Make Aperture run on any Mac

Run Aperture on any Mac

Partially in desperation after discovering my Mac wouldn't install or run Aperture, I figured out a solution to both and want to share it with others wanting to use Aperture on your more than a year old Mac that Apple wants you to replace.

You need HexEdit and BBEdit or TextWrangler.

To disable the installer check:
1) Create a writable image of your Aperture DVD with Disk Utility. Eject the DVD and open the image file.
2) Hit command-shift-g in Finder and enter '/Volumes/Aperture/Aperture.mpkg/Contents'
3) Open Distribution.dist in your text editor
4) Search for 'function installationCheck() {' and enter 'return true;' on the next line. Save and close the file.
5) Et voilà! Aperture now installs with any CPU/GPU.

To disable the application startup check:
1) Install Aperture (after modifying the installer script as described above)
2) Open HexEdit and browse to '/Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/MacOS/'.
3) Open 'Aperture'. HexEdit saves a backup automatically to 'Aperture~' when you write changes to the file, so you don't have to worry about messing up. Be aware that HexEdit is quite buggy in 10.4. Don't click anywhere I didn't tell you to click.
4) Hit cmd+f. In the 'Find' field, enter '49 48 48 32 6D C9'. Make sure 'Matching:' is set to HEX. Hit return.
5) Click the bar of the 'Aperture - Data' window. Replace the selection with '49 48 48 32 59 59'.
6) Click the search window. Using the procedure in step 4 and 5, replace
'49 4C 48 32 6D 35' with '49 4C 48 32 58 C5'.
7) Save and close the file.
8) Done! Have fun : )