XP on MacTel is official: narf gets paid
By Evan Blass 
posted Mar 16th 2006 3:30AM
posted Mar 16th 2006 3:30AM
[Via TUAW, thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Please note: If you're a current Engadget commenter, you do not need to re-register. Simply login and you will be prompted to select a username.
Woohoo! I'm getting an Intel iBook once its out :D
Congrats Narf :)
Well Done.
well then.
Now everyone can take a shut the flying f*** up pill.
Oh wait, everyone will still argue why this is necessary.
Wow - a check! I want one of those. Learn to spell people. CHEQUE, learn to spell.
WOW! That was pretty quick. Im not sure I'd like to be one of the early adopters incase I ended up destroying a perfectly awesome piece of hardware, but I suppose in the future it opens up a lot of options for people who want to play the latest games or use the odd bit of obscure software on their Mac.
Congratulations though, it must've taken a hell of a lot of work!
"Now that you've won, how will you spend all that cash?!"
...
"I'm going to Disney Land!" ;-)
Now I'll have to get one of these things and load Windows on it just to bug the local Mac zealots...
XP on x86? What, you mean somebody actually got XP running on an x86 processor! Incredible, what next...
Hate to say it but Evan you got two things wrong there. XP on x86 has been happening for ages, its what happens on everyday pcs. The other thing is the 0Sx86 projects is very different. It intends to do the complete opposite, get OS X running on normal pcs (hence the x86 portion)
You can only give this guy credit. Kroc Camen, if you find this breakthrough a mere throw-away, then your arrogant views aren't worthy. I find if people truely believed this feat was just 'so easy' - then it would've been done along time ago, and for a lot less (if any at all) money.
Which brings me onto this point. Was this $13,000 needed to entice those who can most likely do this without the incentive?
I can see many a people kicking themselves when the solution comes out - As it's most likely they were headed down that avenue (yet at a much slower pace)
All of this fits very well with the theory that Apple wants to loose OSX...
So what's in it for Apple when they start selling hardware ONLY?
Apple builds better mp3-players than any other company but that also has to do with the iPod software.
Guess Apple did their power-calculations and found out that Apple computers without an OS generates more profit. And it may well be that selling a x86 compatible OSX generates more cash as well...
What do you guys think?
I like how one of the other groups that were working on this (but weren't to the point of booting) came up with a graphical volume bootloader like the default Mac way when pressing the Option key at bootup.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cwaidoh/
Great - running XP on a Mac! (it used to be called Virtual PC)
Now tell me - does it make XP run any better? Does XP have less bugs running on a Mac? Will the User experience be enhanced by running an inferior OS on a better engineered machine?
The real challenge: Run OS X on a Wintel box
Now load OSX on a Wintel box and make it run and give the general public another option and see what difference it makes.
Create a valid and stable platform for individuals to evaluate separate operating systems on the same hardware with the same performance and measure the results.
Now that would be groundbreaking..
#9 - Grant... you misunderstood what #7 was saying... He was saying the title of this article was stupid - not that XP on an Intel mac is trivial...
I agree - the title is rather dumb. XP on x86 is so five years ago.
#4- FYI: CHECK, not CHEQUE, is the correct American English spelling...
@ #10 - frank: thats just dumb.
Apple wanting to loose OS X? - No effing way. Apple hardware costs a premium, because Apple has to factor those OS X development costs, and there HW looks beautiful (if you ever took a look at the Powermacs innards - no matter which model during tha last 5 years - you see that someone actually thought about how to avoid cables strewn all over the place) People are willing to pay the premium, because they know that the unique combination (Apple controlling HW and SW) lets them work more effectively.
If Apple skips OS X and goes Windows or Linux with a nice Skin, itd just be crap, with the same problems that plague Windows and Linux. Ergo: theyd stop selling HW the same day (if theyre smart, cause it wouldnt sell)
- Its the OS X, stupid!
