Return of the Mac

What is the most important part of a Mac? The Apple logo, of course — without it, no one knows how much you spent! My apologies if that cut too deep, but I can assure you that non-Apple users are having a good laugh right about now. In reality, there are of course many reasons that one might choose a Mac over other options, like the slick user interface or perceived security benefits. But you have to admit that a Mac just wouldn’t be the same if you stuffed all the hardware into a plain old case.

What about the opposite extreme — a Mac case stuffed with non-Apple hardware? Well sit back and read on, because that is just what I am going to tell you about.

Although this might sound like a pointless stunt, there was actually a good reason to do it. Retrocomputing enthusiast Paul Rickards owns a Macintosh Portable M5120 from 1989. The problem is that — despite extensive repairs, cleanings, and debugging — it does not work. Letting a classic like this go silently into the night is not an option for anyone who loves vintage computers, so Rickards came up with a plan to carefully gut the machine (saving the hardware in case it can be repaired in the future) and replace it with modern components that emulate the original. The hope is that, from the exterior, the machine will be virtually indistinguishable from the original.

To do it right, everything would need to work. That obviously includes the display and keyboard, but also means that the trackball, mouse, and even the disk drive need to still work when all is said and done. And any hacks necessary to make this happen need to fit comfortably inside the original, unmodified case, because any trimming or drilling would be criminal.

For starters, Rickards selected a Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer to serve as the main processing unit. That is quite an upgrade compared to the original Motorola 68000 CPU! For the display, an LCD module pulled from a broken iPad 2 and a simple HDMI/VGA driver board did the trick, although the fit is not exactly perfect. A Panasonic LKM-FC33-5 SuperDisk drive from a laptop replaced the original disk drive, and a Raspberry Pi Pico with KMK firmware — and a custom adapter for the original ribbon cable — handled keyboard inputs. An Arduino-compatible Pro Micro board with a 16 MHz ATmega32U4 microcontroller interfaced the trackball to the Raspberry Pi. A modern battery pack was selected to keep this computer up and running on the go.

Booting into Raspberry Pi OS might be fine under normal circumstances, but that would just not do for a Macintosh Portable, so Rickards installed the Mini vMac emulator to simulate the experience of a classic Mac operating system. As you would expect, a few hacks were necessary to get the screen size right, give the floppy disk proper permissions, and start everything up at boot time. The details of those hacks can all be found in the project write-up.

It would take a very close look (from the outside) to recognize that this computer is not an original, so it definitely qualifies as a great build. Picking it up might give the secret away, however ― the modern components cut the weight down from 16 pounds to just 9. The full color display is also a giveaway. The truth is, when it comes to vintage computers, there is nothing like the real thing, but this build is a close second.