Hell Has Frozen Over. Again.

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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.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by www.sega.co.jp

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.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by www.sega.co.jp

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.

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