Retro Hackintosh Made From Retro Parts

March 25, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 20 Comments

Apple as a company, has staked most of its future around being a “walled garden” where it controls everything from the hardware up through the user experience. In some ways this is good for users; the hardware is generally high quality and vetted by the company creating the software, making for a very uniform experience. This won’t stop some people from trying to get Apple’s operating systems and other software running on unapproved hardware though. These “Hackintosh” computers were much more common in the Intel era but this replica goes even further back to the Macintosh era.

Originally [Kevin] had ordered an authentic Macintosh with the intent of getting it working again, but a broken floppy disk drive and lack of replacement parts turned this project into a different beast. He used the Mac instead as a model for a new 3D-printed case, spending a ton of time sanding, filling, and finishing it to get it to look nearly indistinguishable from the original. The hardware going in this replica is an old Linux-based thin client machine running the Mini vMac operating system, with a modified floppy drive the computer uses to boot. A hidden SD card slot helps interface with modern computers. The display is a modern LCD, though a sheet of acrylic glued to the front panel replicates a bit of the CRT curve.

Click through to read on!

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Crusty: The Story Of The Mac SE That Could

January 23, 2024 by Adam Fabio 24 Comments

Retrocomputing often involves careful restorations, rare components, and white gloves. This story involves none of those. This is the story of two people who sought to answer one of the greatest questions in the universe: What does it take to kill a Mac SE?

The star of the show here is Crusty, a Mac SE that was found on the loading dock of a scrap company. It sat out in the weather for at least 6 months, complete with the original leaking lithium battery.

Enter [RadRacer203], who is friends with the owner of this particular scrap company. [RadRacer203] and picked up Crusty, along with a few other classic Macs. He brought these machines to VCF East 2021, where our other hero comes in. [CJ] is something of a magician with CRTs and analog electronics. Trained under [Sark] himself, [CJ] has mastered the 5-finger exploding capacitor technique.

The battery had eaten through the mainboard and even into the chassis. But after a thorough cleaning, the damn thing booted up. Crusty was born.

This Mac was a survivor. Much like Top Gear and their plucky Toyota Hilux, [RadRacer203] and [CJ] devised a plan to put Crusty to the test.

Click through the break for more!

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Apple System 7… On Solaris?

November 8, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 17 Comments

While the Unix operating systems Solaris and HP-UX are still in active development, they’re not particularly popular anymore and are mostly relegated to some enterprise and data center environments They did enjoy a peak of popularity in the 90s during the “wild west” era of windowed operating systems, though. This was a time when there were more than two mass-market operating systems commercially available, with many companies fighting for market share. This led to a number of efforts to get software written for one operating system to run on others, whether that was simply porting software directly or using some compatibility layer. Surprisingly enough it was possible in this era to run an entire instance of Mac System 7 within either of these two Unix operating systems, and this was an officially supported piece of Apple software.

The software was called the Macintosh Application Environment (MAE), and was an effort by Apple to bring Macintosh System 7 applications to various Unix-based operating systems, including Solaris and HP-UX. This was a time before Apple’s OS was Unix-compliant, and MAE provided a compatibility layer that translated Macintosh system calls and application programming interfaces (APIs) into the equivalent Unix calls, allowing Mac software to function within the Unix environments. [Lunduke] outlines a lot of the features of this in his post, including some of the details the “scaffolding” allowing the 68k processor to be emulated efficiently on the hardware of the time, the contents of the user manual, and even the memory management and layout.

What’s really jarring to anyone only familiar with Apple’s modern “walled garden” approach is that this is an Apple-supported compatibility layer for another system. At the time, though, they weren’t the technology giant they are today and had to play by a different set of rules to stay viable. Quite the opposite, in fact: they almost went out of business in the mid-90s, so having their software run on as many machines as possible would have been a perk at the time. While this era did have major issues with cross-platform compatibility, there was some software that attempted to solve these problems that are still in active development today.

Thanks to [Stephen] for the tip!

Quake 2 Ported To Apple Watch

September 6, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield No comments

DOOM always seems to spontaneously appear on any new device the day it’s released. From printers to industrial robots to pregnancy tests, it always makes its way on anything with an integrated circuit and a screen. But that’s not the only 90s video game with a cult following and and ability to run on hardware never intended for gaming. The early Quake games are still remarkably popular, and the second installment of this series was recently brought to the Apple Watch thanks to [ByteOverlord].

Building this classic for the Apple Watch requires using the original Quake files and some work with Xcode to get a package together that will run on the wrist-bound computer. There are a few other minimum system requirements to meet as well, but with all of that out of the way the latest release runs fairly well on this small watch. The controls have been significantly modified to use the Apple’s touch screen and digital crown instead of any peripherals, and as a result it’s not likely you’d win any matches if it was possible to cross-play with PC users with a setup like this, but it’s definitely playable although still missing a few features compared to the PC version.

