(...from: http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/
More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.)
...from: http://www.macworld.com/2006/04/firstlooks/bootcampfl/index.php? lsrc=mwweek-0410
Signing up for Boot Camp Apple software simplifies XP installation By Rob Griffiths One word kept coming to mind Wednesday, as I sat down to install Apple’s Boot Camp public beta on my Mac mini Core Duo—simple. Using the software to install Windows XP on my machine? A very simple process. Choosing which OS to boot? Also simple. Installing the necessary drivers? At the risk of repeating myself, simple, simple, and did I mention simple?
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From start to finish, while working on the daily hints [column] updates at the same time, the whole process took me maybe 40 minutes. I spent most of that time in the XP installer; the preparation steps took only about 10 minutes. Most important, you don’t need access to a PC in any way to do this; that alone makes installing Windows XP on a Mac much more doable for many people.
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Native video support The difference in XP’s speed with native video drivers is very noticeable. You can quickly drag windows—their contents display and scroll very quickly, and the overall interface just feels more responsive. But nobody cares about the user interface. What everyone really cares about is gaming, of course! With DirectX and OpenGL support, the whole world of PC gaming is suddenly available for Intel- based Mac users.
I installed a few games from my PC collection to see how they’d fare on my 512MB Core Duo—I had to return the 2GB RAM upgrade I had previously installed for replacement, so I was testing a worst case scenario for the Core Duo. This is especially true for games that require a ton of texture memory, as that would have to come from system memory, dragging down the whole system. Here’s a summary of what I found:
- Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2006: This game was basically perfect running at 1280x1024 resolution. The frame rate was more than fast enough to keep up with the animated water, moving trees, and in-flight ball tracking.
- Far Cry: This first person shooter was Game of the Year back in 2004, due to its amazing visuals, set amidst lush jungles and islands surrounded by animated, semi-transparent water. It puts quite a load on a machine and was just barely playable at 1,024-by-768 on the mini. I suspect that performance will improve greatly when I get the mini back up to 2GB, as Far Cry’s visuals require a lot of video card RAM.
- Combat Flight Simulator 3: In addition to seeing how well this game played, I wanted to make sure Windows XP worked with my Saitek flightstick. Sure enough, I plugged it in, and the Game Controllers Control Panel saw the stick and let me calibrate and test it. Everything worked fine. The frame rate in the game was fine, but I had an odd problem with the graphics sort of “jumping” around. It was sort of like a minor visual earthquake was constantly occurring, displacing things just enough to be annoying. And making it very hard to shoot an enemy plane down. Given enough debugging time, I think I could resolve this issue.
- Motocross Madness 2: This highly unrealistic game was one of my faves on the PC. It's older, sure, but it’s still a hoot to play. And on my Core Duo mini at 1,280-by-1,024, it works amazingly well. I connected my gamepad, which also worked as expected, and was very impressed with how smoothly Motocross Madness ran. Frame rates were very high, and the audio was perfect.
Overall, I was impressed with how well the mini handled games on the built-in graphics chip. I intend to do more testing, especially once I have the system RAM back up to 2GB. But machines like the MacBook Pro and iMac, which have better graphics cards and faster CPUs, should make even better gaming platforms.
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Installing XP on an Intel Mac is no harder than installing it on a new PC yourself—you might even say that it’s simpler.
Other related articles: http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/04/05/bootcamp/index.php? lsrc=mwweek-0410