XP on Mactel: The Movie

The infamous narf2006 has made good on his earlier promise to provide a video of Windows XP booting on an Intel-based iMac. While the video looks fairly convincing, we'll continue to reserve judgment at least until Colin Nederkoorn hands narf a check. Speaking of which, Colin, sponsor of the XP on Mac contest that started this whole thing, had to switch hosts after yesterday's frenzy, and is now hosting only the contest page, rather than the forums where narf had earlier posted pics of his supposed XP solution. Colin expects to have narf's solution in by the end of the week for testing, so we should know pretty soon whether this is the Holy Grail or a just another tin cup.

Update: Narf has sent his solution to Colin for testing, so this does indeed seem real. Now let's see if it's reproducible!

Watch the video (7.7MB MOV)
Read about the contest

[Thanks, Rob and Joseph]

[mingistech @ Mar 15th 2006 11:16AM]

This looks legit to me.

Not that i'd wanna run Windows on a Mac.. but i guess it's good for the people that don't know any better.

OSX all the way baby! :)

[Josh L @ Mar 15th 2006 11:19AM]

looks pretty legit to me

[Jonathan Keim @ Mar 15th 2006 11:21AM]

I have to say I'm convinced. I've never seen a fake video that was so convincing. He was constatnly shaking and going to different angles of the screen.
There's no way he could use a video editor to do that in 1 day

[Keith @ Mar 15th 2006 11:21AM]

Kudos to narf. It looks real to me. The final test though is to find out how he did it.

[Claus N @ Mar 15th 2006 11:22AM]

Wauw, looks like I'm gonna have to find the money somewhere for a MacIntel...

[John from Buffalo @ Mar 15th 2006 11:22AM]

Not much more to say than ... wow. Watched the entire vid, and it'd take a LOT of effort to fake that. It would take someone with a fair experience level of hacking to get WXP on that machine, and looks to be the case. Hats off, golf clap.

[mattsoft @ Mar 15th 2006 11:23AM]

I wanna see BF2 running on an iMac now. :)

[oe @ Mar 15th 2006 11:25AM]

thinking of mortal kombat:
" IT HAS BEGUN!!!! "

[John from Buffalo @ Mar 15th 2006 11:26AM]

".... Wauw, looks like I'm gonna have to find the money somewhere for a MacIntel... ."

You know, seriously .... its a "just because" effort. To waste 1300-1600 after taxes depending on setup on a Mac just because you can install XP on it.. is a COMPLETE waste of time from the end user perspective. Spend 1/2 half the money to get a decent machine with a dual-core, and a Mac mini and a switch box.

[AEMV @ Mar 15th 2006 11:27AM]

Alternate link:

http://clips1.vimeo.com/video_files/2006/03/15/vimeo.74487.mov

[Claus N @ Mar 15th 2006 11:28AM]

A Mac Mini IS a MacIntel...

[diem @ Mar 15th 2006 11:30AM]

I think he need a "DUAL-BOOT" startup to win he big 12-15k prize....

[AEMV @ Mar 15th 2006 11:33AM]

#9, by the time you buy a cheap crap PC for 400$ + the Dual core Mac mini for 800$ which is by the way INTEL BASED, a keyboard, a display and a good KVM switch, you are past the 1500$ mark.

Just get the mac mini and save yourself the cheapo PC and the KVM switch.

[djphatjive @ Mar 15th 2006 11:34AM]

I can do all that using virtual PC. There is so he shows his hand back there turning it on. He could of hit a key on the keyboard to power on vitural pc and load it up. He never shows how he got it to load into windows or how he got past the boot method. Doesn't prove anything. And why is it that all of these has a million cords and its so dark in there to really see whats going on. Heck he could be using vnc for all we know. Its fake!!!!!!

Show everything from start to finish!!!!!! until then it doesn't prove a thing.

[David @ Mar 15th 2006 11:35AM]

Looks like Virtual PC on a G5, or maybe some cleaver skinning of OS X... Or it's real, hard to say :P

[AEMV @ Mar 15th 2006 11:36AM]

another mirror:

http://www.visualmagician.com/vimeo.74487.mov

[Kei @ Mar 15th 2006 11:38AM]

it is still possible that it could be a fake. Take a video screening app, and play it back full screen on a mac.
Doesn't the iMac usually have a white light in the front when restarting? (I didn't see that in the video)

I also wish he focused on the system specs because I couldn't read them at all.

I'm just throwing out a possibility if it was a fake.

Although I indeed hope it's real.

[Andrew Peron @ Mar 15th 2006 11:38AM]

narf must have successfully done this.

two things tell me that it's real.

