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Amethyst1

macrumors G3
Oct 28, 2015
9,783
12,183
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Wowfunhappy

macrumors 68000
Mar 12, 2019
1,745
2,087
Part of the reason you might have had trouble is there was never any such thing as a retail Tiger installer for Intel Macs. The earliest Intel Macs merely shipped with Tiger preinstalled; there was no older OS to upgrade from.

There is a retail installer for Tiger Server, because in that case people needed a way to upgrade from client.

System specific disks can be modified to work on any hardware, but then it’s not an official installer any more.
 
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Amethyst1

macrumors G3
Oct 28, 2015
9,783
12,183
Part of the reason you might have had trouble is there was never any such thing as a retail Tiger installer for Intel Macs. The earliest Intel Macs merely shipped with Tiger preinstalled; there was no older OS to upgrade from.
Yeah, the grey discs is as good as it gets for Tiger client on Intel.

There is a retail installer for Tiger Server, because in that case people needed a way to upgrade from client.
That installer is universal and works on both Intel and PPC Macs. It uses version 10.4.7 build 8K1079, the same build the original Mac Pro came with.

System specific disks can be modified to work on any hardware, but then it’s not an official installer any more.
It's still miles away from those hacked installers modified to work on PCs ;)
 

eyoungren

macrumors Penryn
Aug 31, 2011
29,604
28,365
As a curiosity: why? Those machines work MUCH better with Snow Leopard.
Some people REALLY like Tiger. There are a number of reasons for that, but I think the main reason for wanting to run Tiger on an Intel Mac is speed. Particularly if you're not intending to use the Mac on the internet.

You have the OS with the least overhead and a Mac with an Intel processor. If your Mac has an SSD then this is about as fast as you're ever likely to get that Mac to go.

I prefer my features, options and customizations and am willing to sacrifice some speed for that - but speed is king for a lot of users.
 

Wowfunhappy

macrumors 68000
Mar 12, 2019
1,745
2,087
I like the aesthetics of both the Tiger on Leopard-era UIs, although I ultimately prefer Leopard-era by just a tad.

However, what I find really neat about Tiger is how well the on-screen visuals fit the aesthetics of Apple's hardware at the time. The UI feels like a natural outgrowth of the plastic shells of the Powerbooks, G4 towers, and early iMacs.

Leopard-era does this to some extent, matching the sleek metal of the early Mac Pro and Macbook Pro, but Tiger does it better.
 
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jackoverfull

macrumors regular
Dec 3, 2008
179
81
Berlin, Germany
Some people REALLY like Tiger. There are a number of reasons for that, but I think the main reason for wanting to run Tiger on an Intel Mac is speed. Particularly if you're not intending to use the Mac on the internet.

You have the OS with the least overhead and a Mac with an Intel processor. If your Mac has an SSD then this is about as fast as you're ever likely to get that Mac to go.

I prefer my features, options and customizations and am willing to sacrifice some speed for that - but speed is king for a lot of users.
Ah. I wouldn’t be too sure about it being the faster option, then: it still had a lot of stuff running in Rosetta and snow leopard was much more optimised.

Sure Snow Leopard pretty much flies on anything with an SSD, even early 2006 MacBooks.
 
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jackoverfull

macrumors regular
Dec 3, 2008
179
81
Berlin, Germany
Not totally: back then it was widely criticised for having performance hindered by parts running in Rosetta. This was also a huge issue in the hack into ah community, as Rosetta required the SSE3 instructions, which still weren’t available on many processors back then, and thus the OS wouldn’t run until they wrote an emulator for those instructions and even them with caveats.
 

jackoverfull

macrumors regular
Dec 3, 2008
179
81
Berlin, Germany
On which version? Just saying, but without Rosetta even opening System Preferences wasn’t possible on 10.4.4.

I loved those times, setting up several hackintoshes for friends even before the hackintosh distros came with an installer, Rosetta and the sse instructions were a huge caveat back then.

Also, why does the article refer to 10.4.1? There was never a released 10.4.1 for x86, the first release was 10.4.3.
 
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jackoverfull

macrumors regular
Dec 3, 2008
179
81
Berlin, Germany
The article says 10.4.3.


There sure was, it’s what the DTKs originally shipped with. The article even contains a screenshot of it.

10.4.4 was the first x86 release available to consumers on production hardware.
Afaik the first image to circulate, on which the deadmoo was based on, was a 10.4.3.

Also several odd assumptions (such as apple intentionally relying on Rosetta to lock off non apple hardware) or plainly wrong statements (such as the boot loader used on early hackintosh systems being the one “written for next/apple”, which is a totally nonsensical statement, in fact it was the usual Darwin/x86 one. Or the transition being cage cause of the death of opendarwin, a system that had died years before, when apple had given the cold shoulder to OSS developers) in that article.

In any case, tiger relied on Rosetta, which brought a noticeable Performance penalty.

Something else I remember being nonplussed about, even on 2006 Intel macs, was multitasking: switching between applications often was noticeably slower than on my 2004 iBook and even stuff such as iTunes could skip when doing other things with the computer, something that never happened on PPC mad of the time (and that never got solved entirely).
 

Amethyst1

macrumors G3
Oct 28, 2015
9,783
12,183
Afaik the first image to circulate, on which the deadmoo was based on, was a 10.4.3.
I have the Deadmoo image and an install DVD. Both are 10.4.1 build 8B1025.

Also several odd assumptions (such as apple intentionally relying on Rosetta to lock off non apple hardware)
I wonder why Tiger on Intel relied on stuff running via Rosetta to bring up the GUI or whatever then?

or plainly wrong statements (such as the boot loader used on early hackintosh systems being the one “written for next/apple”, which is a totally nonsensical statement, in fact it was the usual Darwin/x86 one
Is the Darwin/x86 boot loader related to or based on the one used by NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody on x86? If so, maybe it was a matter of bad wording.
 
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jackoverfull

macrumors regular
Dec 3, 2008
179
81
Berlin, Germany
I have the Deadmoo image and an install DVD. Both are 10.4.1 build 8B1025.
My memory must be mistaken then.
I wonder why Tiger on Intel relied on stuff running via Rosetta to bring up the GUI or whatever then?
That’s actually easy to answer: porting takes time and resources, when they could obtain a viable system using emulation, even if at a performance cost, they did, with the idea of properly port the code over gradually in the following releases, which they did.

They did exactly the same during the m68k to PPC transition, with parts of the OS running in emulation even in OS 9. Conversely by Snow Leopard at latest nothing needed emulation anymore and the optimisation to the new platform was tight.

Is the Darwin/x86 boot loader related to or based on the one used by NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody on x86? If so, maybe it was a matter of bad wording.
Possibly…As they wrote it it’s pure nonsense.
 
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