Much rather, as pointed out here http://tinyurl.com/ovjs2 (article by chris seibold at applematters.com), Apple might license OS X under certain strict rules for limited hardware, so other vendors can sell those systems as well, and Apple *MIGHT* stop selling the actual hardware...
matt
#13
Not all of us speak american English. Being Dutch myself, living in Germany...
#14
I only asked for your opinion. You can leave out your colorfull phrazing...
Like your line of thought though!
NICE!!
I know what I'll be doing today. Great work guys!!!! Eceryone wikk want an Apple now, you get the best of both worlds.
#15. I understand that not everyone speaks American English... that's why I made that particular clarification (CHECK is correct American English).
If you're going to take a shot at anyone, let it be #4, who says that we need to "learn to spell". I "learned to spell" just fine in grade school, as I'm sure many others have (including Evan). Besides, I'm sure people don't appreciate others nitpicking their work. I sure as hell don't.
Sorry about the rant.
I hate to turn this into an argument but AC we are not nitpicking the work. If you look at my post (#8) then you will see that I was outlining two majoor errors in the post that could misinform those that are less in the know
I was one of the testers, it is *NOT* yet working on a 20" iMac.
Never thought I'd see the day. Windows and Mac in bed together.
Congrats to Narf on his work... and for bein' 'bout that scrilla!
Alright. I'm done.
hongkongtechkid -
This isn't an argument, because you misread my post (#18)... "nitpicking" (at least, to me), refers to the criticism of small, petty issues (i.e. spelling, as #4 did).
The errors that you pointed out have very valid points, and, indeed, should be brought up. Heck, I'm glad you did.
But, as I'm sure most people would agree (maybe even you?), pointing out something so minor that it has no bearing whatsoever on the substance of the article seems to serve no useful purpose; taking potshots at authors (and people in general) because of those minor errors furthers the injustice.
What do you think?
Well done narf :D
$13k... weee!
As for the 'correct' spelling argument, it's all relative. Since I'm from the UK and speak the Queen's (proper) English, I'd say it should be cheque too. Although, in the CENTRE of all of this is the fact that somebody with an addiction to the letter Z decided to chop and change (bastardise _might_ be too strong a word) proper English. :)
To the people that think this is no big deal: Try installing xp on a pc with no bios and get back to me. thats what made it hard.
Inferior os on better hardware? Youre just an idiot. Just wait until the REAL benchmarks come out, not the bullshit posted as marketing material on the apple site comparing a crippled pc to the intel imac.
The selling point of macs is os x or the look of the box, noone buying one actually has a clue whats happening inside, they dont care, and most importantly: They dont have to.
"it's amazing how fast $13,000 can get folks to code."
We should do the same with the Xbox360
:evil:
Oh great.
Now we've got TWO arguments going - one fighting over the whole "Why run XP on a mac..." and now a brand new one over the spelling of CHECK/CHEQUE.
For christs sake guys - cant we all just get along?
Hey!
Let us all be happy that Engadget is in ENGLISH!
Although I'm Dutch, I certainly would not like a dutch-language Engadget website.
The international language is English.
Let us stick to that. The british vs. american English discussion only applies to professional publications, I think.
Interesting... seems the comment system renumbers the comments, even after they're posted, wreaking havoc with directed messages/replies.
Sorry about the confusion, folks.
Anyhow, funetik is right: spelling is all relative.
But here's something we can all agree is spelled wrong: http://www.imosh.com/NOVELTY/pages/A1638.htm
Congrats to narf on the achievement.
Although, I don't think this will make me buy a Mac any time soon. I was never particularly fond of the Apple hardware anyway.
Still, anyone who appreciates Apple's design philosophy but hates the OS will no doubt be keen to try this.
Cool! I saw this on http://www.ribix.com . Wish I had known about the prize money earlier!
Sorry, I was stirring it. Needed some cheap thrills after a wasted morning.
Anyway, Frank's right, thank christ engadget isn't in Dutch!
Haha, nice tee, AC. I americaniZed my name a little. It was phoneticSilence (get it or not?), chopped to phonetic and then funetik. 'fu-net-ik' is actually the phonetic though, so that's fun(etik)
When will someone get it working the other way? OSX on a standard PC box?
