Most of us will know that Apple’s precursor to the Macintosh series of computers was a machine called the Lisa. Something of a behemoth compared to those early Macs, it had a price to match and wasn’t a commercial success. Working Lisas survive, but unlike a Mac you won’t find many at your local swapmeet. But what if you really must try this early Apple GUI? Never fear, because [AlexElectronics] is here with a much more accessible version on a FPGA.
This Lisa has a surprisingly large PCB compared to the size of the FPGA, because of the number of connectors. It takes the approach of mixing new and old in interfaces, for example as well as original Lisa keyboard and mouse support, you can also use modern USB versions. There’s also an HDMI output for a modern monitor, and an SD card. Unexpectedly alongside the FPGA there’s a 40-pin DIP, it’s a UART chip because there’s no handy pre-built one for that particular chip. We’re told it will be up on GitHub when finalized.
Keeping old computers alive, especially rare ones, is hard. We like projects like this one, and we hope to see more developments. Meanwhile you can see the machine in the video below.
Thanks [Tom Stepleton] for the tip!
A few decades ago, there was a German tinkerer who built a Lisa compatible from scratch..
Later on, it was modified to run a patchee copy of Mac’s System OS.
Info: https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/open-sourcing-the-lisa-macs-bigger-sister/#comment-6584214
Heres the non FPGA version by the same author
https://github.com/alexthecat123/Lisa-PCBs
Alex was also involved IIRC in Adrian’s Digital Basement Lisa restoration, which went pretty well and was fun to watch.
The economics of PCBs are weird its cheaper to buy large numbers of large PCBs than to buy small numbers of small PCBs… lots of setup and handing costs. So a gut level estimate just glancing at a .jpg I think it’ll be like $150 to $1500 depending on if you order 1 engineering prototype from China or qty 1000.
What I do know about the LISA is they did early serial number locked DRM so I assume the FPGA can be programmed to be any unlocked copy of the OS. In that way its probably simpler to use the FPGA than to figure out how to change the serial # on a discrete copy.