Courtesy of OpenCore Legacy Patcher, my older macmini5,3 and macbook6,1 have been running Monterey smoothly. With macOS Ventura due later this year, I will likely move our macpro5,1, macbookpro11,4, and macbookpro12,1 machines to Ventura and also need to use OpenCore Legacy Patcher. Before we do that, I want to jot down instructions for upgrading Ventura for these machines and Ventura is not running well on OpenCore Legacy Patcher just yet. The instructions below are based on Mr. Macintosh’s video on upgrading Monterey with OpenCore Legacy Patcher, but I expect these steps to be the same or similar:

1. Backup your machine! (I recommend a bootable backup in addition to a Time Machine backup if you can afford the space).

2. Update macOS like you would on a supported machine (click Apple logo->About This Mac->Software Update…->Advanced…->Ok->Update Now. Adding clicks for “Advanced” and “Update now…” might allow your Mac to update faster if it already had a chance to download the patch. This will probably take about an hour and ends with your Mac needing to restart. If your Mac doesn’t install the update, skip to the next step and then repeat step 2 at the end.

3. When your Mac boots back up, run the latest version of OpenCore Legacy Patcher, get it here. Fire up the OpenCore Legacy Patcher application and then we will build and install OpenCore to the boot drive EFI. Before you do build and install, you might want to change the bootpicker to false if you don’t want your Mac users seeing extra options during boots or restarts (and you can still get to these by holding down the option key at start-up). Build and install OpenCore to the boot drive’s EFI. Also, to get macOS system updates to load, you’ll need to set spoofing to “minimal” through OpenCore Legacy Patcher).

4. This step is not needed for Metal Macs. For non-Metal Macs, run OpenCore Legacy Patcher and then click “Post Install Root Patch”, click “Start Root Patching”, click “Yes” to give OpenCore Legacy Patcher root access, enter your credentials when prompted, and when prompted click “Reboot” and then “Restart” to restart your machine. This step will load the proper GPU graphics drivers and more to speed up your Mac.

Expect to see edits to these instructions as I continue bringing our legacy hardware to Ventura. Also note, I started using the text-based interface and moved to the GUI OpenCore Legacy Patcher interface since the two codebases should be in sync, at least according to Mr. Macintosh that is true. OpenCore Legacy Patcher will be called OpenCore-patch when it is sitting in your Applications folder or wherever you install it. Ventura will not