I'm stoked for narf and the rest of the indie Mac development community. It shouldn't be long before step-by-step directions are in our hands and we can reproduce the project ourselves.
I still have two big questions, that I posted toward the end of the "XP on Mactel: The Movie" thread: First, what kind of hardware issues will we have now, assuming that some Mac hardware is incompatible with some Windows software? And what is the risk of Macs now being affected by viruses -- if I get a Windows virus on a dual-booting machine, can it wipe out my Mac hard drive too? We still have a long way to go.
What's the deal with all the national superiority? If the author of the article is American, expect him to write in American English. If he's British, expect him to write the Queen's English. Don't get all huffy just because he's from another country than you. I'm an American and I spell it "check." Big deal. I read British web sites all the time and I don't get cranky about the way they spell things. How can you even call this an "error," as if the author made a mistake, when what he wrote is the correct and accepted spelling of the word in American English? One version of the language is no better or worse than the other, so just drop it.
@Brisben:
You can't compare the performance of an emulator with code running natively. Emulators are slow as hell, because they have to translate every line of code to run on a different processor. Windows was written for x86 processors. Macs now use x86 processors. Hence the point of the challenge.
Also note that this means that every single piece of software made by Apple before the switch will NOT run natively - it must use the Rosetta emulator, which will run "most" PowerPC applications, at about half their original speed. Hence at present I would expect a typical XP system running on an imac with ALL it's applications running natively to run a lot better than a Mac system on the same machine which has to rely on emulation.
And you're also incredibly naive if you think there's any discernable difference between Mac OS and XP which makes one overall "superior". Both contain bugs - hence XP's service packs and Apples trademark crazy-long version numbers (OSX 10.4.3, iTunes 6.0.3.5 etc.) - and since people stopped using DOS the "user experience" has been virtually identical.
Holy crap my iMac has been immortalized on engadget :)
Anyway Yes Windows runs very well on the imac. Short of the driver issues things are working well. Big kinks are just the video (none of the mobility x1600 drivers I've tried work), and Sound (only get audio out of the headphones jack, no speaker output).
Just because you're from somewhere else (i.e. not America), doesn't mean your point of view is valid.
Um, #12 Brisben, they've been doing that for months now (run OSX 10.4 on WinTel systems), if that's what you're driving at...
[url]http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php[/url]
Nick - "For christs sake guys - cant we all just get along?"
That would be "...For Christ's sake guys - can't..."
Frank - "The british vs. american English discussion only applies to professional publications, I think."
That would be "British" and "American"
There's this key called a "Shift key," commonly found on the far-left above the Control (Ctrl) key.
Comments system lost my sarcasim cap:
""
If you were offended by my comment, then you are exactly who I intended to poke fun at.
American English is the lingua franca of the modern world. Get used to it; your kids already have.
MichaelLC >>
Tell me, would you spell it "eCock", "Ecock" or "e-cock"? I'm slightly confused with all this talk about capitalization mattering.
Just for information, they have OSX10.4 running on un-chipped X86 boards. It's a little patchy (heh, no pun intended) you have to start with an early hacked version of the beta OSX86 than install hacked patches to bring it up to current version.
As for the whole "bad OS on ""great"" hardware", Windows isn't a bad OS, the gaming and Business world wouldn't be sitting where they are at the moment if it werent for the widespread use of a *once* cheap OS on affordable hardware. Still to this day, not to many people would say that Apple PC products are terribly affordable, compared to their WinTel counterparts.
As for the argument, yeah XP is buggy and has alot of crap4code but, it has it's apparent uses, and OSX is a great OS and it has it's uses and Apple hardware, is for the most part really good hardware (by make, not model) the parts are the same now, but the quality of the design and make of the hardware is of a superb quality
So why not run, the OS that you HAVE to use for what ever reason it is, on a fantastic pice of hardware?
Mark, it really isn't.
Noone really uses American English outside of North America.
I've not problem with American English, the differences are miniscule compared to the similarities, but what you've said is completely untrue.
