macintosh

53 Articles

Hackaday Links: January 31, 2016

January 31, 2016 by 27 Comments

[Damien] has been working on MicroPython for a while now. We did an interview with him a while ago about porting Python to tiny microcontrollers, and soon the BBC micro:bit will be getting Python into the hands of millions of British schoolchildren. Now [Damien] has a Kickstarter to get MicroPython to the bare metal of an ESP8266. That would be extremely interesting; there’s a lot you can do with an easily scriptable Internet Thing running Python.

A little over a month ago, [Renier] won the Hackaday Prize Best Product competition with the Vinduino, a device that cuts water usage of vinyards (and orchards, I guess) by 25%. Now he’s won the IoT awards for Best DIY Project.

We have lost a great inventor. [Artur Fischer], inventor of the plastic drywall plug, fischertechnik, the plastic wall plug, photo flash light, and holder of over 1100 patents (more than the great Edison), passed away this week.

Who remembers Glider? That old Macintosh game where you fly a paper airplane around a house is now available on GitHub. The creator of Glider, [John Calhoun] put all the code up a few days ago. If you have Metrowerks Code Warrior sitting around on an old box, feel free to dig around.

 In the ‘this guy totally won’t get sued’ column is MagSafe for iPhones. The MagSafe power adapter is Apple’s largest contribution to humanity, but they are a little protective about it.

We have two calls for the community: [jimie] had a go at programming the latest, coolest, open source radio. Programming it is hard. Has anyone found an improved guide? Second, I now have a Tadpole Computer that was former property of Quallcom. I can’t find any info on getting *nix or *BSD on it. Anyone have any experience?

Better Networking With A Macintosh Classic

December 15, 2015 by 18 Comments

While it may not be the case anymore, if you compare a Mac and a PC from 1990, the Mac comes out far ahead. PCs suffered with DOS, while the Mac enjoyed real, non-bitmapped fonts. Where a Windows PC required LANMAN to connect to a network, the Mac had networking built right into every single machine. In fact, any Mac from The Old Days can use this built-in networking to connect to the Internet, but most old Mac networking hacks have relied on PPP or other network to serial conversion. [Pierre] thought there was an incomplete understanding in getting old Macs up on the Internet and decided to connect a Mac Classic to the Internet with Apple’s built-in networking.

Since the very first Macintosh, Apple included a simple networking protocol that allowed users to share hard drives, folders, and printers over a local network. This networking setup was called LocalTalk. It wasn’t meant for internets or very large networks; the connection between computers was basically daisy chained serial cables and later RJ-11 (telephone) cables.

LocalTalk stuck around for a long time, and even now if you need to do anything with a Mac made in the last century, it’s your best bet for file transfer. Because of LocalTalk’s longevity, routers and LocalTalk to Ethernet adapters can be found fairly easily. The only problem is finding a modern device that speaks both TCP/IP and LocalTalk. You can’t use a new Mac for this; LocalTalk has been gone from OS X since Snow Leopard. You can do it with a Raspberry Pi, though.

With a little bit of futzing about with MacTCP and a few other pieces of software from 1993 or thereabouts, [Pierre] can even get his old Mac Classic online. Of course the browsers are all horribly outdated (making the Hackaday retro edition very useful), but [Pierre] was able to load up rotten.com. It takes a while with an 8MHz CPU and 4MB of RAM, but it does get the job done.

You can check out [Pierre]’s demo video below.

Continue reading “Better Networking With A Macintosh Classic” →

Hackaday Links: October 25, 2015

October 25, 2015 by 11 Comments

There are dozens of different 3D printable cases out there for the Raspberry Pi, but the BeagleBone Black, as useful as it is, doesn’t have as many options. The folks at 3D hubs thought they could solve this with a portable electronics lab for the BBB. It opens like a book, fits a half-size breadboard inside, and looks very cool.

The guy who 3D printed his lawnmower has a very, very large 3D printer. He now added a hammock to it, just so he could hang out during the very long prints.

There’s a box somewhere in your attic, basement, or garage filled with IDE cables. Wouldn’t they be useful for projects? Yep, only not all the wires work; some are grounds tied together, some are not wired straight through, and some are missing. [esot.eric] has the definitive guide for 80-wire IDE cables.

Like case mods? Here’s a golden apple, made out of walnut. Yes, there are better woods he could have used. It’s a wooden replica of a Mac 128 with a Mac Mini and LCD stuffed inside. Want a video? Here you go.

If you have a 3D printer, you’re probably familiar with PEEK. It’s the plastic used as a thermal break in non-all-metal hotends. Now it’s a filament. An extraordinarily expensive filament at €900 per kilogram. Printing temperature is 370°C, so you’ll need an all-metal hotend.

It’s the Kickstarter that just keeps going and going and going. That’s not a bad thing, though: there really isn’t much of a market for new Amiga 1200 cases. We’ve featured this project before, but the last time was unsuccessful. Now, with seven days left and just over $14k to go, it might make it this time.

Macintosh Hard Drive Repair

October 13, 2015 by 57 Comments

The Macintosh II was a popular computer in the era before Apple dominated the coffee shop user market, but for those of us still using our Mac II’s you may find that your SCSI hard drive isn’t performing the way that it should. Since this computer is somewhat of a relic and information on them is scarce, [TheKhakinator] posted his own hard drive repair procedure for these classic computers.

