How are these people finding VGA cables in the street :S I needed like 10 or so VGA cables recently for an art installation and asked everyone I could and nobody had any lying around... I ended up having to buy new ones which seems a shame considering how many are thrown away!
I was considering doing something like that for an Amiga, running AmigaOS 3.2. It's a cute idea, especially once you 3D print a shell that looks like the original (shrunken down).
I do think that the lack of an old school floppy drive means that something is kinda missing from the experience, but I do like the idea of having a machine dedicated to running this instead of just firing up an emulator on my existing desktop PC. (Edit: And I love how this MicroMac project isn't just "running Linux and an existing emulator" but actually trying to go lower level, essentially the RP2040 acting as a 68k)
Need CRT too for the authentic experience.
We need doubly-curved OLED screens. We can already do Trinitron (cylindrical) ones with the flexible displays we have.
It is an interesting problem, though. I noticed in Disney's Loki, they used a combination of VFX and lenses on top of flat panels to give the impression they were using CRTs (notably in their ADM-3 lookalikes). For a 9~14" CRT it'd be a fairly large lens that would need to be optically connected to the panel below (so not to have internal reflections).
Can't it be done with a DLP device? CRT was X-ray projection device with phosphor paint applied inside to convert the rays to visible light.
CRTs were emitting an electron beam to draw images on a phosphorescent screen, not emitting X-rays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode-ray_tube Blasting X-rays through a screen to the face of an observer would not have been a good idea…
Interestingly, a lot of folks used to repeat the x-ray thing, that's where the term "eyeball cancer machine" came from.
You could check out the A500 mini, more of an emulator though - https://retrogames.biz/products/thea500-mini/
A500 Mini isn't as cool IMO. It's just a generic arm board running linux with an Amiga emulator. The keys don't even work. May as well just use a Pi or a PC.
Yeah, I have one, and the keyboard being non-functional is a real bummer. It's a neat mini console (especially once you add some additional games), but I wish they would make a version with a working keyboard, like they made TheC64. But the quality of the case is great, and the tank mouse definitely is the way to use workbench)
I would buy this! Especially if you got the sizing right so that an SD card could be inserted like a floppy, that would rock!
Someone will eventually make a Mac LC Mini ;-)
Just kidding. Apple would NEVER allow that.
Right on the money: "SD card could be inserted like a floppy"
Amiga emulator on teensy 4.1: https://www.pjrc.com/amiga-emulator-on-teensy-4-1/
Why not store emulated RAM on disk and get the full 512KB experience? Killing the drive from overuse? Surely the flash speed of the RP2040 surpasses the RAM speed of the original Mac.
If only the RP2040 supported SPI PSRAM!
The PicoGUS uses PIO to implement a PSRAM interface in order to store 1 MB of audio sample data: https://github.com/polpo/rp2040-psram
That is cool, I'll give it a go. It could be made workable for something like a JIT or interpreter (like the MicroMac). Could it be added to the RP2040 address space and used as a native load store target?
The neat thing about the ESP32 chips is you can extend their internal memory with external SPI PSRAM chips.
https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/product-files/4677/4677_esp-ps...
what about a esp32-s3?
Very nice finding a random VGA cable on the road. Happened to me once or twice, but never when I wanted one of them.
Thrift store?
I often see those at flea markets / garage sales, sometimes by the metric ton (OK, exaggerating a bit).
are they that hard to find in your country? for me it's way more likely to find a VGA cable around than an HDMI when i need it
That was the highlight of the story for me.
I was hoping this was a super cheap hackintosh running modern macOS. Is that even possible these days?
I’m asking out of genuine curiosity - what are the reasons you’d want that, other than a fun project? There’s so much hardware integration in the stack of a modern Mac that it would feel a little hard for me to even say a hackintosh was a Mac.
Anyways, curious what you have in mind.
Yes. The biggest limiting factor for “cheap” is building around a CPU with a supported GPU. A second hand RX 4xx/5xx series card is a good pick if you can’t find a chip with supported iGPU.
Is that even possible these days?
It still kinda is as long as macOS supports Intel, but the writing is on the wall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39728146
The VGA interface is the most impressive part to me somehow.