One, in order for him to have successfully installed windows onto his iMac, he would have to do extensive EFI hacking/workarounds, which is apparent in the boot sequence of windows, with the logo (any windows user would know that the traditional windows boot is the ugly black bar loadng with Starting Windows across the top, then the fade in logo and progress bar). Then again, he could have installed a program, such as bootskin XP, to skin the boot interface (i used to use it with a faux-OS X boot, looked real nice actually), or he himself rewrote the boot code in the MBR.

Two, There is no way that system was emulated. Anyone who has used an emulator or virtual PC on ANY operating system knows that graphics are not that fluid unless they are native (the virtual PC has to emulate a VESA driver, thus usually causing visual "tears" in the emulated environment.), The windows hardware interface management utility would have also read off a list of emulated, generic hardware names, e.g. the harddrive would have read Generic Virtual Drive or something of the nature.(The harddrive in the video read off "Maxtor 6L160M0")

Also, windows ACPI read off as seeing a multiprocessor PC, which is concurrent with the fact it is running an Intel Core Duo.

Everything about this seems real, I can't spot any discrepancies in the video, therefore, i'd say it's legitimate.

[narco @ Mar 15th 2006 11:40AM]

Clearly a photoshop.

Fishes,
narco.

[JC @ Mar 15th 2006 11:40AM]

Wow, think of the benchmarks! This will allow direct comparison of the hardware in Apple dual core computers to the XP competition.

[Andrew Peron @ Mar 15th 2006 11:41AM]

haha narco.

you're gonna start a fanboy fight with that.

[TIMMAH! @ Mar 15th 2006 11:46AM]

Why are they trying to make this so hard. Let's face it, there are people out there who need to run Windows for real-world, practical reasons. Secondly, you're not going to be buying MacIntel hardware to just run Windows because there are certainly much cheaper ways of doing that. So I would think that the ability to dual-boot would be something that Apple would want to promote so that they could sell more boxes and get further entrenched in marketshare.

[AEMV @ Mar 15th 2006 11:49AM]

The only way this could be fake would be to crack open the imac and use is as the display of a regular PC.

I doubt this is the case.

[vectorbug @ Mar 15th 2006 11:50AM]

Haha, (to me) this is like making a video of someone putting a geo metro engine in a Carrera GT. Of course its possible, but really the only logical reason to do it would be to win a contest.

[Faentur @ Mar 15th 2006 11:51AM]

as this looks pretty legit to me, I am reserving judgement until the instructions are released and others have tried and succeded. I have a PowerBook which I do everything on except play games. I have a PC sitting in the corner that I use ONLY for games. If this turns out to be the real thing, I would love to upgrade to a MacBook Pro (in another revision or 2) and only have one machine. Now That would be cool.

[Archijs @ Mar 15th 2006 11:51AM]

bwah, who the hell needs an xp when u have macos?! :)

[JK @ Mar 15th 2006 11:54AM]

I hate to admit it, but I'm with TIMMAH!

I was a mac user back in college (got a brand new blue & white G3 freshman year), maybe even a fanboy... Then I got to the real world, where I have to be able to run real world software, none of which is available on the Mac (unless someone can point me to a good schematic capture & multilayer PCB layout pacakge for OS X?). I haven't owned a Mac since... I'd like to have one for all the sweet hardware they build, but without windows it's simply not practical. Put XP on a mac and I'm on board for sure.

[David @ Mar 15th 2006 11:58AM]

Did anyone else notice what looked like a cable coming out the bottom right hand side of the screen, difficult to see as he never goes round that side with the video, could he have just used a pc and connected it to the imac screen?

[kleger @ Mar 15th 2006 11:59AM]

its just a movie being played full screen.

[Andrew Peron @ Mar 15th 2006 12:03PM]

kleger, then how do you explain the resolution change flickers and reconfigs? videos don't record that. and videos can't change resolutions in the middle.

[Ken @ Mar 15th 2006 12:04PM]

I don't see this being used as an external monitor as it only has DVI out, and absolutely no inputs to use it as a monitor alone... unless some crazy mad hardware hacking was going on, this is real.

I can't wait to play CS and Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 on my Mac :)

[bynaryum @ Mar 15th 2006 12:13PM]

One thing:

I am reserving judgment until I see video of this guy physically moving the mouse and having the movement onscreen correspond with it. That was not shown in this video.

[Cal @ Mar 15th 2006 12:16PM]

Umm why would this boot up with a gray background with the windows logo? I didn't know there where any preset windows background upon installation automatically changes the background to grey with the windows logo. Or is that a hack? Anyone?

[NipsMG @ Mar 15th 2006 12:17PM]

It's amazing to me how many of the Mac fanboys dont' understand the point of this.

Noone is stupid enough to go out and buy a MAC JUST to run windows on it. The point is, that many of us LIKE MACOS, and want to run it legitimately, but still have a need to run applications in windows that don't run well under emulated environments (DirectX Apps, games, etc). The only way to do this is to get Windows running in dual boot on an intel Mac.

