bluescsi

2 Articles

BlueSCSI: Not Just For Apple

October 13, 2025 by 11 Comments

Anyone into retro Macintosh machines has probably heard of BlueSCSI: an RP2040-based adapter that lets solid state flash memory sit on the SCSI bus and pretend to contain hard drives. You might have seen it on an Amiga or an Atari as well, but what about a PC? Once upon a time, higher end PCs did use SCSI, and [TME Retro] happened to have one such. Not a fan of spinning platters of rust, he takes us through using BlueSCSI with a big-blue-based-box.

Naturally if you wish to replicate this, you should check the BlueSCSI docs to see if the SCSI controller in your PC is on their supported hardware list; otherwise, your life is going to be a lot more difficult than what is depicted on [TME Retro]. As is, it’s pretty much the same drop-in experience anyone who has used BlueSCSI on a vintage Macintosh might expect. Since the retro-PC world might not be as familiar with that, [TME Retro] gives a great step-by-step, showing how to set up hard disk image files and an iso to emulate a SCSI CD drive on the SD card that goes into the BlueSCSIv2.

This may not be news to some of you, but as the title of this video suggests, not everyone knows that BlueSCSI works with PCs now, even if it has been in the docs for a while. Of course PCs owners are more likely to be replacing an IDE drive; if you’d rather use a true SSD on that bus, we’ve got you covered.

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Access The Information Superhighway With A Mac Plus

October 17, 2024 by 5 Comments

For some time now, Apple has developed a reputation for manufacturing computers and phones that are not particularly repairable or upgradable. While this reputation is somewhat deserved, especially in recent years, it seems less true for their older machines. With the second and perhaps most influential computer, the Apple II, being so upgradable that the machine had a production run of nearly two decades. Similarly, the Macintosh Plus of 1986 was surprisingly upgradable and repairable and [Hunter] demonstrates its capabilities by bringing one onto the modern Internet, albeit with a few tricks to adapt the old hardware and software to the modern era.

The Mac Plus was salvaged from a thrift store, and the first issue to solve was that it had some rotten capacitors that had to be replaced before the computer could be reliably powered on at all. [Hunter] then got to work bringing this computer online, with the only major hardware modification being a BlueSCSI hard drive emulator which allows using an SD card instead of an original hard disk. It can also emulate an original Macintosh Ethernet card, allowing it to fairly easily get online.

The original operating system and browser don’t support modern protocols such as HTTPS or scripting languages like Javascript or CSS, so a tool called MacProxy was used to bridge this gap. It serves simplified HTML from the Internet to the Mac Plus, but [Hunter] wanted it to work even better, adding modular domain-specific handling to allow the computer to more easily access sites like Reddit, YouTube, and even Hackaday, although he does call us out a bit for not maintaining our retro page perhaps as well as it ought to be.

[Hunter] has also built an extension to use the Wayback Machine to serve websites to the Mac from a specific date in the past, which really enhances the retro feel of using a computer like this to access the Internet. Of course, if you don’t have original Macintosh hardware but still want to have the same experience of the early Internet or retro hardware this replica Mac will get you there too.

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