want to have my mini Hackintoshed, but am not sure of the risks.