[HN Gopher] ITXPlus: A ITX Sized Macintosh Plus Logicboard Repro...
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ITXPlus: A ITX Sized Macintosh Plus Logicboard Reproduction
Author : zdw
Score : 119 points
Date : 2025-05-21 21:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (68kmla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (68kmla.org)
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Very cool. I think this is probably the way forward for various
| types of retrocomputing now that original chassises are
| disintegrating due to aging plastics and parts are becoming more
| scarce.
|
| It's a much higher bar to clear, but I'd love to see this
| treatment for some PPC 603/604, G3, and eventually G4 era Macs...
| I love the idea of building an ITX G4 cube.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| As you get into more and more modern designs, there are more
| high speed signals and the motherboards get increasingly more
| complex.
|
| Not that it can't be done, but the work to reproduce something
| made at the cutting edge in the 2000s feels like it'd be an
| order of magnitude harder than 70s/80s designs.
|
| Though I'm always amazed what the retro communities will do to
| preserve the tech for future generations!
| whartung wrote:
| That's alright though. SE/30 was Peak Macintosh anyway.
| sneak wrote:
| The 9600/350 was a thing of beauty.
| runjake wrote:
| Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_9600
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| My memory is that the Power Towers were incredibly hard
| to service. If correct, that's a shame, because the IIci
| I used at work was lovely to work with.
| linguae wrote:
| I've read that the predecessor to the 9600, the 9500,
| wasn't the easiest machine to work on. The 9600 had a
| more convenient pull-down case, which was continued in
| the designs of the beige G3 tower, the blue and white G3
| tower, and the G4 towers.
| crest wrote:
| An unlike the 9500 you could even get at the RAM slots
| without breaking the damn plastic clips as use tear down
| the whole machine. Whoever combined the 9500 case and
| mainboard deserves as special place in engineering hell.
| vondur wrote:
| Heck, I'd be happy with a board that had the power/emulation
| of a 68040 so we can run MacOS 7.6 and some of old apps from
| back in the day.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| 68040 CPUs are easy to find. Motorola was shipping them in
| ASTRO mobile radio infrastructure equipment well into the
| 2000s, and a lot of that gear is getting scrapped now.
| rbanffy wrote:
| A small ARM board can do the job easily, but that won't be
| very close to the actual experience. Playing with the C64
| Maxi made me understand how important the physicality of
| the system is to the experience. It's nice to have a
| physical 68000, but that level of fidelity is not really
| necessary for a user to understand what a Mac was about. A
| keyboard with a locking Caps Lock key is.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| A big problem with emulation that has yet to be overcome
| entirely is the added latency. Any of my newer machines
| can emulate a 68k Mac at full speed and I can hook up my
| Apple Extended Keyboard II to help replicate the physical
| portions of the experience, and yet using a real old Mac
| feels notably different simply because it doesn't suffer
| from the latency papercuts brought by USB and modern
| operating system.
|
| That's one of the things that jumps out at me when I pull
| out my old PowerBook G3 and boot it into OS 9 on
| occasion: it feels incredibly responsive relative to
| modern counterparts, especially with an SSD removing the
| wait times that normally came with a spinning disk,
| despite it being only a tiny fraction as powerful.
| rbanffy wrote:
| You can mitigate the latencies by making the CPU faster,
| pushing more work to the GPU, using an analog VGA output,
| or trimming down the OS so that as little as possible
| preempts the emulator.
| johnklos wrote:
| Considering that we've moved from wire wrapping to being able
| to design and order multi-layer circuit boards, and we've
| gone from 74 series and basic PALs to CPLDs and FPGAs that
| regular people can program, I don't think what tinkerers can
| do will hit any barriers any time soon.
|
| The ability to recreate classic computing is wonderful, both
| in preservation of history and in making things available to
| people who hadn't even been born when these machines were new
| :)
| userbinator wrote:
| Fortunately for later CPUs, especially on the PC/x86 they are
| usually based on reference designs, and the amount of
| documentation available in electronic form much greater. Late
| 2000s is when they started closing up and being more
| secretive, and I'd consider that a greater concern.
| phire wrote:
| Though, the late 90s feels achievable.
|
| The Front Side Bus of the Pentium III maxed out at 133 MHz,
| single transfer (and was often configured at 100 MHz for
| lower spec CPUs), and the AMD K6 was even slower. I don't
| have much PCB design experience, but my understanding is that
| 133MHz is quite achievable for hobbyists these days.
|
| Things very quickly go off the rails after that.
| redundantly wrote:
| I imagine FPGAs would be a great way forward for retro
| computing, just like it is for retro gaming.
| bitwize wrote:
| Retrocomputing and retrogaming are going to get a boost from
| a hybrid approach: using uC boards like the Raspberry Pi Pico
| to emulate each individual component. You get timing accuracy
| that's close to FPGA, but at $5 a pop, the components are
| cheaper than an FPGA board would cost.
|
| The Connomore 64 is an example of a complete system built
| this way. I'm sure Mac, Amiga, and Atari ST clones will be
| incoming. https://github.com/c1570/Connomore64
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| FPGAs hold a lot of promise, but as I understand have limits
| on performance and can be on the power hungry side which can
| preclude some later CPUs and make portable form factors
| impractical.
| wmf wrote:
| https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/
| rbanffy wrote:
| > now that original chassises are disintegrating due to aging
| plastics and parts are becoming more scarce.
|
| We need to start making detailed 3D scans of parts. The
| original parts will degrade, but we can make accurate
| reproductions of those parts. It would be great if museums took
| part of that effort, even if for no other reason than having
| the historically relevant items all in one place.
| tomcam wrote:
| I love that idea.
|
| The ergonomics of that first Mac design remain my favorite of
| any computer. Loved the keyboard, the screen even though it
| was black and white, and even the handle. It made carrying
| the computer remarkably easy. Would be awesome if I could
| experience it again without worrying about leaky batteries or
| exploded capacitors.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Remember the original Mac didn't even have cursor keys.
| tomcam wrote:
| I'd forgotten! Fascinating in retrospect
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Well these guys are doing some earlier Apple
| parts:https://maceffects.com/collections/all
|
| Talked to these guys at VCF East this year. They are total
| rockstars but man its expensive to do this stuff. We are
| talking well into 6 figures for just the molds and testing.
| Probably not even started production at that point. And doing
| it outside of China? Good luck.
| Palomides wrote:
| none of those PPC CPUs are still in production, to say nothing
| of the many other undocumented custom chips used in those Macs.
| the 68000 is still available new.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Higher speed grades of the 68SEC000 are happy operating over
| 50MHz, if you want the world's quickest Mac Plus.
| bitwize wrote:
| Nice! Makes me want to buy a Mac again.
| nxobject wrote:
| One reason why the TFA might have chosen the Plus: the SE and
| SE/30 consolidate a lot of glue logic that are on PALs that can
| be cracked into not-so-easy to crack ASICs. The SE/30 has a
| notorious "GLUE" chip that has 80 pins, and most likely won't be
| cloned anytime soon.
| wmf wrote:
| I wonder if it would be easier to design a new Mac model from
| scratch(ish) and put drivers in the ROM. AFAIK Basilisk II
| doesn't emulate a real Mac but the System doesn't notice
| because of ROM patches.
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(page generated 2025-05-22 23:02 UTC)