Back on the discussion at hand. This looks cool. It'll be interesting to see how easy it is for non power users to implement.
And if you agreed with my original comment...
SHAME ON YOU!
Narf deserves his $13K. Great stuff!
Now let's see what Apple would do to keep this happening again when announcing the intel iBook. heh.
lets all take a moment to laugh at those suckers who say this ain't real. HA HA !
# 40 "MichaelLC"
You don't seem to get the point!
How would you cope dear Michael if Engadget were to be in the Dutch or German language?
We non-native English speakers do our best to get involved in this comments section. So don't get too picky when it comes to minor errors.
Seeing as how Windows can support so many different hardward configurations, I would say they are NOT writing buggy code at all...
I really see no point in someone trying to correct someone else's spelling, this is not a spelling class. This is a really good forum about technology and not spelling.
funetik:
you mean webster don't you?
Finally !!! Virii, spyware, and more: all on a Mac !!!
Thank God. I was so sick of hearing everybody screaming "omg ive never seen a windowz logo on a gray screen before! wtf is that? its fake! im a dumbass and refuse to consider for 3 seconds that narf has created a custom boot loader!!! lolz"
cant wait to get a mac book pro and put windows on it and walk in to my apple store and walk over to the genius bar, and be like, "I have a question about this piece of software. See it looks like this.." and then turn the computer around and show him windows booting. It will be ownage.
Now les work on making osx fully compatible with windows pc's.. Ive got this 3ghz media center that needs a real OS....:) (Sorry Gates, I love my 360 though)...
Meanwhile a non-American solution to all this grows and grows and grows...
Ubuntu
#46 : "Noone really uses American English outside of North America."
i doubt he was referring to strict physical continental borders. anyone who does in the 21st freaking century (and on a gadget site no less!) should start rethinking their view of the world. and start thinking of the internet/virtual world. the one where most stuff happens these days.
quick examples:
American CRITISIZE = 31,200,000
British CRITISISE = 7,220,000
American COLOR = 1,310,000,000
British COLOUR = 200,000,000
American CHECK / BANK CHECK = 3,740,000,000 / 205,000,000
British CHEQUE = 49,800,000
even with it specified as BANK CHECK (due to multiple meanings of CHECK alone)... it beats out CHEQUE by a wide margin.
that is just using the quick and dirty Google-as-Corpus that actual real-life linguists use.
so yeah... it's totally obvious that ONLY North America (what about Canada? no love?) uses CHECK and *everyone* else in the whole world is using proper the British English CHEQUE.
quite. obvious. indeed.
like a previous poster stated... i can't recall the last time i went to a UK-based site and started bitching about the spelling. i understand the writers are most likely English... in freaking England. it has never even crossed my mind to complain about their version of English (that i am FULLY AWARE exists... not like the different spellings were a surprise to me) being *ever so slightly different* than mine.
such a thing honestly is quite RUDE. a thing i see people accusing Americans of quite frequently.
and for fun:
DEFINITELY = 251,000,000
DEFINATELY = 26,400,000
PROBABLY = 798,000,000
PROBALLY = 1,330,000
thanks!
- - -
and... i hope those instructions get posted soon. i'm itching to try it out on my MacBook Pro... though honestly i might just wait until someone gets a good virtualization app working.
what would be really cool. and that i understand is *possible* under VMWare under Linux... is running BOTH virtualization AND dual booting. meaning the way the disk is set up... you can either pop open a VMWare window under the host OS to run Windows *or* you can also boot directly into the same exact partition and run Windows completely on it's own.
that would be the absolute most useful option were it ever possible.
#25 "Since I'm from the UK and speak the Queen's (proper) English, I'd say it should be cheque too."
As a linguist I'd say what you "speak" has actually ZERO to do with how you "spell things"--you don't pronounce "check" any differently and if one thing has been shown about orthographical systems (I'm looking at you Japan/China and other systems with pictograms) is they are 100% arbitrary, lacking any empirical evidence of one system being better than another.
