Respect Sakura

So, right after I commit myself to yet another stupid purchase decision, along comes what I’ve always wanted since the ‘05 WWDC announcement - the ability to run Windows XP and Mac OS X on the one computer.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you would have heard about the Windows XP on Mac contest, and that it’s finally been won by two guys. It’s pretty simple.. a hacked ntdetect.com, and an EFI module to load the XP installer and OS.

Unfortunately, not everything is quite up and running just yet. The ATI drivers don’t work for the iMac and MacBook Pro, and there’s a few other issues here and there as well. Basically, the ATI video problem is the biggest hurdle so far. Noone really cares about the silly remote, or getting the iSight to work on the iMacs/MacBook Pro - you could just as easily spend :20bux: on a crappy USB webcam, anyways.

I’m looking forward to future pursuits of this. If my Conroe-based PowerMac (MacTower lol) dual boots XP and OS X, then Heracles becomes a dedicated fileserver, and I will forever be in happy happy funtime land with my single machine that does everything I want.

And yes, the whole reason for this post was to display the above image. Enjoy.

Edit: Forgot to update this post when it happened, but Apple did one better and made BootCamp, along with proper driver support and everything. They’ve also updated the firmware on the entire Intel Mac line, adding in the missing CSM support that their EFI implementation was missing, which allows old BIOS-driven OS’s (like XP and Vista) to boot. Not everything else works well, but XP Home/Pro/MCE SP2 runs great. Screw the XOM hack, go with BootCamp and the firmware update instead. It’s much betterer.