macOS Monterey on Ryzen + Windows + VMware 16

I’m running Windows 11 on my Ryzen 9 5900HX work laptop. Getting a virtual Mac up & running has been a day-long nightmare. I found various hacks on the internet for Virtualbox (csr-active-config, 6.1.30, VBoxManage — cpu-profile) — none of them helped me further than the chewed apple logo.

VMware came through and delivered me my Safari testing environment, but not without pain.

I like a package manager even when temporarily working in Windows, and while Chocolatey feels more like an AutoIt script than a robust tool, it’s a lot better than nothing. Install the VMware Workstation Player package:

choco install vmware-workstation-player

By default, you can’t even choose macOS from the dropdowns. The people of the internet have this solved: https://github.com/paolo-projects/auto-unlocker/releases/tag/v2.0.0a

Patch

I’m a sucker for default values

Later

I chose to store the VM in a single file

Customize Hardware? Yes. I chose to give it 16 gigs of RAM and eight cores. We software developers are darned expensive these days and anything that can save 15 minutes of our time is a buy.

If you already have a Mac somewhere, you can use it to get an ‘official’ image for making bootable USB sticks. I was not so lucky and had to resort to downloading one from the internet. Their Mediafire link was surprisingly fast…