Yeah, that's what sets the RP2040 apart from other micros. I think of it as being analogous to the recent advent of "software-defined radio" -- the RP2040's PIO are fast enough to allow for software-defined Composite video, software-defined VGA, software-defined DVI, software-defined USB, etc etc etc.
What other micros are you talking about? STM32 can easily do it (I suspect that any ARM based micro can), and I've seen some vga libraries for ESP32. There's not much special about the RP2040 other than it's price and brand name.
On other typical 32b MCUs you end up doing this kind of bitbanging purely from software, while RP2040 has the PIO which is kind of programmable bitbanging accelerator. Similar hardware blocks in other MCUs are either single-purpose (think USART), or much more limited and mostly only found weird automotive parts.
Super cool project.
It makes me wonder what the smallest/barest SBC one could get away with for emulating the last 68k Macs or average mid-to-late 90s PPC Mac at full performance might be. Retrofitting a modernish laptop body of some sort with one of those so it would be capable of running System 7.6.1 up through Mac OS 9.x could make for a surprisingly useful "zen mode" laptop.
This is precisely what I want. 7.6 with all-day battery life in an ultralight would be heaven for me.
Same! Just add in an easy way to print from the emulator!
And the display should be e-ink to go all the way from zen to Nirvana!
I wondered if anyone had written an IWM simulator, and I didn't find one, but I did find this FPGA project:
https://www.bigmessowires.com/2017/12/07/fpga-based-disk-con...
Someone's trying to reverse-engineer the IWM, but they have not yet quite succeeded: https://www.applefritter.com/content/iwm-reverse-engineering
Found this in that same thread, an IWM implementation in MAME: https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/devices/mach...
Somewhat related, there's a MiSTer implementation of the Apple II: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Apple-II_MiSTer
I had a Saturday job at a computer shop when the Mac came out, and we got one as a demo. I remember just staring at the genius of those rounded corners in the corners of the screen, and thinking how beautiful it was that they'd thought of that.
In case you haven't read it - https://folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html
This is brilliant, thanks!
On my first actual job, we did that with Apple II software. You don't only lose the corners, but you need to lose a whole column of pixels to make the rounded corner work on a checkered background.
What about every computer up to the 90s for ~10€ of hardware to house inside of an existing keyboard?
(or your subset of favorites)
You can do this with a Rasberry Pi 400, no problem. I have one running https://retropie.org.uk/ and it works great.
a Rasberry Pi 400 is ~90€
...or add such functionality to a USB hub ;)
Something like this that could run the latest macos would be amazing.. I am disgusted by having to buy a mac just so I can build to iOS. That kind of thing should be illegal.
You can use GitHub actions to build to mac (and I assume iOS as well).
How about the same thing on a 68K emulated with an FPGA? (ok it will probably cost more than 5 pounds)
Unless you want cycle-accurate interfaces, it's pointless. Software can provide more than good enough performance and be a lot more flexible at that.
As microcontrollers get faster, the cycle-accurate timing becomes less relevant, as you can still match external timings with software and have the support of an RTOS to help with that.
What about power consumption? Could you have a tiny Mac which runs approximately forever on a single charge?
one of these running system 7 would be a delight, seeing that's probably where the classic Mac OS hit its peak.
You can do that comfortably on a "normal" Rasbperry Pi - I have a bunch of resources for that here: https://taoofmac.com/space/emulation
Holy cow. I took a stab at hacking vMac to run on an ESP32 and gave up (it’s been done on some models, but not on the one I had handy), but this is several levels above and beyond.
I take off my metaphorical hat to you, sir.
I ran Mini vMac on a Raspberry Pi and got a decent looking Mac clone.
https://imgur.com/gallery/raspberry-pi-running-mini-vmac-cus...
It's a shame monitors don't provide 5V from pin9 of the VGA connector... Would be nice to be able to power things from the monitor connection. IIRC, SCART provides +9V.
