Tiger OS X compatibility

I wanted to point out and remind OS X Tiger users that City of Heroes does not officially support OS X Tiger.

With the launch of Issue 15, we placed a note in the Release Notes as follows:
<ul type="square">[*]Please note that Tiger is not an officially supported Operating System for City of Heroes, and that when Snow Leopard launches, users using OS X Tiger may not be able to run City of Heroes.[/list]
The patch note was put in place to remind OS X Tiger (10.4) users that Tiger is not officially supported, and provide ample warning that that once OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) comes out (September 2009), we will not support any OS X Tiger compatibility issues.

I added a note to that effect to my Mac Edition Guide.

I am not a Mac user and this in no way effects me.But I was curious about something.
Will Mac users be required to upgrade each time a new OS is put out by Apple? As support for the old OS is not provided?

Tiger is several years old now, and every machine that can run Tiger can run Leopard. Leopard has some significant improvements for running on Intel machines (which are the only ones that can run the COH client). Leopard in fact came out pretty soon after the Intel machines came out, so most Intel Macs were sold with Leopard.

Tiger was built on a hardware platform Apple decided to retire, given that the returns of performance per dollar when compared to an Intel x86/x64 machine are pretty lousy. The PowerPC hardware was just too clunky - sure, it may have had a 2ghz cpu, which would be equivalent to a (ballpark figure) Intel 1ghz cpu.

Since Apple is 'aimed' at professional users of graphics intensive hardware, the change was deemed big enough to keep those users away from Microsoft, and encourage other users to return/adopt.

Oh,well that explains alot guys,thanks.Like I said I was just curious after reading Ghosts announcement.

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Tiger was built on a hardware platform Apple decided to retire, given that the returns of performance per dollar when compared to an Intel x86/x64 machine are pretty lousy. The PowerPC hardware was just too clunky - sure, it may have had a 2ghz cpu, which would be equivalent to a (ballpark figure) Intel 1ghz cpu.

Since Apple is 'aimed' at professional users of graphics intensive hardware, the change was deemed big enough to keep those users away from Microsoft, and encourage other users to return/adopt.

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PowerPC wasn't 'clunky' as much as it was falling behind from a manufacturing/deployment point of view. Apple and IBM were the only desktop/laptop purchasers and the vast numbers required to sustain the research, development and manufacturing were always going to put them on a competitive disadvantage on one front or another.

The death knell for PowerPC on Apple hardware was when IBM decided that Apple should pay for the next generation of PowerPC laptop variant (low power 970/G5 and G6 desktops). Apple refused, and that was pretty much the end of PPC Macs. By 2005-2006 Apple had no choice but to pick x86/x64 if they wanted to remain price and performance competitive since the Intel/AMD wars had advanced x86 deployments so aggressively.

PowerPC still exists on high end iron, with POWER6 currently and POWER7 on the way, and today PPC thrives in low power applications as well, especially in satellite and automotive controllers. And PowerPC-like variants lives in the CPUs of Wii, Xbox360 and PS3.

The performance comparison you cite would be comparing a PPC970 of yesteryear to today's Core2/i7 CPUs. Hardly a fair comparison, but valid. I'd put the 970 up against the Pentium 4s, since they are of the same era, and actually of similar performance.

I remember reading articles about the processor wars.

Turns out that the PowerPC variant Apple was using was being retired by IBM. To replace it, Apple had 3 choices: Switch to IBM's "pro line" PowerPC's at a much higher unit cost, which would have saved the effort of converting software over; Switch to IBM's new low-cost Cell processor, which would also require software rewrites, and no promises of a standard instruction set; Or switch to Intel, which would also require software rewrites, but only once, as it's been standardized for years.

If Apple went with the pro PowerPC, the unit cost of each Mac would have gone up significantly, thought the software would have stayed the same.

The Cell would have *reduced* the price of each Mac, but the software transition may have killed the platform. Especially if it had to be done again a few years later.

Intel was an obvious answer, because it would only take one software transition (albeit a difficult one) and thought it cost more than Cell, it was far less than the pro PowerPC. The timing was right, too, with Transitive technology's on-the-fly PowerPC-to-Intel translation software coming available.

So that's why we have Intel today. It was purely a business decision which happened to be in our favor.

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Tiger is several years old now, and every machine that can run Tiger can run Leopard.

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Unfortunately that is false.

I am currently maintaining an iBook (700 MHz G3) that can run Tiger just fine but, alas, cannot run Leopard. Leopard requires G4 or higher.

This of course has nothing to do with CoH for Mac since this is an old PPC Mac that cannot run CoH in any form.

I suspect that you meant to write the following true statement.

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Tiger is several years old now, and every Intel machine that can run Tiger can run Leopard.

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[ QUOTE ]
Tiger is several years old now, and every machine that can run Tiger can run Leopard.

