Hell Has Frozen Over. Again.
 

It is apparently never best to listen to Microsoft and Apple about what they say when it comes to getting their operating systems running on other computers.

Despite the earlier news of Vista not having (or having very little support of) EFI, people were able to get Windows XP running on a 20" Intel iMac. They also netted a nice little check (about 13,000.)

I haven't fully checked into the details yet, but it's pretty amazing.

Here's the news stories and such (which includes photos and a video.)
http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/14/x...tel-game-over/
http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/16/w...lution-posted/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/3243619...n/photostream/ (photos)
http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/15/x...tel-the-movie/ (video)

Sales of iMacs (and maybe even MacBooks, if confirmed,) might just go up even more, I think.

Now that WinXp has landed on a Mac, Gates can finally conquer the one consumer platform that got away...
This is even better than OS X on x86 Processors, now Mac users can run bloated software and a hacker friendly OS on their iMacs. How many people are really going to try this?

You'd be surprised.

I'm sure a lot of people would do it just for the novelty.

Running windows on a Mac? That would be like buying a band new house and then smearing shit over all the walls.

How about running Mac on a daily basis, but using windows for the far better game selection. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Not really necessary when they're both running on the same processor. Seriously, I don't think Cedega for Intel Macs is a difficult concept. Heck, if the game companies are smart then they'll start making ports since it won't be nearly as hard as it used to be.

Common misconception. The MAIN difficulty in porting games to the Mac is no DirectX. So not only do they have to switch their rendering engine over to OpenGL (unless it lives there already), they have to move their sound engine over from DirectSound, not rely on DirectInput, and all the other libraries DirectX provides for game-makers. THAT'S the main problem with porting games to the Mac—not the fact that they used to run on PPC (though that was occasionally still a concern, but not nearly as big a one as the others).

EDIT: Figured I should comment some on the original point of the thread—seems to me this isn't that surprising. They're running on mostly common hardware now, and for the last bit I was assuming it was only a matter of time until some intrepid souls worked up a hack that'd work. From the screenshots I've seen, there are plenty of unsupported devices (most notably the video card, which is simply running in VGA compatible mode, quite a problem for those who intend to run games in Windows on their Macs—but also things like the Ethernet driver, etc.). So I'm not sure how reasonably "functional" this method is, yet.

This is exactly what I was going to ask. Getting Windows to run on Mac hardware is one thing, but getting functional drivers for all of the hardware devices is an entirely different matter. And if you plan on using it for gaming, it's not a matter of just making functional drivers, but full featured driver sets including the custom application layer software that is usually involved in controlling the hardware.

This is an unsupported project and you really are not dealing with an open source platform like you would be in developing drivers for a Nix platform.

Well since Macs use Ati or Nvidia based video cards, as long as the Windows boots and the soundcard works you should be able to run most games well. I'd love to see those iMacs run DOS or Win9x, THAT would be a real challenge (since EFI didn't even exist during Win9x's heyday).

I'm pretty sure the devices in Macs have a totally different memory addressing modes/structures, bus timings and interfacing opcodes even under the Intel architecture which is going to require a rewrite of most drivers. Remember, drivers run at the hardware level, not the kernel (OS) level. Installing WindowsXP on an iMac doesn't mean you'll be able to use WindowsXP drivers on the iMac.

Hmm, what drivers did the person who put WinXP on the iMac get to work? You know the primary system drivers (such as HDD, CD/DVD and some others) and the video card worked (since we saw a picture).

Basic read/write modes are standardized and allow basic functionality for the most part like VGA mode for video cards. However, advanced functionality of devices (burst DMA mode for HDDs, higher resolution 24-bit color for video cards, etc) require more advanced memory addressing modes which are not standardized across hardware platforms.

From what I saw, the video card was running in 16-32bit mode, it seemed to work just fine (VGA mode would look horrendusly awful in WinXP). Of course WinXP interfaces with the videocard better than previous versions can.
What video card do iMacs use?