Pin 9 is there to power the EEPROM in the monitor fromthe computer even when the monitor is turned off, so monitors providing 5V there would lead to same kind of problems as there are with DisplayPort pin 20 and cheap cables that connect this pin through (which would be correct for DP 1.0, but there are no DP 1.0 products).
mirror as it looks like the blog is getting overloaded: https://archive.ph/NXWOm
Thanks, I thought the slowness was because of my phone and was about to order a new one.
Now I'm thinking about the creative misuse of (non-existing) technology.
From the numbering scheme, the "4" in "RP2040" is log2(ram/16K). If we wanted to emulate a Lisa, we'd need 1MB of RAM, which would mean, at least, an RP2060 chip (log2(1024/16) = 6) or, more comfortably, an RP4x70 or RP2x80). Those parts, unfortunately, don't exist yet. Maybe they get inspired with their IPO and start making those parts.
But it's not a Macintosh; it's a Raspberry Pi emulating a Macintosh
Want! Looks like fun.
Very neat. I so wanted a Mac back in the day... It is amazing what can be done now with modern micro controllers. Thanks for writing it all up.
Awesome way to give kids their first computer and it can only do what it can do.
Everyone loves MacPaint. Maybe you love MacPaint, and have noticed I’ve deftly avoided mentioning it. Okay, FINE:
To be honest, I'd bet Bill Atkinson knew every trick in the book and used many for making MacPaint work in the original constraints provided.
I'm not sure that's a fair fight for the author.
This is a really impressive project! It was a fun read. Thanks for sharing! I like this writing style.
As an aside, I try to create a dual-target build for all my embedded projects, with a native host build for rapid prototyping/debugging
I find myself doing the same thing on my embedded projects, including at my job. I actually find myself using the PC build much more frequently than the hardware for my day-to-day work now that the hardware layer is stable and tested. More people should do this!
(Do you find “Pico Micro Mac” doesn’t really scan? I didn’t think this taxonomy through, did I?)
I think "Atto Mac" rolls off the tongue nicely.
The day I started soldering it together I needed a VGA connector. I had a DB15 but wanted it for another project, and felt bad about cutting up a VGA cable. But when I took a walk at lunchtime, no shitting you, I passed some street cables. I had a VGA cable – the rust helps with the janky aesthetic.
Sometimes this happens.
I feel like this is missing a link to spritesmod[0], which might use a little bit of a bigger platform (esp32) but a functional Mac plus that fits in your palm is absurd.
I would never have thought you could do what OP did, rp2040 looks way too small, amazing work!
I guess Lemmings, After Dark and The Cycles would work there?
You would be surprised how much trash there is in the city around us, that you suddenly start noticing when you have a diy project. Let me share you some moments of my own with you.
I was leaving university campus with my buddies, talking about building magnetic card reader to check contents of my campus library card. Just as I was explaining magnetic heads to one of the guys I see a random cassette player few meters from us, in pile of illegaly dumped trash. Mid sentence I stop, grab and smash the radio open on the curb, pull out the magnetic head and continue talking about the said magnetic head. Guys were bewildered.
At other time I was watching a video about TV fresnel lens based lighting fixture, waiting for my date. After the date while taking the girl to the car I spotted a flat TV next to a dumpster box. Car was right across the street so I took the TV home. She quickly learned I'm no stranger to dumpster adventures. I had the light don't by the morning.
Almost 2 years before that I needed a short (30cm max) ac plug with wire to fix something in the workshop, and I remembered seeing a broken electric tea pot behind our local dumpster while taking out the trash, it was exactly the right length of wire, and awh better than I needed.
Recently, I was renovating something with my wife, and I needed a vacuum cleaner for the drywall sanding and other dust and spills related to that. Just few days after settingy eyes on karcher vacuum I find one in the dumpster as we were walking from the cinema back home. I opened it up next day and realized previous owner had thrown away brand new vacuum cleaner. They had not unpacked and set the filter, hair and piece of cloth got into the air sucking fins and got it stuck. I pulled the trash out, set the filter and voila!
Over the last 10 years I had many more situations like that :)
A million years ago, I spent two cold nights standing on my head in the driver's side footwell of my E36 BMW, installing an inexpensive Wal-Mart-sourced CodeAlarm remote starter to make my then-wife happy.
