VOGONS

intel based iMac to XP gaming machine conversion: still possible?

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First post, by VGApocalypse

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I'd really like to have a stylish and somewhat powerful XP gaming machine im my living room.
(OK, maybe just because my wife would yell at me when setting up a "non-stylish" pc there.)

So, to prevent some being yelled at, I crawled the bay and stumbled upon quite a lot of Apple machines for really low bucks. Back in the day Win XP via bootcamp was no problem at all - but frankly I don't if those downloads are still available by apple today. They were quite tailored to each machine if I remember correctly.

Thus please, dear Vogons, has anyone tried such an endeavour recently? Does bootcamped XP still work?
Some iMacs I came across had quite decent graphic solutions for XP gaming, a (still) state of the art display, quite powerful early i5 or i7 cpus - and I'd really like to make this work.

Hoarding the precious, worshipping the ancient, playing the forgotten.

Reply 1 of 2, by wierd_w

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At the very least, their support site still returns results.

https://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=searc … IONS&q=bootcamp

https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs/mac/pp38

A funny thing to try:

XP requires a CSM to boot, because it needs a DOS like disk interface at first stage, and needs a DOS vga bios in the expected address space. This means the bootcamp version made for it might be able to chainload GRUB2, and with it, (free)DOS partition.

It would be 'amusing' to see what vsbhda sees. 😁

Last edited by wierd_w on 2026-02-25, 14:36. Edited 1 time in total.
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