A custom slipstreamed CD is required to install XP on a Mac. Please note that you must use your own copy of an XP install CD. It is not legal to use a ready-made slipstreamed CD downloaded from the Internet. Such practice is not endorsed by onmac.net.


What You'll Need
- An original XP PRO SP2 CDROM (It doesn't have to be bootable, but it should have a i386 directory in the root.)
- The winxponmac0.1.zip file
- Nero Burning ROM
- A blank CD (Preferrably a CD-RW, just in case it doesn't work first time)
- A PC with XP already installed.
- 20-30 minutes

While I'm disappointed not to have won, I'm encouraged to see that our approaches were remarkably similar. We both wrote custom EFI CSM drivers to emulate the BIOS functions Windows requires to boot. I'm very curious how they managed to get VGA working, and I won't be surprised if it doesn't work in either the Mini or the Macbook Pro, as it looks like they did all their development on an iMac.

If nothing else, this was a tremendous learning experience for me, and the timing couldn't have been better. I have recently become interested in Intel assembly and protected mode programming, topics I considered too challenging years ago when I was doing DOS programming, but concepts that make much more sense to me now. I had randomly dusted off some old assembly language references from my bookshelf and read some chapters on protected mode programming a few weeks prior to beginning work on this project, so I was able to grasp what needed to be done to provide a working solution almost immediately.