Mac Plus Becomes A Vector Display

June 16, 2019 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

The vintage Macintosh all-in-one computers were a design icon, as well as being highly useful machines in the 80s and 90s. In the decades since, they’ve been used for everything from web servers to aquariums, but that’s not all. [Arcade Jason] decided to grab an old Macintosh Plus and turn it into a vector display.

The hack starts with the opening of a Macintosh, which naturally requires a long screwdriver with the right tip. Setting the stage for things to come, this is achieved by soldering together a couple of existing tools to get the reach he needs. [Jason] then proceeds to install a brightness control for the main electron gun, as well as deflection drivers and a spot killing circuit. Everything is done with the intention of the hack being reversible, as [Jason] didn’t wish to sacrifice a good Macintosh Plus just for the sake of having some fun.

For those unfamiliar with vector cathode-ray displays and the manner in which they are driven, [Arcade Jason] does a great job explaining the basics. A set of magnetic coils is used to alter the trajectory of an electron fired at the screen. If you aim those electrons in ordered lines from left-to-right, top-to-bottom you’ve created a raster display. If you instead guide the electrons to follow the shapes you want to appear on the screen you’ve created a vector display.

We can’t help but feel this would be a hilarious way to troll at a demoscene meetup. We’ve seen [Jason]’s vector work before, too — like this impressive color Asteroids hack.

Macintosh API Comes To Linux, Android

January 26, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

Unlike DOS, early versions of Windows, and most *nixes, the classic Mac operating system is weird. Contained in the ROM are subroutines to draw windows, pop up dialog boxes, and other various tasks purely related to the UI. On other systems, this would be separate from the BIOS, but in your Mac from the 80s, everything is baked into the ROM and hidden deep in the operating system. This has caused many problems for emulation; you can’t emulate an old Mac without a ROM or without a real installation of the operating system. Where BeOS — a cool but entirely forgettable operating system — has an Open Source reimplementation of the programming API, there’s nothing like that for a computer that at one point had a ten percent market share. This is weird, and we’ve all been waiting for someone to come up with an Open Source reimplementation of the Macintosh Toolbox, the API that’s responsible for everything from LoadRunner to Shufflepuck.

Now that day has finally come. The Advanced Mac Substitute is an API-level reimplementation of the classic Mac OS. You can now run classic Mac apps on Linux and Android without using an Apple ROM or Apple system software.

The Advanced Mac Substitute (AMS) is a project from [Josh Juran] to run old (pre-OS 7) Mac software without an Apple ROM. For the last twenty years, Macintosh emulators have required Apple ROMs and/or installation media because the API calls will redirect to the ROM. Unlike other emulation projects, the AMS does not attempt to emulate the hardware, except for the 68k processor. It simply launches directly into an application with the frontend being a generic bitmap terminal. This means there is no OS to speak of, but that also means we finally get flatpak for the classic Mac OS.

AMS is still in the very early phases of development; keyboards don’t work on some systems, and it doesn’t work on the latest versions of MacOS at all. Additionally, there’s no support for System 7 applications. That said, this is an excellent advance in the state of Macintosh emulation. If you’d like an example of how cool this could be, go play some Oregon Trail and tell me how awesome playing Shufflepuck or Glider on a webpage would be.

Unobtanium Bezels Finally Modeled For 3D Printing

January 19, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

In 1991, Apple released the Quadra line of computers, named after their utilization of the new Motorola 68040 CPU. The Quadra line initially consisted of two models, the Quadra 700 and the Quadra 900. These two models, and the Quadra 950, released as a slight upgrade to the 900, were the peak of performance. You could conceivably load these machines up with 256 Megabytes of RAM, in an era where hard drives hovered around 80 Megabytes. This much RAM would cost as much as a house. These were powerhouses, the first ProTools workstations, and they ran Jurassic Park. If you wanted peak performance in the early 90s, you got a Quadra.

The Quadra 900 and 950 were tower computers, and there were options for floppy, Zip drives, Bernoulli drives, and a CD-ROM drive. They were introduced a little before the ‘multimedia’ hubub, and right now, the plastic bezel for the CD-ROM option is an absurdly expensive piece of plastic. People have paid $150 for an original CD-ROM bezel. Seems like the perfect application of 3D printing, doesn’t it? That’s exactly what [360alaska] over on the 68k Macintosh Liberation Army forms did. The unobtanium bezel can now be sent off to Shapeways.

This project is a continuation of a thread where various forum members shared their .STLs for random bits of Apple plastic, ranging from rubber feet for PowerBooks to the clip-on ‘programmer’s switch’ for the Macintosh SE. The crowning achievement of this community endeavour is the Quadra 950 CD-ROM bezel. There are a few varieties, ranging from one that fits a standard 5 1/4″ drive, to a nearly exact replica of the official Apple offering for their official drive. All the files are there for the downloadin’.

Printing these bezels will be a bit of a challenge for a filament-based printer, but resin printers are getting cheap and Shapeways is always there for you. Painting to match the brominated patina of old plastic is also a challenge, but the forum members have had some success with off-the-shelf spray paints.

Apple’s Best Computer Gets WiFi

September 26, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

The greatest computer Apple will ever make isn’t the Apple II, it isn’t the Bondi Blue iMac, it isn’t the trash can, and it certainly isn’t whatever overheating mess they’re pushing out now. The best computer Apple will ever make is the SE/30, at its time a server in a tiny portable shell, and capable of supporting 128 Megabytes of RAM thirty years ago.

