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.
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