It worked great. It could even operate the door locks and roll the windows up with the fob (none of which sounds very special for a modern vehicle, but my car was not equipped with remote-anything from the factory so all of this was very nice).
Over a decade later, the fob got destroyed in an unfortunate boating incident. I was bummed. Replacements were available to purchase and I hemmed and hawed about buying one, or maybe upgrading to a fancier system, or just getting over it and continuing to use the key in the lock cylinder (like some commoner!) to lock and unlock the doors.
And then I was walking down the street in Bexley, Ohio, and I saw a broken laundry basket full of discarded things ("illegally dumped" things) on the curb. It appeared to have all manner of random household trash.
But on the top of that basket of stuff was a plastic clamshell. And inside that clamshell was an identical remote starter kit -- exactly the same as the one I'd bought forever ago.
It was unopened.
A few careful slashes with my pocket knife later, and I had a new remote. Even the ancient tiny little 12V (A23) alkaline battery still worked -- and kept working for months. (I left the rest of the trash where it was.)
Sometimes the universe does provide for those who keep their eyes open.
(Pairing the new remote was interesting because it involved operating the brake pedal switch while the car was turned off, and the E36 turns off the brake light circuit completely when the car is turned off... But those are just BMW problems. I got it sorted.)
I kind of feel you dropped the lede here. Need to hear this story as well.
I bet it's "dropped her keys into the lake." Perhaps after awkwardly balancing them a place that, in hindsight, should not have been used.
I am more suprised that the BMW outlasted the remote starter!
We need to deal with some important issues you raised.
Ah, was there another date?
Any relationship to dumpster adventuress?
Yes, according to a llm. He had a particularly touching moment repairing a broken drone he found with his son. Shortly after the story took a dark turn with the cancer diagnosis. As the condition worsened, he made an effort to document his projects, scavenging 3D printers, partly as a manual and partly as a diary. "The knowledge that my kids would have these memories and skills to carry forward, and perhaps pass on to their children, made the days feel meaningful."
Not what I was expecting. Perhaps the model was not a reliable source.
Unfortunately, some of use are not so lucky, at least I am not, haha.
I got the idea to tinker with satellite dishes to make a simple radio telescope. I remember riding around and constantly seeing old DirectTV satellite dishes constantly on the side of the road for trash. Before this idea. So I figured, oh, I can easily get my hands on one. As soon as I committed to that project, I never saw a single satellite dish sitting by the street as I rode around.
If it makes you feel better you probably would not have been able to just pick up the dishes and use them without buying extra parts. I had DirectTV and when I cancelled they came and took the feed horn off the satellite dish but left the rest of the dish. I’m not sure how much a feed horn would cost but at least the dish wouldn’t have been immediately usable. I also was interested in making a radio telescope but gave up when I realized DirectTV took that part of the dish
My personal favourite save is a Bosch dishwasher that was kerbside. The drain motor was stuck, had melted plastic around the impeller. I have it in my workshop but it’s better than the one in the house.
Mine was pretty easy to fix - I was surprised how simple it was. IIRC, there's an inlet valve, a circulating/heater pump, and an exhaust pump.
Are the girl from the flat TV date and your wife the same person though? :)
Is the girl from the date with the TV now the wife?
Exactly this, one has to keep their eyes open and give luck a chance to happen.
Unfortunately, where I live, people bring their trash to the dumpster. And it's illegal to take stuff out of it…
Someone had abandoned a vacuum cleaner identical to my own (10+ year old) model from a not so common make in the ground floor lobby of my apartment block. It was surreal walking past it for months, just sitting there alone in the corner.
My own vacuum cleaner was missing an attachment, but I never touched the abandoned one because I wasn't sure whether it was truly abandoned.
A few weeks later I found the same cleaner had gone missing, checked the dumpster - yep, there it was. Fished it out and now I have a complete set of attachments again.
A hill I will die on is that tech products should just stop bundling cables, for anything, with the possible exception of unit-specific power adapters. A while back I purchased a KVM switch - it came with 3 DP cables, which went straight into my e-waste box. I've also seen office fit-outs where mountains of cables that came with monitors went straight from factory to landfill because they were the wrong length.
