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WinXP on a Mac, Hoax?
Brill writes "Ars Technica is reporting that a member of the 'WinXP on Mac' forums called narf2006 may have succeeded at the impossible. He's submitted his solution to get XP on an Intel Mac, for the $12,000 prize, but for now the only proof available is a blurry Flickr collection of photos that could be faked with virtual PC. His reputation on the forums however is strong, and he's already calling for testers." We've had people write in to say this has been announced a hoax on the contest page. The contest page is, of course, down due to bandwidth reasons. Engadget's conversation about this announcement has several theories on how this may have been faked. What's the verdict? Real or Fake?
...Amit Singh from IBM and kernelthread.com (slashdotted 16 times for excellent technical articles on various bits of internals of Apple hardware and Mac OS X) has his own legacy boot solution as well. From a rejected submission:
It appears that Amit Singh of IBM Almaden Research Center, of kernelthread.com and author of Mac OS X Internals, has devised a method to allow legacy, or BIOS-based, booting on Intel-based Macs, which they're calling "BAMBIOS". This means operating systems that currently only support legacy booting, such as many Linux distributions that don't yet support EFI, or things like Windows XP and the forthcoming Windows Vista (the 32-bit version of which will lack EFI support), will now be able to run on Intel-based Macs without modification (and completely legally). There is also another solution from "narf2006", described here and shown in this flickr set of photos. narf2006's solution is awaiting verification by Colin for the $12,000 pot. Time to get that MacBook Pro you've been waiting on for the best of both worlds, everyone...
So even if narf2006's solution isn't real, Amit's solution most certainly is, since he has a great deal of credibility. One way or another, we'll all be able to boot Windows directly on our Intel-based Macs.
This will be great news for people interested in Windows gaming on an Intel-based Mac (who really need the direct video access) and/or people who just want to do it NOW; however, a virtualization solution running under Mac OS X, such as VMware or Parallels, will be the real holy grail for most users. Most people don't want/need/care about the highest graphics and I/O performance; just the ability to run Windows side-by-side with Mac OS X at a speed that is more than usable, and to also have some capability to seamlessly share things like clipboards and files between the environments (as a nice VM environment would most certainly do). Not to mention not having to reboot.
In any case, even dual booting will be a welcome capability. It remains to be seen how convoluted the process is...
Also, I just spoke with Colin Nederkoorn (the guy running the contest) moments ago, and narf2006's solution has NOT been submitted to him yet. He said that narf2006 said he's "cleaning it up" and will be submitting it "later this week". So, no one, including Colin, has actually seen this solution working yet. Also, he apparently hasn't been in communication with Amit on the BAMBIOS solution as yet...
but I'd much rather see darWINE working well, or VMWare/VirtualPC running Windows at nearly native speed, or even some significant speedups that make QEMU nearly native speed. A Virtual Windows without the slowdown of emulation would be really nice; on the other hand, I have no desire whatsoever to actually boot Windows on a Mac. That's like putting 87 octane gas in a formula 1 car! ;-)
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
I am interested in what the device manager says, if he shows a shot of that, it would go a long way.
The iMac G5 with built-in iSight camera is visually identical to the new Intel based iMacs.
Virtual PC 7 runs on the iMac G5 without a hitch (and allows full screen mode.)
You then need only take photos of your iMac G5 running windows-xp under virtual PC in full screen mode.
Better proof is images of this method on a MacBook Pro, because intel-based macs are unable to run virtual PC.
Additionally, faking images of a MacBook Pro running XP is also trivial, as you can simply get screen shots (from virtual pc on a G4 or G5 system.. or even off the web.) and display them full screen on your new Intel Mac.
In fact I can fake pictures of my powerbook running vista via a similar method, I can fake images of my powerbook running nintendo DS games with the same method.
The truth of this will come out once the method is tested to work or not work. Only then will the prize money be rewarded.
I know this is a bit off topic, but has anyone tried Solaris x86? It would probably be more interesting to me to be able to dual boot Solaris/OSX than Windows XP.
The only big difference is the TPM chip. Shoot, with all the people booting Mac OS X natively on random PC hardware, it shouldn't be a big logical leap to grasping the concept that booting WinXP (or any Windows for that matter) on a Macintel is only a matter of time.
You seem a little confused. The "TPM chip" as you put it has nothing to do with stopping other OS's from booting on macs, it is just a way to harder to make OS X boot on a machine without the right one. The reason it is hard to get WinXP booting on an Intel mac is because Windows utilizes BIOS to boot on all 32 bit systems. Apple did not include BIOS, opting for the more advanced EFI. Windows does support EFI, but only on 64 bit chips. Apple is using 32 bit chips. Hence, the Apple machines are hardware Windows does not support.
You are likely right that Windows will eventually boot on Macs, just because eventually Apple will move to 64 bit Intel chips, which Windows does support, or MS may implement the ability to boot from 32 bit EFI systems. Yes Apple uses mostly commodity hardware, but it is usually newer hardware and they often don't bother implementing 20 year old legacy features like PS/2 ports, floppy drives, BIOS, etc. As a result, it is entirely possible that Apple machines may stay ahead of the curve of Windows support and thus Windows users will have a hard time using Apple hardware. This is mostly because Apple has such a limited hardware set it needs to support, it can adapt much more quickly to new hardware.
As a final point, with the new virtualization features in the newest Intel chips, I don't see many people dual booting macs anyway. When you can run multiple OS's hosted on top of OS X, at nearly the same speed as a fresh boot (RAM notwithstanding) I suspect most users will prefer that route. I know I will.