Possibly now completely off topic at this point in the thread, but riffing on what you just brought up
@Trash80toHP_Mini, i had actually been looking into this for a crazy hack idea of:
1. grabbing video output from a video card and turning that into vga,
2. converting vga->hdmi,
3. sending it to a raspberry pi video-in hat,
4. piping that to an airplay server software onboard, and
5. airplay video stream from your old mac to an apple tv.
Sounds nuts but i think it’s totally doable.
In my research i found this video on using an hdmi video input hat on a raspberry pi to twitch stream an old nintendo. Seems our project isn’t that different.
https://www.hackster.io/tinkernut/raspberry-pi-twitch-o-matic-190a15
The video-in hat is new and not too expensive at 70 euros:
https://auvidea.eu/product-category/csi2bridge/hdmi2csi/
You’ll also need an a vga to hdmi converter. Thee are
cheap ones on amazon ($12ish) but i’m not sure if they’re sufficient, or if you need to spend big bucks to get a proper upscaler ($150+). Depends on how standard a video stream is being output from these cards (or analog board), and whether upscaling can happen in software easily enough to output a standard 720p or 1080p stream via hdmi/airplay. If we’re trying to get a 512x342 input into digital we’d need a fancy upscaler, whereas a normal 640x480@60hz is sufficient for the $12 amazon ones (supposedly). For color outputs sync-on-green is solvable by how the cable is made i think, else we’d just need db15->vga adapter.
Another way to do this analog to digital conversion would be to build one of those chip data grabbers like what nishida radio did for
IIgs HDMI adapter, which clips onto the video chip and vampires it’s digital signal. That is ideal since you skip analog step, but a lot of work.
I’m a big fan of raspberry pi’s because they’re extremely well supported (which matters for preservation) and seem to be ideal multipurpose bridge computers for all these related projects like
- adding wifi,
- adding bluetooth (bluetooth kb/mouse -> pi -> pipe inputs to usb -> usb wombat -> adb)
- modern web stuff like https->http proxy and converting modern webpages to 1bit clickable gifs,
- handling 1-bit spotify cover art,
- setting up dropbox (add it to pi, create local webserver for a dropbox folder, point Cloud7 extension at that url on boot, voila dropbox on 68k mac)
etc etc.
I’ve been holding onto this idea for a while hoping to execute it and do a big reveal of a classic mac with modern i/o (wifi, bluetooth peripherals, airplay) but life has gotten in the way of ambitious hobby projects. Someone interested in taking the plunge here and give it a try? maybe
@ants?
(note: if you ever wondered what product managers do for fun, it’s coming up with ideas like these
)