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OSx86 is a collaborative hacking project to run the Mac OS X computer operating system on non-Apple personal computers with x86 architecture processors. more...

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The effort started soon after the June 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference announcement that Apple would be transferring their personal computers from PowerPC to Intel microprocessors.

OSx86 is a portmanteau of OS X and x86. A computer built to run this type of Mac OS X is sometimes known as a Hackintosh, which is a recycled term originally denoting the modified Lisa 2/10 running Mac System.

First 3rd party Mac OS X on Intel builds - The Developer Transition Kit

Initial efforts to run Mac OS X on non apple hardware revolved around leaked copies of the Development DVD released by Apple as part of the Developer Transition Kit which Apple made available to registered developers for $999. The first patches centered around circumventing the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) that was included on the motherboard of the Developer Transition Kits. The TPM was required by the Rosetta technology that allowed software compiled for the PowerPC architecture to run on Intel-based architecture. Removing this requirement allowed Mac OS X to be installed on non-Apple computers. Rosetta also required microprocessors that included SSE3 instructions. Patches were released to the community which emulated these instructions with SSE2 equivalents and allowed the installation on machines without SSE3 support, although this produced a performance penalty.

In October 2005 Apple released a 10.4.3 update to developers that required NX bit microprocessor support. Patches were released to circumvent this.

Mac OS X v10.4.4 released on Intel Macs

On January 10, 2006, Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.4 with the first generation of Intel-based Macs, the iMac and the MacBook Pro. These machines used Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) platform firmware instead of the legacy BIOS found on most x86 motherboards. On February 14, 2006 an initial "crack" of Mac OS X v10.4.4 was released on the Internet by a hacker using the pseudonym Maxxuss. Within hours Apple released the 10.4.5 update, which was patched again by Maxxuss in less than two weeks. On April 3, 2006 Apple released their 10.4.6 update and again patches were released within two weeks that allowed users to install most of this update on non-Apple computers, although this did not include the updated kernel in 10.4.6. These patches were released by SemjaZa and compiled by JaS. In June, JaS released the 10.4.7 Mac OS X update for non-Apple computers using the 10.4.4 kernel.

Read more at Wikipedia.org