[HN Gopher] Turning an iPad Pro into the Ultimate Classic Macint...
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Turning an iPad Pro into the Ultimate Classic Macintosh (2021)
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 53 points
Date : 2024-01-23 15:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.gingerbeardman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.gingerbeardman.com)
| emchammer wrote:
| MacOS System 7 looks like it would be a nice native interface for
| an e-paper tablet. I never used a Newton.
| nxobject wrote:
| Yeah - having originally designed the interface for a very low
| dot pitch 512x342, it turns out to be practically made for
| fingers when you integer-scale!
| donkulous wrote:
| I know people have swapped out the classic Macs CRTs for an
| LCD, but I wonder if anyone has tried it with an e-ink display?
| I've always thought the same thing regarding the classic pre-
| MacOS 8 systems on e-ink.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Classic Mac OS all the way up through OS 9 handles 1-bit and
| grayscale displays quite well.
|
| I've thought for some time now that if one were build a System
| 7.5/Mac OS 8 laptop with an e-ink or high quality transflective
| display (like that found on the Playdate[0]) and new 68k/PPC
| SoC built on a modern node with a modern battery, the resulting
| device would be surprisingly useful even if lacked
| connectivity. It'd sip power, with battery life likely measured
| in weeks or months and could probably be kept charged with a
| lid-sized solar panel.
|
| [0]: https://play.date/
| Someone wrote:
| > It'd sip power
|
| Are you sure? I think Classic MacOS effectively always busy-
| looped (WaitNextEvent would block, but only if the OS could
| run another event loop), never sleeping its (single) CPU.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma.
| ..:
|
| _"The Event Manager reports a null event when your
| application requests an event and your application's event
| stream does not contain any of the requested event types"_
|
| If that's true, that modern node CPU would not sleep most of
| the time, but just loop a lot faster.
| wk_end wrote:
| Would a 68k on a modern node running at a fraction of its
| potential max speed burn through very much power? Apple
| managed to get multiple hours of battery life out of 68k
| chips on classic MacOS PowerBooks...
| pvg wrote:
| HN thread at the time
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26854990
|
| And some follow-on posts by the author
|
| https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/tag/emulation/
| christkv wrote:
| This kind of stuff is why I can't wait to be able to sideload
| apps soon in the EU
| rcarmo wrote:
| This. Came here to say this.
| dools wrote:
| I used mini vmac a couple of years back to play prince of persia,
| dark castle and fools errand on my ipad, it was amazing how it
| transported me back to another time.
| calf wrote:
| My formative Mac experience was System 7, with the 8-bit and
| 16-bit (in the UI it was named "256" and "Thousands") color
| display. The icons and desktop UI was wondrous.
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