Along with the launch on the market of the Intel-based Macs a new challenge came up: get hackers boot both Mac OS X and Windows XP from a Mac.
It was clear that sooner or later hackers would take up this challenge and try to make the first Intel Mac host Windows XP. The contest was powered by Nederkoorn which managed to raise $13,854 out of donation in order to give it as a prize.
The rumors that “Narf‿(an individual who seems to have taken this challenge seriously) managed to turn the idea into reality, started making waves around the Web a few days ago with his publishing of a few pictures in order to prove its successful outcome. Submitting the actual solution to the Windows XP on Mac site for testing, he turned out in the end to be the winner of the prize as his results were validated.
The process of making your Windows XP to work on the Intel Mac turns out not to be plug and play. If you want to test this new thing, the documentation provided by Nederkoorn’s Web site guides you through the actual steps which are to be taken. From the necessary equipment required to the actual moves one should make, the documentation provides you with all the information you need. Once every step has been completed successfully, you should be able to switch between Mac OS X and Windows after rebooting your computer.
Still the idea of taking full advantage of a Windows on your Mac is yet far away regarding the fact that for example the native graphics drives are not in the right place yet so the video performance is limited. Not a good news for gamers who cannot wait to get their Macs support Windows games as well. There are also some other features of the Mac that seem not to work yet as well like: Apple Remote and the iSight webcam.
At the Intel Developers Forum last week Microsoft announced a disappointing news for the computer friendly people: Windows Vista is not going to support EFI which is the boot technology used by Macs, at least for the beginning.
The contest had one main condition: do not use emulation. Microsoft does use machine emulators for its Windows to run on Intel Macs but this makes the system run very slowly. The winners of this somehow crazy contest managed to avoid emulation as well as VMWare which allow multiple operating systems to work on a single computer simultaneously.
The contest organizers have also stated that donations can still be made in this project’s account as the money is to be used in order to fund an open source project meant to support future developments of this idea.
It is clear this could increase sales for Apple as a lot of people would be happier to use Macs that can also run Windows, without slowing down the system, but how does Microsoft feel about this?