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kmacnewuser

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 27, 2020
7
1
Hello everyone. Im somewhat of a geek that likes to experiment with stuff. In the far past I had Tiger on a virtual machine but then I upgraded my computer and it could no longer work. I made the mistake to delete it!. Now... after all these years I have a goal to run all intel based MacOSX versions as virtual machines. Why? Just for the heck of it.

I have been pretty good and have everything from 10.5.x and up running fine. But tiger nope! I know its possible because im seeing videos and people talk about it. I have a iso for server 10.4 that boots up to the point when its just about to install and it gives me a no entry icon.

Now I have seen people talk about a version that was tweaked called Mac OSX JaS AMD-Intel-SSE2-SSE3 with PPF1 & PPF2.iso
But this is so old it has vanished from the interwebs.. I dont suppose anyone has this or knows where I can get it.. or how I can get Tiger to work without it.

Any help would be grateful.
 

Macbookprodude

Suspended
Jan 1, 2018
3,306
898
Hi, you will need a modified intel vanilla in9staller to get Tiger to run under emulation. Unless you can find the retail disc of Tiger which ran on intel Macs, it won’t work. Try to find a retail tiger disc which runs on intel hardware. Most I have seen run on PPC only.
 

Wowfunhappy

macrumors 68000
Mar 12, 2019
1,604
1,980
There is no such thing as a retail Tiger install DVD. Intel Macs shipped with Tiger; there was no hardware for a user to install too.

The Mac Pro Tiger disks on Macintosh Garden worked for me in VMWare Fusion.

Edit: I meant there are no Intel installers! Oops! I should have made that clear!
 
Last edited:

Jack Neill

macrumors 68020
Sep 13, 2015
2,268
2,293
San Antonio Texas
Hello everyone. Im somewhat of a geek that likes to experiment with stuff. In the far past I had Tiger on a virtual machine but then I upgraded my computer and it could no longer work. I made the mistake to delete it!. Now... after all these years I have a goal to run all intel based MacOSX versions as virtual machines. Why? Just for the heck of it.

I have been pretty good and have everything from 10.5.x and up running fine. But tiger nope! I know its possible because im seeing videos and people talk about it. I have a iso for server 10.4 that boots up to the point when its just about to install and it gives me a no entry icon.

Now I have seen people talk about a version that was tweaked called Mac OSX JaS AMD-Intel-SSE2-SSE3 with PPF1 & PPF2.iso
But this is so old it has vanished from the interwebs.. I dont suppose anyone has this or knows where I can get it.. or how I can get Tiger to work without it.

Any help would be grateful.

That was for Hackintoshs and while really cool at a the time, wasn't the most stable. I would go with Wowfunhappy's suggestion of using the Mac Pro disks from MG.
 

Nymunariya

macrumors newbie
Jun 25, 2020
24
3
Germany
Tiger is super picky. I discovered a github for running Tiger in VirtualBox on a mac. But it was an uphill battle the entire time.

Half the time, the machine wouldn't boot, because it couldn't find the root device. When it did work, the harddrive would never "appear" in Disk Utility. I think I had to change the harddrive config in VirtualBox to use IDE instead of SATA, then it booted immediately and I could install Tiger Server.

I was only able to install Tiger Server. I could not install a universal build of Tiger. I mainly wanted to try running older games via Rosetta, but Tiger Server does not include OpenGL and seemed pretty finicky. If I wasn't careful when changing SATA to IDE (I think CD drive can't be swapped over), then I would get an EFI boot and I don't know how to fix that. So trash and reimport and reinstall.
 

Wowfunhappy

macrumors 68000
Mar 12, 2019
1,604
1,980
Tiger Server does not include OpenGL and seemed pretty finicky

...are you sure about that one? I kind of doubt that—it would be a lot of work for Apple to rip that out from the OS for basically no gain.

I think what you're experiencing is that Virtualbox (and Parallels, and VMWare) don't support graphics acceleration for Mac OS guests. The only way around that—in theory—would be to use ESXI or KVM alongside GPU passthrough. You'd need a GPU that's natively supported by Tiger.

In practice, I tried to set this up with up with Mavericks and both ESXI and KVM and absolutely could not get passthrough working (even though High Sierra worked fine). Since Tiger is even older, I doubt it would work, although I'd love to see someone manage it...
 

Macbookprodude

Suspended
Jan 1, 2018
3,306
898
There is no such thing as a retail Tiger install DVD. Intel Macs shipped with Tiger; there was no hardware for a user to install too.

The Mac Pro Tiger disks on Macintosh Garden worked for me in VMWare Fusion.

Not true.. I have a retail Tiger DVD plus Tiger on 3 CDs.
 

Wowfunhappy

macrumors 68000
Mar 12, 2019
1,604
1,980
Not true.. I have a retail Tiger DVD plus Tiger on 3 CDs.
An Intel retail Tiger DVD? Are you sure it's not a PPC installer?

Edit: Sorry, I realize now I didn't specify Intel in my post. It's just, we were talking about VMWare! You can't virtualize PPC Tiger on Intel hardware, it doesn't work!
 

Wowfunhappy

macrumors 68000
Mar 12, 2019
1,604
1,980
Right, so I should have specified (my bad, I forgot!), there's no such thing as an Intel retail Tiger installer. There are PPC installers, but they won't work in a VM on a Windows host (unless you know of a PPC version of Windows, and a PPC-compatible version of VMWare that runs on PPC Windows :p)
 
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