I tried many times to get MacOS to run on my AMD cpu windows machine so I could build my mobile games to iOS from Unity. I tried virtualbox and VMware and a few different ways of installing macOS on both. In some cases MacOS would install and run ok, but I could never connect to the iphone over usb and actually build to it.
I ended up buying a 2nd hand mac mini. I still feel dirty paying £300 for such a low spec machine. it runs like absolute garbage. But it has Catalina and I can actually finally build to iOS.. very very very slowly.
[Updating xcode today took 6 hours]
I wonder if I should try this? Do ye think theres any chance of it working on the same hardware that failed to work in virtualbox and VMware on Windows?
I've installed a Hackintosh on my machine (only High Sierra because I have a Pascal Nvidia GPU and Nvidia and Apple are still throwing a tantrum) and it's working quite painless.
The old style of installing a Hackintosh (configuring clover and some random binaries based on forum threads) never worked for me, but Dortania's OpenCore Install Guide [1] worked great out of the box.
If your GPU works on macOS (so recent-ish AMD or old Nvidia), I definitely recommend giving it a try. You're missing out on a few performance optimisations and stuff like iMessage and Facetime don't work, but it's definitely good enough to just run and debug builds, possibly even with hardware acceleration inside the necessary emulators (not VMs).
If you want to go the VM route, you'll probably run into trouble because Apple's OS assumes that the processor is made by Intel (not strange, because all of their x64 processors are bought from Intel). There's a few patches you can download and install to make the OS boot on macOS though, and with those the VM should work in VirtualBox, VMWare, KVM, this snap, and that Docker image running qemu that someone posted at some point. Details about what to patches you may need can be found somewhere in [1], as well as a list of limitations. For example, running virtual machines on an AMD Hackintosh is practically impossible.
If you want to get the bare basics working in a virtual machine, running through the opencore install guide inside the VM will most definitely work, though the GUI will be slow as molasses because of the lack of GPU acceleration. That's still fine for running a build task over something like SSH though. There's options!
A 6-hour upgrade sounds like that mini is probably still on spinning rust. Rather than mess around just get the cheapest SSD you can find and install that. Also from what I've heard it comes down to certain AMD CPUs missing instructions macOS assumes are present, so any modern virtual machine that doesn't emulate every instruction can't help there.
I've pulled it off on my threadripper but I can't seem to assign it more than 8 cores. Other than that there's a problem with connecting an iphone. It's not perfect, but it's not bad. I'm on debian.
[Updating xcode today took 6 hours]
I wonder if I should try this? Do ye think theres any chance of it working on the same hardware that failed to work in virtualbox and VMware on Windows?