The root of the problem is that the Quantum SCSI hard drives that came with these computers use a rubber-style bump stop for the head, which becomes “gloopy” after some time. These computers are in the range of 28 years old, so “some time” is relative. The fix involves removing the magnets in the hard drive, which in [TheKhakinator]’s case was difficult because of an uncooperative screw, and removing the rubber bump stops. In this video, they were replaced with PVC, but [TheKhakinator] is open to suggestions if anyone knows of a better material choice.

This video is very informative and, if you’ve never seen the inside of a hard drive, is a pretty good instructional video about the internals. If you own one of these machines and are having the same problems, hopefully you can get your System 6 computer up and running now! Once you do, be sure to head over to the retro page and let us know how you did!

Continue reading “Macintosh Hard Drive Repair” →

A Third Scale Mini PowerMac

October 2, 2015 by 12 Comments

We’re surrounded by tiny ARM boards running Linux, and one of the most popular things to do with these tiny yet powerful computers is case modding. We’ve seen Raspberry Pis in Game Boys, old Ataris, and even in books. [Aaron] decided it was time to fit a tiny computer inside an officially licensed bit of miniature Apple hardware and came up with the Mini PowerMac. It’s a 1/3rd scale model of an all-in-one Mac from 1996, and [Aaron] made its new hardware fit like a glove.

Instead of an old Mac modified with an LCD, or even a tiny 3D printed model like Adafruit’s Mini Mac Pi, [Aaron] is using an accessory for American Girl dolls released in 1996. This third-scale model of an all-in-one PowerPC Mac is surprisingly advanced for something that would go in a doll house. When used by American Girl dolls, it has a 3.25″ monochrome LCD that simulates the MacOS responding to mouse clicks and keypresses. If you want to see the stock tiny Mac in action, here’s a video.

The American Girl Mini Macintosh is hollow, and there’s a lot of space in this lump of plastic. [Aaron] tried to fit a Raspberry Pi in the case. A Pi wouldn’t fit. An ODROID-W did, and with a little bit of soldering, [Aaron] had a computer far more powerful than an actual PowerMac 5200. Added to this is a 3.5″ automotive rearview display, carefully mounted to the 1/3rd size screen bezel of the mini Mac.

The rest of the build is exactly what you would expect – a DC/DC step down converter, a USB hub, and a pair of dongles for WiFi and a wireless keyboard. The software for the ODROID-W is fully compatible with the Raspberry Pi, and a quick install of the Basilisk II Macintosh emulator and an installation of Mac OS 7.5.3 completed the build.

Mac SE

Viewing A Macintosh SE’s Video On A Modern Computer

July 9, 2015 by 25 Comments

[Bbraun] has an old Macintosh SE computer. He was looking for a way to view the video output from the SE on a newer, modern computer. He ended up working out a pretty clever solution using a stm32f4discovery board.

First, the SE’s logic board was removed from its case and placed onto a desk for easier access. The discovery board was then hooked up to the SE’s processor direct slot (PDS) using normal jumper wires. The discovery board acts as a USB COM port on a newer Mac OSX computer. The discovery board watches the SE for writes to video memory. When it sees that the R/W pin goes low, it knows that a write is occurring. It then waits for /AS to go low, which indicates that an address is on the bus. The discovery board reads the address and verifies that it falls within the range of the video frame buffer. If it does, then the discovery board writes a copy of the data to a local buffer.

The OSX computer runs a simple app that can make a request to the discovery board via USB. When the board receives the request, it sends its local frame buffer data over the USB connection and back to the host. The OSX computer then displays that data in a window using CGImage. The demo video below was captured using this technique. Continue reading “Viewing A Macintosh SE’s Video On A Modern Computer” →

VCF East X: Amigas And Non-Apple Macs

April 22, 2015 by 13 Comments

The Amiga 1000, the original Amiga, was introduced in 1985, making this the 30th anniversary of the Commodore Amiga. Of course this needed to be represented at the Vintage Computer Festival, and [Bill Winters] and [Anthony Becker] were more than up to the task:

The guys brought with them a representation of nearly every Amiga, and also have a few neat gadgets to plug into these cool little boxes. The Amiga 1200 has been heavily upgraded with a compact flash drive. With the proper adapters and cards, this neat machine can be upgraded with Ethernet, WiFi, or just about every conceivable networking solution.

Attached to the A500 is a Gotek floppy drive emulator, a relatively standard if weird device that turns a PC floppy drive connector into a USB mass storage solution. This floppy emulator did not originally support Amiga disk formats, but with a firmware modification, everything just works. That’s a great story in itself, and something we should probably cover another time.

If you’re wondering what it was like for [Bill] and [Anthony] to dig through their garage for their exhibit, here you go.

Portable Macintoshen

The first Macintosh was released in 1984. Macintosh users wanted a slightly more portable machine, but the first ‘luggable’ Mac wouldn’t be released until late 1989. The market was there to fill the gap, with some bizarre machines exhibited by [Matt Bergeron]:

The Outbound laptop and notebook were unlicensed clones of the Macintosh. Instead of pirating the Apple ROMs, the Outbound computers required buyers to pull the ROM chips from their Macs and install them in the slightly more portable version. This was, of course, inconvenient, and we can imagine there were more than a few ROM chips cloned.

The Dynamac was a different beast, using the entire PCB from a mac SE or SE/30. To this, the creators of the Dynamac added a custom video card and electroluminescent display that was also capable of driving an external monitor. Very cool stuff.