I understand some of the reason it happens - it's not a great experience to buy a product and then be unable to start using it immediately because you don't have the right cables. And there are a lot of low-quality cables out there which might have the right connectors but not actually work - I bought at least 3 different 5m DP cables before I found one that reliably worked at 4K. But surely that can't justify the literal mountains of e-waste the practice creates.
Sadly I don't think it'll ever change without regulation.
No. Unit-specific power adapters should not exist. Either put a USB-C or a 120v/240v AC connector on the device, depending on power requirements. It's really not that hard.
Note: it must be connector, not a fixed cable. I.e. an IEC C8 or C14.
This might apply to (most) IT devices. But there are devices that require 24 V, or 48 V, or any other voltage that USB-C can't supply, and that for various reasons (space, EMI, possibly even compliance with some safety regulation) can't contain an integrated power supply unit from 120/230 V mains. Of course this should be an exception and most consumer devices can definitely work with the regular voltages and currents that USB-C can supply.
That's fine but it should be a standard for a entire class of products.
I agree in principle, but I think there has to be some room for exceptions here. Some portable devices like smartwatches are too space constrained for USB-C and some devices might use too much power for USB-PD but still be too small to include the power supply internally. Also, some of my synth gear uses a locking barrel connector, which I think is a better trade-off than a locking USB-C connector because it can be locked and unlocked faster.
Bundled power bricks are also much less likely to directly be e-wasted without being used.
Printers stopped coming with a USB A-to-B cable many years ago. Who knew that the printer makers were in the right all along?
Yes, and I think they did that for relatively cynical reasons -- as a handout to the Best Buys of the world who would then be able to attach a 90% margin "Printer cable" at $29.95 to your $50 Black Friday special inkjet.
I suspect the reason why this didn't go on to become standard across all classes of device, is because since 2010 or so, the average or median margin on accessories has cratered thanks to Amazon Marketplace sellers. You could realistically end up needing to buy a Belkin $30 printer cable in 2005, unless you'd heard of Monoprice. Today by contrast if you just search Amazon for it, you'll have one for $4.94-$6.49 delivered within 2 days. If margins were still what they used to be on cables and stuff, I think you'd have a strong incentive for places like Amazon and Walmart to pressure suppliers to make cables a la carte (officially for environmental reasons, but also, for great profits, lol)
You won't die alone on that hill. I think it's a great thing that many phones no longer ship with chargers. The mild inconvenience of having to buy a separate charger should not outweigh the reduction amount of waste we produce with new chargers.
Brazil has made it illegal to sell a phone without a charger which IMO is a total step backwards. If anything, it should be illegal to not give the option to unbundle cables from the package.
A really bad one now is devices providing crappy power only usb micro cables, very often these will still have the 4 pin head. I've started instantly binning them to avoid situations where I need to transfer data and can only find these ones lying around
Things come and go. :)
I save at least one example of every kind of computer, RF, or AV wire, but I only keep what I deem to be current-gen for my own world. The stuff that doesn't make the cut get sold by the pound periodically at a local scrap yard after I prep them by snipping the connectors off, which generates a meaningful amount of folding cash -- enough for a coney dog and some ice cream from around the corner, anyway. (Rules vary; the scrap yard near me is very happy to buy deconnectorized insulated computer-ish cables. Some might buy them with the connectors attached. Some might not want this kind of wire at all.)
I like having what I might need on-hand, but I also dislike the notion of hoarding. I try to keep it balanced.
Sometimes, this bites me. I hadn't use a VGA cable for years during the last culling so they all got recycled, and then I needed one a few months ago for an old Compaq server. I found a beige HD15 cable at work that functioned well-enough, but it was a blurry mess (real VGA cables have coax inside, and this cable did not).
I even ran out of bog-standard IEC computer power cords a couple of years ago and had to -- you know -- actually buy one. I never thought this would be a possibility.
What happened to your own stash of VGA cables?
At some point, you have boxes and boxes of stuff that may contain something that might be useful someday on the off-chance that you can actually find that thing when you need it. I'd love to connect everything to the person--including future me--who would find it useful (or thinks they would in the moment) but it's often not practical.
