Make Your Own Mac Pi For Some Desktop Nostalgia

Mac Pi

Do you miss your Mac Classic? Well if you’re looking for a fun little project, why not build yourself a Mini Mac Pi that emulates Mac OS 7?

It’s a fairly simple project that makes use of the Raspberry Pi B, a 320×240 2.8″ touchscreen LCD (the PiTFT), a lithium-ion battery, a buck-boost circuit and of course, a power switch. The cute enclosure is made by 3D printing, and all the files are available on Thingiverse — they’ve been sliced up in a way that they will be printable on most consumer printer bed sizes.

Once everything is assembled, you’ll need to run Mini vMac alongside Raspbian in order to run Mac OS 7. There are a few caveats though — The original resolution is 512×342, so there’s a bit of screen clipping that occurs. There’s also minor application support, but for the purpose of nostalgia, we think the included selection is more than enough to satisfy most memories.

The Mac Classic was a specific model of Mac, and the form factor between the 128/512/Plus, SE, and Classic lines are *extremely* similar and often confused. This design features the post-Snow White design language found only in the Mac Classic, and can rightfully be referred to as such. -ed

10 thoughts on “Make Your Own Mac Pi For Some Desktop Nostalgia

  1. I have to imagine there is a way to emulate an 040 mac with a Beagleboard or RasPi. At that point, I’m happy to find a way to graft-on a larger display. Oh, the nostalgia… I actually have a working powerbook 180c in the cabinet.

  2. Here’s something similar from last year:

    hackaday.com/2013/08/28/a-one-third-scale-macintosh/

    It’s too bad sound doesn’t work 100% in Mini vMac on Raspbian. There are a lot of well-done shareware games for the platform.

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