[/ QUOTE ]

Unfortunately that is false.

I am currently maintaining an iBook (700 MHz G3) that can run Tiger just fine but, alas, cannot run Leopard. Leopard requires G4 or higher.

This of course has nothing to do with CoH for Mac since this is an old PPC Mac that cannot run CoH in any form.

I suspect that you meant to write the following true statement.

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Tiger is several years old now, and every Intel machine that can run Tiger can run Leopard.

[/ QUOTE ]

[/ QUOTE ]
Leopard is only officially supported on 867MHz and faster G4 processors. However, using 3rd-party utilities, you can run it on G4 processors of lower clock speeds, and I believe there were reports of it running on lower-speed G3 processors as well, similar to the people that got Windows 7 running on a Pentium II. (You can also use 3rd-party software to run OS 9.2 and earlier versions of OS X, such as 10.2 and 10.3, on non-G3 systems.)

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I remember reading articles about the processor wars.

Turns out that the PowerPC variant Apple was using was being retired by IBM. To replace it, Apple had 3 choices: Switch to IBM's "pro line" PowerPC's at a much higher unit cost, which would have saved the effort of converting software over; Switch to IBM's new low-cost Cell processor, which would also require software rewrites, and no promises of a standard instruction set; Or switch to Intel, which would also require software rewrites, but only once, as it's been standardized for years.

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Also, Apple had always keept an in-house version of OSX running on Intel CPUs since the jump to that new kernel, since, after all, the original OSX (NextStep) was an x86 OS.

In the keynote when the switch was announced all this was noted, but it had been very well "known" by the die hard mac community that frequented rumor sites since day one of OSX. Heck, when it was still called Rhapsody there were demos done on Intel machines, at that point rumors of dual CPU support were strong and the Intel version even behaved windows-like (menus on windows instead of top of screen.)

So truth is, there was no rewrite needed at all to just go Intel, it would just kill Classic mode.

PumBumbler: your avatar is extremely disturbing.

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PumBumbler: your avatar is extremely disturbing.

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Thanks, I got the inspiration from this thread.

More info on this for those who really want it:

CoH likely can't support Tiger (OS X 10.4) any longer because it may now be using features of Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6) that are not available in Tiger, such as:

- OpenGL - Leopard and Snow Leopard have much newer versions with features that aren't available in Tiger. They could use an older feature set, but to make the CoH client better and more usable, new OpenGL features are usually better. Since Apple rarely releases OpenGL separately from the OS like Microsoft does with DirectX, making the older OS unsupported is the obvious option.

- Tar/Gzip - the Updater uses Tar and Gzip that are part of Leopard and Snow Leopard. The older version in Tiger may have been the source of some of the updater issues present in the last Training Room build.

- Webkit - The Updater may use Webkit features only available as a part of the latest Safari, which may not be supported by Tiger.

- XCode - The Updater and Cider portions of CoH for Mac may be compiled by XCode versions that are not guaranteed compatible with Tiger, and installing compatibility modules may be causing the compile to fail. The solution most programmers opt for at this point is to limit to newer versions of OS X.

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Also, Apple had always keept an in-house version of OSX running on Intel CPUs since the jump to that new kernel, since, after all, the original OSX (NextStep) was an x86 OS.

I.[/QUOTE]


I know that this is an old thread, but I feel the need to correct you on this. I had a NeXT Cube at work, its was an m68k, while the originaleXTStep was not x86, OpenStep was (the next generation of the NeXT OS, written to run on standard i386 hardware.

NeXTStep (as well as OpenStep, and OS X are all based on the Mach microkernel developed ay Carnegie-Mellon, and as such, it was near trivial to port OS X to i386 based hardware. The Mach microkernel sits in between the main OS userland and graphical bits, and essentially means that you can run things not written hardware -specific on it. This was the point of all these translation layers that Apple had (ie. universal binaries, that had separate hardware dependent stuff in dynamic libraries, but the main programmatical stuff in other linked files that were exactly the same per application.).

The reliance upon Mach makes things a lot easier, because overall you just need to port the kernel and device drivers, and then the app just needs to have a dynamic library to hook into the specific hardware if needed (ie. PPC logic board hardwares, as opposed to Intel ones might have different coprocessors, different device drivers to hook into that the microkernel conducts information for - for something say, like CoH, the main architecture dependent stuff would be graphics - the cider implementation based on WINE would need to support the graphical engine for the PPC mac, via that abstraction layer, its too much work, which is why only x86 macs are supported, plus cider/wine was not ported to the PPC mach microkernel).

Anyway, enough of that, I just wanted to correct the assumption - the OS X architecture is not like say, Linux, or even FreeBSD... where the kernel is similar to Windows NT's HAL kernel... the device drivers sit on top of it, as does the application support layer, which enables you to have many different hardware architectures supported easily - if needed (ie. the ARM processor in the iPhone)