[Austin @ Mar 15th 2006 12:18PM]

Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 sucks. RCT 1 is better.

[Mrgreen @ Mar 15th 2006 12:18PM]

I wanna see Mac OS on a 'PC', not Windowze on a Mac

[Stephen @ Mar 15th 2006 12:20PM]

"Why are they trying to make this so hard. Let's face it, there are people out there who need to run Windows for real-world, practical reasons. Secondly, you're not going to be buying MacIntel hardware to just run Windows because there are certainly much cheaper ways of doing that. So I would think that the ability to dual-boot would be something that Apple would want to promote so that they could sell more boxes and get further entrenched in marketshare."

That's not the case though. If Apple machines were capable of dual boot than it would remove incentive to developers to release OSX versions of their software. Why not just release an XP version that will run on everything now that macs can boot XP. This is last thing that apple wants.

[Andrew Peron @ Mar 15th 2006 12:21PM]

mrgreen, I can show you that.

I have it on my winbox downstairs.
haha.

i have a friend in Apple corporate, he got me a copy of the intel dev build of OS X that runs on any intel processor with SSE3.

its nothing special, just a mac in an ugly box.

[AEMV @ Mar 15th 2006 12:22PM]

OSX on a PC has been done but will never be supported by apple and will probably stop workiking everytime you update the OS...even for minor updates.

Apple does NOT want OSX on PC, but does not mind Windows on MAc. Microsoft only benefits from windows running on Mac because theyll sell more licenses.

[Joel Rodriguez @ Mar 15th 2006 12:22PM]

Two things:

1. It's a movie on fullscreen
2. The lcd was attached to a normal PC.

Not too hard to do even in a day

[Josh @ Mar 15th 2006 12:24PM]

While this is encouraging, I still want to see the dual boot in action where he can choose either OSX or Win... Just being able to run Win on the Mac hardware really doesn't do much for me...

[Jared @ Mar 15th 2006 12:25PM]

#18 narco, photoshop can't make movies like this

#9 the whole point is that it runs both systems now (or ultimately the idea is that it will run both), not just to replace OS X with Windows

#1 Another reason to run Windows on a Mac is that Macs are quality pieces of hardware! Why not use this is an opportunity to benchmark these machines, e.g. if Photoshop in Windows on said iMac runs operation X in 53 s, operation Y 23 in and Photoshop in OS X on said iMac runs operation X in 52 s and op Y in 21 seconds, then maybe OS X is a faster OS.

Just some thoughts...

[Andrew Peron @ Mar 15th 2006 12:26PM]

Joel, read what I said to kleger.
It's not a video, and I can't say it's not an attached screen, but I highly doubt it.

[J @ Mar 15th 2006 12:26PM]

so once you get it to boot are you home free? or is there still going to a boat load of hardware/driver issues to deal with? Is this ever going to be viable for the average user?

[Torontoguy @ Mar 15th 2006 12:26PM]

I'm the cynical type so I'll hold off on judgement...BUT...what I actually see is Windows XP install running on a Mac...monitor.
If I was going to fake this...I'd have a PC hidden under the desk connected to the Mac monitor but, as I say, I'm the cynical type.
Good luck to him. It is always fun to solve a difficult problem.

[Andrew Peron @ Mar 15th 2006 12:28PM]

J, all the hardware in the iMac will work in windows, the only obstacle is the EFI. Once you install, you're good to go.

[Ramon @ Mar 15th 2006 12:30PM]

This looks suspiciously like an image projected onto the screen. First of all, there are scenes where in a fairly-lit room, the entire room flickers when the screen changes. Also, it seems like the reflection of the blue onto that monitor in front of the iMac is a little too reflective. Finally, a little before halfway through the video, there's a little white light that moves back and forth once at the top of the iMac, almost like a laser pointer (I don't know if this is an iMac restart feature or what, I'm just pointing it out). A few times during the film it seemed like he zoomed in to keep other areas hidden, or kept moving the camera around to keep detail from showing.

I guess it's convincing enough, but, to play devil's advocate, it's more than easy to code a fake system dialogue in some visual studio app to display hardware and such. Like others, I'm reserving judgement.

[maddmike @ Mar 15th 2006 12:31PM]

So, what exactly is the point? I can see wanting to get OSX to run on Intel because it's better than Windoze, but I just don't get why you'd want to run a crappy OS on MAC hardware.

[Andrew Peron @ Mar 15th 2006 12:33PM]

Ramon, the white light is a iMac feature, and as far as the hardware system dialogue, that was authentic windows. I wll personally vouch for that one.

[ken @ Mar 15th 2006 12:38PM]

In Soviet Russia, Windows XP hacks you!