“A self-professed Mac lover who jump-started a prize award for the first person to figure out how to boot Windows XP on an Intel-based Macintosh is confident that someone will step forward to claim the bounty,” Gregg Keizer reports for TechWeb News. “‘I’m an optimist,’ said Colin Nederkoorn of Houston, Texas, and the creator of The Contest Web site. ‘I think someone will claim it.'”
MacDailyNews Note: As of 11:55am CST, the prize total stands at $7115.
Keizer continues, “Among his requirements, Nederkoorn said, were that the user must be able to boot either OS X or Windows XP at startup; and boot XP, not Vista or other versions. The process cannot rely on virtualization software. ‘When the Intel Macs were announced, I expected Apple would have the foresight to make it easy to dual boot,’ said Nederkoorn. ‘But then I found out that Apple was using EFI rather than a BIOS. One group said it should still be possible, while a whole other camp said it was impossible.’ Nederkoorn believes someone should be able to figure it out. ‘But someone needed to get in there and give them an incentive,’ he said. And The Contest was born.”
Full article here.
“Windows XP on an Intel Mac” Contest here.
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Related MacDailyNews article:
Growing reward pot awaits first person to get Windows XP running on Intel-based Mac – January 24, 2006
There’s got to be a better way to play solitaire on a Mac than dual booting Windows.
Hey Grape Graphics, my Boss only used Windows, so I just brought my own Mac to work… he eventually worked out I was far more efficient, so he now only buys Macs
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What a perfect combo. Mac hardware and Microsoft software. A solid laptop that runs all of my software.
It’ll never work. Why? Because the EULA in Windows says that you’re not allowed to reverse-engineer Windows. To alter XP to be able to use EFI, you’d have to reverse-engineer Windows, change a lot of the coding in the BIOS section so that it supports EFI (making it exclusively EFI would be even harder, so let’s stick with simple compatibility), make the corresponding changes within the rest of the OS, put it all back together, and then go through about 100-1000 versions until you get the coding done perfectly without any fuck-ups.
But if you don’t mind using the prize money to fight off Microsoft’s lawyers, go for it.
SOLUTION: Apple should make a cheaper than cheap Mac Mini running WinXP. Make it for $200 with a bare minimum of components and let it connect to your Mac screen in a resizeable window…
So if you really have to run Windows run it on its own minimal box letting you see/print output through the Mac.
Keep Apple Macs and Windows pc’s separate – after all you’d never see God and the Devil in the same room now would you?
No Brad, all that someone needs to do is stick a BIOS to EFI translator into the boot loader and fool XP into thinking a BIOS is there.
Not simple by any means, but I can guarantee plenty of coders out there can do it, keep it small and allow OSX to still use the EFI directly.
And Macaday, read the Book of Job.
“A couple years ago .. Billy Gates bought some of the “assets” of the company called Connectix … As far as I know, the only thing that was purchased was VPC …
I dont remember how much money changed hands on that deal … but.. seems to me that if… (or when) the new MacTels are able to dual boot into WinCrap… it would render Microshafts “investment” as one destined to go down the tubes …
VPC would, then, become obsolete… just like Vista / ShortHorn did about five years ago..”
VPC was bought for the Xbox. Xbox 360 runs PowerPC chips. They needed an emulator to run previous games. Also a lot of Windows programers run VPC so they can test software in multiple operating systems without having to boot up.