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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?
Doesn't he have to explain how he did it to collect the prize? Am I missing something?
...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...
simple answer.... YES
If I sorted out the bits of magic to get WinXP up and running on a Mac, I don't think I would post how to the outside world until *after* I collected my bounty. No shock at the lack of details here.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
For US$12,000, I'd take a day off and fly out to the contest judge's place to show them in person.
Why is this so difficult?
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
... that this is not a hoax! Windows XP boots on a Mac! http://www.mathcaddy.com/windowsxpbootsonamac!!!!1 /
:)
SCNR
They have stated over and over again that it would be impossible for someone to boot XP on a Intel Mac. Now we have claims by someone that it can be done.
I think you have that backwards.
Apple has said they don't care if you want to by their hardware and boot XP on it, feel free. They're not doing anything to stop it, but they are also not doing anything to enable it.
What they are against is Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware.
- Tony
Who would put up 12,000 bucks for something that's not really needed? I mean, sure, hacking the hardware to get it to run is kinda cool and all...but 12 grand?!?! Is it THAT important to buy Mac hardware to put Windows on?
It's not about buying mac hardware specifically to run windows, it's about the ability to dual boot mac osx and windows on the same laptop. Honestly, I'm at the point in my life where I need fewer computers, not more of them. Having a whole closet full of junky old PC's isn't worth the time and energy anymore, so I just have 2 laptops now, a powerbook and an old gateway. I'd gladly sell them both if I could buy one laptop that could run both OS's.
For what I do (audio programming and music production), emulation is not an acceptable solution due to obvious performance and hardware issues. Plus, there is so much good software available for both platforms, why limit yourself to just one?
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
"Who would put up 12,000 bucks?"
Microsoft
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