All else, espeically in this case, is just pure snobbery. The fact is in *any* variety of written English there is not a one-to-one phoneme-grapheme correspondence so spelling is arbitrary. End of story you arrogant pricks.
in Canada we adapt what we feel is best of either 'language'....
so it's cheque, colour, and critiCize!! (with a C...)
it's nice when you live in a country that understands there are shades of gray/grey and everything is not black or white!
---------
i'm SO looking forward to being able to boot either OS...thanks for the good news!
Considering 'American English' is a contradiction in terms, lets just leave it that:
* Cheque is the English spelling (and 'International English' therefore); and
* Check is the American interpretation (similar to George W Bush being the interpretation of President...)
Ok, enough already... Many congrats to Narf and Blanka - they deserve so much gratitude.
"Noone really uses American English outside of North America."
Might want to visit Japan, China, Korea, or pretty much any Asian country sometime, because American English is what's taught in all of them.
It is true that various British or Australian colloquialisms and slang work their way into Japanese English (words like "reckon", though that's also used heavily in the American south), but generally they are taught the same English that American schoolkids are taught. Some people there even call this "Orthodox English", and there is a movement to cleanse what little Australian and British English has found its way into the lexicon there. (This is sort of a hardline position; most people don't really care that much.)
Even if American English was only used in America, though, there would still be way more native American English speakers than native speakers of any other style. It would still be the dominant form of English. Put the UK, Australia and Canada together and you haven't even hit half the English-speaking US population yet.
btw, you will notice that even though I'm American, I put my periods and commas outside my quotation marks. Some of the grammar we use here in the US just makes no sense, so I revert to the more logical British style.
In the immortal words of Pinky, "Narfrageous!" Seriously good job y'all.
Let's officially welcome Macintosh computers to the wide world of incessant and never ending bouts of viral infections!
caveat: I know that through Virtual PC Macintosh computers have been infected... but this obviously brings it to a whole new plain..
YEAH!!! Everyone's can be on an equal sub-plain finally!!! heheh
-Scott
Non-native English speakers are to be admired for their dedication to literacy in such a strange and convoluted language.
That said -- the actual English (UK) folks also need to chill out about the sanctity of their "Queen's English". English has changed significantly since its inception and continues to do so. (Read: Early, Middle, Modern, Post-Modern(?)).
"The thrustelcok made eek hir lay, The wode dove upon the spray she sang ful loude and cleere." / Chaucer 1390 AD.
How the hell did this post turn into bickering English lesson?
Oh, and congrats to the winners. Time to get a MacBook Pro.
File and Instructions mirrored:
http://www.uneasysilence.com/archive/2006/03/5687/
Questions for Anyone who knows the answers--
1. Can it be easily dual booted between mac and pc??
2. Do all the mac system components work under the xp system (eg. any net cards, vid cards, etc...)
3. Is it fast under XP????
Now we just need a similar contest to have Windows programs run simultaneously within the MacOS without having to Dual Boot. Wouldn't bother me at all to give the good folks DarWine a kick in the ass/help in completing their glorious task ;D
So... how about a bet on how long it takes Apple to do a "neccesary" upgrade or whatever to send this solution down the river to meet Hades?
I'd love to be a fly on the wall in Steve's office right now.
Hopefully now we will be able to make the transition from Mac to Windows more easily.
Did you read about Gates not liking the Negroponte new cheap computers?
Here
http://www.devicetodevice.com
For the record...blanka deserves all the credit for this hack. He did all the heavy lifting.
See that little thing in the URL at the top: .COM
This being a North American hosted site, read by a mainly North American audience, and utilizing a majority of American developed technologies, how dare they be so f#$*ing stupid as to follow American usage of the word check... jeez some people.
Wow - a check! I want one of those. Learn to spell people. CHEQUE, learn to spell.
And you wonder why Eurotrash, such as yourself, is hated the world over.
Good job, now make XP run in a VM, and I'm sold.
js, #48: "Now let's see what Apple would do to keep this happening again when announcing the intel iBook. heh."
