As discussed in the prior post around switching to LaunchBox for retro gaming, I decided to convert my early 2013 Macbook Pro 15″ Retina to Windows. It had the latest version of MacOS on it and I could (and probably should) have simply followed the steps to convert it to a dual boot configuration using Bootcamp. But since I really didn’t see myself using MacOS, I thought that I would just wipe the drive and use Windows exclusively to save space on the smallish 500Gb SSD.
Step 1 was getting a USB stick for Win10 installation. I thought that I could just use the Win10 recovery USB stick I already had; however, after holding down the alt/options key and booting from USB I realized that it is only good for recovery. Thus, I read up on how to create a new Win10 “installation media” and used my other laptop to do so. I repeated the boot process with the installation media, and the installation worked like a charm with me up and running with Win10 in short order.
The original reason I switched away from Linux Mint on the Macbook was that (unrelated to the hardware), LM simply has crappy multi-monitor and dots per inch (DPI) scaling support. Could I get it to work with an external monitor, yes, but it was clunky at best and never provided a decent user experience; again, something I am still shocked about given it’s 2022.
To my surprise and pleasure, W10 running on the nine-year old Apple hardware with the same dual monitor (internal/external) setup as with LM worked perfectly. The primary retina display with 2880×1800 resolution was crystal clear, W10 properly and automatically setup scaling to 200%, the external monitor at 1920×1080 was also setup automatically with appropriate 100% scaling. When I moved windows back and forth between the monitor, the scaling automatically changed for a really nice user experience. And this was all with the stock out of the box W10 display driver.
From the basic widows install, I proceeded to get the primary additional pieces of software I used up and running, including things like the Chrome, Adobe photo suite, Ultimaker Cura slicing software, Autodesk Fusion 360, Evernote, etc. installed. Turns out, that was a bit of a rookie PC builder mistake. I did all that before really checking out the Device Manager and/or checking to see that all the peripherals were in fact working; as you can imagine they weren’t. Although the display and Wi-Fi was working, there was no Bluetooth and more importantly no sound!
I could probably have lived without Bluetooth since I’m using the laptop with an external Logictech keyboard with its own dongle and at my desk I can simply plugin headphones if needed. But with no sound it would be pretty useless as a retro gaming rig given that the 8-bit sound is half the retro gaming experience. It would also be worthless for Youtube and well playing music at my desk while I worked.
I knew immediately it was a driver problem and figured I could simply “update drivers” to get it working. That launched me down a LONG path of searching for drivers. Long story short, Microsoft flat out doesn’t support or offer drivers for Apple products other than basic display and basic USB/keyboard, e.g., enough to get Win10 running, but that’s it. After much research I came to find out that the only way Apple offered the drivers is packaged up as Bootcamp, which is downloaded/created from a working version of MacOS; which, of course I no longer had. Long story short, I eventually found Apple actually hosted the Bootcamp packages on “hidden” URLs which were of course posted and can be found in this GitHub repository. I found out that my early 2013 Macbook Pro 15″ Retina had an Apple shorthand model notation of MacbookPro10,1 and used that designation to figure out that the Boot camp package I needed was at this Apple URL. Once I downloaded the package (BootCampESD.pkg), I searched around to figure out what to do with it and ultimately used 7-zip to unpackage it and get to the installer. I then ran the installer and like magic, all of the special Apple hardware Win10 drivers were installed, and the laptop became fully functional! I was extremely worried that the installer would fail given that Win10 wasn’t even a thing in 2013, it was Win7 at that time. But no, Apple must have updated their Bootcamp packages to support Win10, thankfully.
So, after quite the winding journey, I know have a pretty decent spare Win10 laptop that I can leave permanently on my desk. Note that I setup Launchbox as a fully portable system using Dropbox, so that can now be run from any of my Win10/Win11 systems. I’ll do a short separate post about that setup.
