Windows 10 running on Mac Mini (late 2012) without BootCamp

Apple doesn’t make it easy! The biggest pain? Drivers. You already knew that though.

I installed Windows 10 to the mini and didn’t think much about drivers; wasn’t sure I was going to keep the OS on the, still not. Once I it was up and running I still wanted to be able to give it a good test drive – need to see what my best options for Steam is. I digress, lets get to the substance.

After you have installed Windows 10 you will need to get the hardware working that isn’t. For me it was the trackpad/mouse combo - the magic mouse, bluetooth, HDMI sound, and WiFi. In my research I came across a link to a developer who wrote software to get the drivers needed for the model of Mac running Windows. This worked, with some fumbles.

First, you will need to get brigadier. This may work flawlessly for you, it didn’t for me. The site states that using the -i option will install the files and -k will prevent the download from being deleted after install. None of that worked for me…

After running brigadier a few times with no success. When running brigadier it will if you the link that it is downloading the Mac pkg from. I used this link and put it in the browser to download it.

Fetching Boot Camp product at URL http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/28/26/031-24514/qx7ph7k6mewtcf4eyhxmiilgc7r2ikjgud/BootCampESD.pkg.

The rest of the instruction on the site for brigadier were good. After the download I unpacked the pkg and then the payload. After unpacking the Payload file I was left with a dmg file. I then used dmg2iso to convert the dmg to an iso. Once I had the iso it mounted in Windows 10 like a CD.

Once you can see the CD mounted you are good. The CD contains all of the drivers that you will need. Now there was talk for the mouse that I have to use magic mouse drivers, I didn’t use that. On the CD there are mouse drivers and trackpad drivers; I installed both. Mouse works great – no gestures scroll works.

That was my experience with getting Windows 10 installed on a Mac Mini.

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This install is about 6 months old and I haven't had any issues. The primary function of the build is to play games. It will not play Overwatch, but I wasn't looking to play Overwatch. It plays Balder's Gate, Castle Crashers, Portal, and other fine with little to no issues. Fall Out: New Vegas I needed to turn the resolution down from 1080 to 720 and reduce the clip plane to smooth out the game play; still it runs fine.