GadgetFreak,

You may wish to take a look at VirtualBox, a free virtualization program from Sun, which is similar to VMWare and Parallels. It has the ability to run a VM in headless mode. So in a UNIX shell, you type something like:

VBoxHeadless -startvm WinXP64 -vrdp=off

and then connect to the Win XP instance over RDP with Microsoft's RDP client on your Mac. This is much nicer and more efficient than using X. You even get excellent sound support!

If you type the above command under an instance of the program "screen", you don't even need to stay logged into the host OS.

The only thing I am not certain about is whether it can allocate 8GB of RAM to your VM. VirtualBox is actively developed, and even if it does not have this capability yet, I am sure it will have it soon.

http://www.virtualbox.org

http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/screen.html