It actually amazes me that this isn't a well-solved problem by now. We've got various marketplaces for used items (eBay, CL, FB Marketplace, etc.) and we've got various rental/sharing platforms for niche things (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) and those are decent for what they are, yet somehow the inherent inefficiencies (effort to list an item, effort to discover an item, platform fees, etc.) suggest that there is a lot of room for improvement.
It's kind of like how scheduling assistant features/products, such as Calendly, offer a massive improvement over writing messages back and forth along the lines of "send me your availability," yet a verbal/synchronous discussion isn't nearly as bad as written/async, since it gets you across the finish line quickly despite many round trips, so lots of people are fine doing that instead of using efficient tools, so there's no mass adoption/demand.
It's just hard to get away from the transaction costs associated with exchanging low-value physical goods over distance. A swap meet with a local electronics club? Sure. But selling individual items on eBay? Not so much.
There were a bunch of ideas associated with the early Web like sharing tools and so forth that just don't make sense outside an informal neighborhood "economy" (and often not even there).
I feel like a lot of major urban centers have "that" store whose entire business model is collecting electronics from failing businesses and then selling that. Great way to get a bunch of extremely underpowered Windows laptops or Android tablets. Terrible computing devices in general but if you're lucky it'll work well enough.
not in Poland... :(
Allegro is full of refurb mini PCs, mostly Dells. It is complete computer for less than $100 [0], like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40697831 says, it is very hard to beat it in terms of value. That said it is much harder to get nice notebook/tablet, the wear and tear is very visible on screens/keyboards.
[0] to my surprise the one I grabbed had an internal mono speaker(not beeper) somewhere in the case.
Where I live I can only find discarded beer cans and (used) Costa Coffee cups, and inverted broken umbrellas, because itś windy. These people must live in a nicer part of a nicer city ;-)
BTW, in which city can I find a discarded DEC V230/240 or 330 terminal on the street? I need it as a reference implementation of Tektronix graphics ate ReGIS. I promised the VTE crowd I'd work on that.
Seem to remember xterm also did tektronix. Haven’t looked at the source for 35 years / x11r5 but should be doable.
I hope your art installation didnt involve CRT monitors?
I hope it did
The thrift stores in my area have tonnes of VGA cables.
If you're the type of person who regularly visits thrift stores, taking the time to go through the cables and wall-warts is worth it. The staff don't know what they have and everything is priced more-or-less the same. You can end up getting some quality and rare cables for a pittance. It is one of the few sections of modern thrift stores that feel like thrift stores of old.
Also home theater speakers.
Any business with an IT department should be drowning in them. Monitors still ship with VGA cables even though they are rarely used. So if you know anyone in a smaller IT dept that doesn't have really draconian rules over assets they would be more than happy to give you a pile of them.
I think that applies to most cables, BTW. Always look in thrift stores first if you can afford to spend some of your time in exchange for reducing ewaste! (In Japan you're guaranteed to find boxes full of old and some new VGA cables at any Hard Off store.) If you don't have time but don't mind some time lag, you can buy used ones from ebay or similar. (E.g., search for 'vga cables lot')
In every city I lived there were either some local recycling facilities/organizations where you can buy old things dirt cheap. So not really found in the streets but easily findable.
Also second hand market offer a lot of obsolete stuff for very little money.
Lot of people keep/store old cables. I personally have several hundred cables of various types collected over the years put away in couple of plastic crates. Sometimes I find them at work that are just sitting in boxes waiting to be thrown away or just extra cables that come with monitors or other devices. They come in handy for projects or when I’m tinkering with old hardware.
Maybe hit up your local sketchy electronics store, VGA is still sold regularly as older gadgets still need it (One of my screens still uses VGA)
I say sketchy as in no name brand anything, 100% chinesium electronics
Goodwill?
I get most of my “old” tech by volunteering community computer refurbishing places. Good way to meet people and stock up on tech supplies at the same time!
I feel ya, it's tough now with some stuff. There is an old firewire to scsi adapter out ther, if you can find one it's $500+ now lol.