macintosh

55 Articles

The Most Inexpensive Apple Computer Possible

November 7, 2024 by 20 Comments

If Apple has a reputation for anything other than decent hardware and excellent industrial design, it’s for selling its products at extremely inflated prices. But there are some alternatives if you want the Apple experience on the cheap. Buying their hardware a few years out of date of course is one way to avoid the bulk of the depreciation, but at the extreme end is this working Mac clone that cost just $14.

This build relies on the fact that modern microcontrollers absolutely blow away the computing power available to the average consumer in the 1980s. To emulate the Macintosh 128K, this build uses nothing more powerful than a Raspberry Pi Pico. There’s a little bit more to it than that, though, since this build also replicates the feel of the screen of the era as well. Using a “hat” for the Pi Pico from [Ron’s Computer Videos] lets the Pico’s remaining system resources send the video signal from the emulated Mac out over VGA, meaning that monitors from the late 80s and on can be used with ease. There’s an option for micro SD card storage as well, allowing the retro Mac to have an incredible amount of storage compared to the original.

The emulation of the 80s-era Mac is available on a separate GitHub page for anyone wanting to take a look at that. A VGA monitor is not strictly required, but we do feel that displaying retro computer graphics on 4K OLEDs leaves a little something out of the experience of older machines like this, even if they are emulated. Although this Macintosh replica with a modern e-ink display does an excellent job of recreating the original monochrome displays of early Macs as well.

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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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Retro Hackintosh Made From Retro Parts

March 25, 2024 by 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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ThunderScan: The Wild 1980s Product That Turned A Printer Into A Scanner

December 12, 2023 by 27 Comments

Back in the 1980s, printers were expensive things. Scanners were rare, particularly for the home market, because home computers could barely handle basic graphics anyway. Back in these halcyon days, an obscure company called Thunderware built a device to convert the former into the latter. It was known as the Thunderscan, and was a scanning head built for the Apple ImageWriter dot matrix printer. Weird enough already, but this device hides some weird secrets in its design.

The actual scanning method was simple enough; the device mounted a carriage to the printer head of the ImageWriter. In that carriage was an optical reflective sensor which was scanned across a page horizontally while it was fed through the printer. So far, so normal.

The hilarious part is how the scanner actually delivered data to the Macintosh computer it was hooked up to. It did precisely nothing with the serial data lines at all, these were left for the computer to command the printer. Instead, the output of the analog optical sensor was fed to a voltage-to-frequency converter, which was then hooked up to the handshake/clock-in pin on the serial port.

The scanner software simply looked at the rate at which new characters were becoming available on the serial port as the handshake pin was toggled at various frequencies by the output of the optical sensor. Faster toggling of the pin indicated a darker section of the image, slower corresponded to lighter.

Interestingly, [Andy Hertzfeld] also has his own stories to tell on the development, for which his software contribution seems to have netted him a great sum of royalties over the years. It’s funny to think how mainstream scanners once were; and yet we barely think about them today beyond a few niche uses. Times, they change.

Thanks to [J. Peterson] for the tip!

Designing A Macintosh-to-VGA Adapter With An LM1881

October 7, 2023 by 3 Comments
Old-school Macintosh-to-VGA adapter. Just solve for X, set the right DIP switches and you’re golden.

If you’re the happy owner of a vintage Apple system like a 1989 Macintosh IIci you may know the pain of keeping working monitors around. Unless it’s a genuine Apple-approved CRT with the proprietary DA-15-based video connector, you are going to need at least an adapter studded with DIP switches to connect it to other monitors. Yet as [Steve] recently found out, the Macintosh’s rather selective use of video synchronization signals causes quite a headache when you try to hook up a range of VGA-equipped LCD monitors. A possible solution? Extracting the sync signal using a Texas Instruments LM1881 video sync separator chip.

Much of this trouble comes from the way that these old Apple systems output the analog video signal, which goes far beyond the physical differences of the DA-15 versus the standard DE-15 D-subminiature connectors. Whereas the VGA standard defines the RGB signals along with a VSYNC and HSYNC signal, the Apple version can generate HSYNC, VSYC, but also CSYNC (composite sync). Which sync signal is generated depends on what value the system reads on the three sense pins on the DA-15 connector, as a kind of crude monitor ID.

Theoretically this should be easy to adapt to, you might think, but the curveball Apple throws here is that for the monitor ID that outputs both VSYNC and HSYNC you are limited to a fixed resolution of 640 x 870, which is not the desired 640 x 480. The obvious solution is then to target the one monitor configuration with this output resolution, and extract the CSYNC (and sync-on-green) signal which it outputs, so that it can be fudged into a more VGA-like sync signal. Incidentally, it seems that [Steve]’s older Dell 2001FP LCD monitor does support sync-on-green and CSYNC, whereas newer LCD monitors no longer list this as a feature, which is why now more than a passive adapter is needed.

Although still a work-in-progress, so far [Steve] has managed to get an image on a number of these newer LCDs by using the LM1881 to extract CSYNC and obtain a VSYNC signal this way, while using the CSYNC as a sloppy HSYNC alternative. Other ICs also can generate an HSYNC signal from CSYNC, but those cost a bit more than the ~USD$3 LM1881.

Increasing System Memory With The Flick Of A Switch

June 5, 2023 by 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 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!