The wizards (nay, geniuses) over at the Max OS X Internals Blog have developed what they’re calling BAMBIOS – software that allows legacy booting on Intel-based Macs. From their post:
For example, a regular (that is, non-EFI) version of Linux can be readily booted using this software. [...] Linux works fine, and we have made good progress with booting an unmodified Windows XP installation.
They have a mini presentation which explains a little about what they’re doing, but basically they’re leveraging the Bochs BIOS as a way to give Windows XP (or any other “legacy” X86 OS) something to talk to. Oh – and you just know that Apple love being able to refer to Windows as legacy! I’ll save the rant about the EFI-less Vista release for another time…
Anyway, this is fantastic news, and a huge step towards the dual booting Holy Grail a lot of us early-adopters have been seeking. WinXPonMac.com – are you ready to pay out?
Update: It appears that they’re not the only team to have made good progress. This guy has got XP booting – he says by patching the NT bootloader/kernel. That sounds like a less elegant solution than building a fake BIOS, but since neither group has made their solution available yet it remains to be seen how easy either of them is for the rest of us to achieve.
Categories: Apple, Hardware, Internet, Software