Apple has already said what thy'll do. Nothing. Here's Phill Schiller, from an interview at the WWDC shortly after Steve Jobs's announcement:
'After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that." - 06/06/2005'
Schiller repeated more or less the same statement in another interview following the January release of the iMac and MacBook Pro.
Blanka or Narf, how about a quick comment on where things stand for the 20" iMac?
I heard they were sending him a Czech in the mail. ;)
The instructions are clear and work exactly as advertised. I tried it this evening and found the boot loader pretty sweet. The downside is that another contest is in order to write APM, network, PCI and wireless drivers. With Windows installed per the instructions, there are no network drivers (which can be bypassed by using a USB ethernet adapter) no resetting the video resolution (at least on an Intel Mac Mini) etc, etc. I installed MS Office 2003 and the machine screams - BUT without the network, there is some room to grow. If Windows continues to run as it does now on an Intel based Mac (IBM), it is a great contender to Sony and Dell. the performance is awesome on a Mac Mini 1.66 GHz, 512 MB computer. Can someone scrape up another 13k and divy it up on a per driver basis??? This is worth a try for anyone with an IBM. (Don't be scared!)
Invisible Hand of Capitalism... Adam Smith :) I wish more people would read him :)
You're absolutely right.... Now maybe we should try this whole Capitalism thing a few other places...
SHUT THE HELL UP!!!!!
How old are you guy? You're arguing about capitalization and British vs. American English. I wish I had such important things to worry about. The comments are to comment about the story, NOT to bitch like little girls to each other and try to show your grammatical superiority. You are idiots. Let it go.
Great job figuring out a double-boot on the system not using BIOS. I am hesitant, however, about instaling XP on my MacBook Pro since the systems would not talk to each other. I would rather see Apple coming out with a new version of Virtual PC, compited to run natively on x86 so can can drag files between OSX and XP. As to the hardware and software comments. I buy mac for OS X primarly, put Windows on it and I am switching to Linux tomorrow. I am biased of course because I am a Java developer, the UNIX part of OS X just makes a lot of sense to me: speed, stability, security. For other users Windows may be better solution, not for me. As to Apple hardware: double-core 64bit Intel 2Ghz in a laptop so thin, coupled with the os that uses that 64bit... lets not complain much about Apple here.
wow, it got all the way to 20 before people started fighting..... what were hippies thinking. Anyways, I can't wait to see benchmarks between these babies and some real powerhouse Athlon 64 and overclocked opteron systems. I think I saw better engineered systems, referring to apple somewhere..... I hope you're talking about the case or something because the CPU was the last non PC component left..... and then you could go to Xoxide.com and get something really pretty.
Maybe I'm stretching the term engineered, I guess the Kia Rio might be better engineered then a Dodge Ram, but I'd still take the Dodge Ram.
Don't bother tearing me apart, I never really post and absolutely never read back later.
#83, the dual core CPU used in the new Mac is not 64 bit. Nor do I believe OS X for Intel to be 64 bit as it wouldn't make any kind of sense to run a 64 bit OS on a 32 bit CPU.
The Intel CPU do have some kind of >32 bit memory extention to be able to address more than 4 GB. Don't know much about this although.
As far as capitalism at work here helping to get this project done so quickly, I would bet that many programers out there may have been gambling with when to release the solution. The sooner you release, less money you get, or wait to long for the pot to grow bigger and get nothing. The idea of captialism may have kept the solution in the bag longer than nessisary ;)
i wish the solution could be a vmware virtual machine that can load osx or xp... especially now that vmware server is free.
that would be very hot.
#46.
If you have ever been to Canada... we do not use American english. It is Cheque, not Check. Centre, not Center, and it's Criticize, not Critisize.
We are proud of our beavers, we don't live in igloos, and based on my own experience travelling through the USA, my 19 year old brother could drink a whole bar full of you under the table in less than an hour.
P.S.>> I still can't imagine why anyone would actually want to run Windows on a Mac. Have you ever tried to upgrade an iBook?
You guys are wasting to much time on the way a word is spelled. The person that did the spell check, did you not understand what he meant. People that were born here are not very good spellers.