This actually isn’t the first Quake game to be ported to the Apple Watch, either. The first version of Quake ran on this device thanks to [MyOwnClone]’s efforts a little over a year ago. It’s also not the first time we’ve seen Quake running on unusual Apple hardware, either. Take a look at this project which uses one of the early iPods to play this game, along with the scroll wheel for a one-of-a-kind controller.

Thanks to [Joni] for the tip!

Hackaday Links: July 2, 2023

July 2, 2023 by Dan Maloney 21 Comments

Members of Pixelbar woke up to shocking news on Wednesday morning this week as they learned that a fire had destroyed the building housing their Rotterdam hackerspace. Pictures of the fire are pretty dramatic and show the entire building ablaze. We’re not familiar with Pixelbar specifically, but most hackerspaces seem to share space with other businesses in repurposed warehouses and other industrial buildings, and it looks like that was the case here. Local coverage doesn’t indicate that a cause has been determined, but they do say that “large batches of wood” were stored in or near the structure, which likely contributed to the dramatic display. There don’t seem to be reports of injuries to civilians or first responders, so that’s a blessing, but Pixelbar seems to have been completely destroyed. If you’re in a position to help, check out their GoFundMe page. As our own Jenny List, who currently lives in The Netherlands, points out, spaces suitable for housing a hackerspace are hard to come by in a city like Rotterdam, which is the busiest port in Europe. That means Pixelbar members will be competing for space with businesses that have far deeper pockets, so anything you can donate will likely go a long way toward rebuilding.

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Increasing System Memory With The Flick Of A Switch

June 5, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 17 Comments

There’s an apocryphal quote floating around the internet that “640K ought to be enough memory for anybody” but it does seem unlikely that this was ever actually said by any famous computer moguls of the 1980s. What is true, however, is that in general more computer memory tends to be better than less. In fact, this was the basis for the Macintosh 512k in the 1980s, whose main feature was that it was essentially the same machine as the Macintosh 128k, but with quadruple the memory as its predecessor. If you have yet to upgrade to the 512k, though, it might be best to take a look at this memory upgrade instead.

The Fat Mac Switcher, as it is called by its creator [Kay Koba], can upgrade the memory capability of these retro Apple machines with the simple push of a switch. The switch and controller logic sit on a separate PCB that needs to be installed into the computer’s motherboard in place of some of the existing circuitry. The computer itself needs its 16 memory modules replaced with 41256 DRAM modules for this to work properly though, but once its installed it can switch seamlessly between 512k and 128k modes.

Another interesting quirk of the retro Macintosh scene is that the technically inferior 128k models tend to be valued higher than the more capable 512k versions, despite being nearly identical otherwise. There are also some other interesting discussions on one of the forum posts about this build as well. This module can also be used in reverse; by installing it in a Macintosh 512k the computer can be downgraded to the original Macintosh 128k. For this the memory modules won’t need to be upgraded but a different change to the motherboard is required.

A product like this certainly would have been a welcome addition in the mid 80s when these machines were first introduced, since the 512k was released only months after the 128k machines were, but the retrocomputing enthusiasts should still get some use out of this device and be more able to explore the differences between the two computers. If you never were able to experience one of these “original” Macintosh computers in their heyday, check out this fully-functional one-third scale replica.

FPS Game Engine Built In Ancient Macintosh HyperCard Software

January 27, 2023 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

Wolfenstein 3D and Doom are great examples of early FPS games. Back in that era, as Amiga was slowly losing its gaming supremacy to the PC, Apple wasn’t even on the playing field. However, [Chris Tully] has used the 90s HyperCard platform to create an FPS of his own, and it’s charming in what it achieves.

If you’re not familiar with it, HyperCard was a strange combination of database, programming language, and graphical interface system all rolled into one. It made developing GUI apps for the Macintosh platform simpler, with some limitations. It was certainly never intended for making pseudo-3D video games, but that just makes [Chris’s] achievement all the more impressive.

At this stage, [Chris’s] game doesn’t feature any NPCs, weapons, or items yet. It’s thus more of a First Person Walker than First Person Shooter. It features four small rooms with perpendicular, vertical walls, rendered either greyscale or 8-bit color. Now that he’s got the basic engine running, [Chris] is looking to recreate a bit of a Doom RPG experience, rather than copying Doom itself. He hopes to add everything from monsters to weapons, lava, and working HUD elements. If you want to dive in to the code, you can – HyperCard “stacks”, as they’re known, are made up of readily editable scripts.

[Chris] built the project to celebrate the aesthetic and limitations of the original Mac platform. While it could technically run on original hardware, it would run incredibly slowly. It currently takes several seconds to update the viewport on an emulated Mac Plus with 4MB of RAM. Thankfully, emulation on a modern PC can be sped up a lot to help the framerate.

We love seeing HyperCard pushed far beyond its original limits. We’ve seen it before, too, such as when it was used on a forgotten 90s Apple phone prototype. If you’ve been hacking away on retro software yourself, we’d love to see your projects on the tipsline!