Over the years, people have extended and expanded the SE/30 to absolutely ludicrous degrees, but now we have a simple way of adding WiFi to this classic computer. Over on the 68kmla forums, [ants] discovered a tiny cheap card that could easily serve as an Ethernet to WiFi bridge. After attaching this card to a Danaport Ethernet card and bending some aluminum for a bracket, they had a WiFi antenna sticking out of the back of a 30-year-old computer.

But adding a WiFi card to an old computer is nothing new — this could have been done with a Pi, or if you’re a hacker, a TP-Link router flashed with OpenWRT. To really do this right, you’ll need integration with the operating system, and that’s where this build goes off the rails. [ants] wrote a WiFi extension for System 7 (with the relevant GitHub)

The problem with the Vonets WiFi card is that configuration has to be done through a browser. Since there are no modern browsers for classic macs, this meant either pulling out a PowerBook or doing the configuration through your daily driver desktop PC. The WiFi extension gets around that by giving a classic mac the ability to configure the Vonets card almost automatically. This extension also looks like how you would configure the WiFi on a modern mac, complete with the WiFi icon in the toolbar. It’s beautiful, and one of the rare examples of modern 68k mac programming.

As for what you can do by adding WiFi to a 30-year-old computer with a 16MHz processor, the answer is a resounding, ‘not much’. Your choice of browsers is limited (iCab seems to be the best), but you can load the Google homepage slowly. HTTPS isn’t going to work, and the Internet right now is full of megabytes of Javascript cruft. If you find a nice, lightweight web page — such as the Hackaday Retro Edition, for example — you’re looking at a capable web browsing machine. Of course, the real use case for giving the SE/30 WiFi is file transfer around the home network, but still: it’s WiFi for the best computer Apple ever made.

Apple Passwords: They All ‘Just Work’

January 12, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 40 Comments

When the Macintosh was released some thirty-odd years ago, to Steve Jobs’ triumphant return in the late 90s, there was one phrase to describe the simplicity of using a Mac. ‘It Just Works’. Whether this was a reference to the complete lack of games on the Mac (Marathon shoutout, tho) or a statement to the user-friendliness of the Mac, one thing is now apparent. Apple has improved the macOS to such a degree that all passwords just work. That is to say, security on the latest versions of macOS is abysmal, and every few weeks a new bug is reported.

The first such security vulnerability in macOS High Sierra was reported by [Lemi Ergin] on Twitter. Simply, anyone could login as root with an empty password after clicking the login button several times. The steps to reproduce were as simple as opening System Preferences, Clicking the lock to make changes, typing ‘root’ in the username field, and clicking the Unlock button. It should go without saying this is incredibly insecure, and although this is only a local exploit, it’s a mind-numbingly idiotic exploit. This issue was quickly fixed by Apple in the Security Update 2017-001

The most recent password flaw comes in the form of unlocking the App Store preferences that can be unlocked with any password. The steps to reproduce on macOS High Sierra are simply:

Click on System Preferences
Click on App Store
Click the padlock icon
Enter your username and any password
Click unlock

This issue has been fixed in the beta of macOS 10.13.3, which should be released within a month. The bug does not exist in macOS Sierra version 10.12.6 or earlier.

This is the second bug in macOS in as many months where passwords just work. Or don’t work, depending on how cheeky you want to be. While these bugs have been overshadowed with recent exploits of Intel’s ME and a million blog posts on Meltdown, these are very, very serious bugs that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. And, where there are two, there’s probably more.

We don’t know what’s up with the latest version of the macOS and the password problems, but we are eagerly awaiting the Medium post from a member of the macOS team going over these issues. We hope to see that in a decade or two.

Jeroen Domburg Miniaturizes A Mac

November 27, 2017 by Dan Maloney 20 Comments

His name may not ring a bell, but his handle will — Sprite_tm, a regular to these pages and to Hackaday events around the world. Hailing from The Netherlands by way of Shanghai, Jeroen Domburg dropped by the Hackaday Superconference 2017 to give a talk on a pet project of his: turning a Macintosh into, well, a pet.

You could say this is Jeroen’s second minification of vintage hardware. At last year’s Hackaday Superconference, he brought out the tiniest Game Boy ever made. This incredible hardware and software hack stuffs a complete Game Boy into something you can lose in your pocket. How do you top a miniature version of the most iconic video game system ever made? By creating a miniature version of the most iconic computer ever made, of course.

The tiny object in front of Jeroen in the title image is, in fact, a working Macintosh Plus that he built. Recreating mid-80’s technology using 2017 parts seems like it would be easy, and while it’s obviously easier than breaking the laws of physics to go the other direction, Jeroen faced some serious challenges along the way, which he goes into some detail about in his talk.

Continue reading “Jeroen Domburg Miniaturizes A Mac” →

The Other Way To Brick A Mac Classic

April 5, 2017 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

Why would you build a mini Mac Classic using LEGO and a Raspberry Pi? Well, why wouldn’t you?

[Jannis Hermanns] couldn’t find a reason to control this outburst of nostalgia for the good old days of small, expensive computers and long hours spent clawing through the LEGO bin to find The Perfect Piece to finish a build. It turns out that the computer part of this replica was the easy part — it’s just an e-paper display driven by a Raspberry Pi Zero. Building the case was another matter, though.

After a parti-colored prototype with whatever bricks he had on hand, a session of LEGO Digital Designer led him to just the right combination of bricks to build an accurate case, almost. It turns out that the stock selection of bricks in LDD won’t allow for the proper proportions for the case, so he ordered the all-white bricks and busted out the Dremel. LEGO purists may want to avert their eyes from the ABS gore within, but in the end the case worked out and the whole build looks great.

Fancy a full-size Mac Classic reboot? How about this iPad docking station? Or if tiny and nostalgic is really your thing, this retro-future terminal build is pretty keen too.

[via r/raspberry_pi]