Hey all. Long-time lurker, finally have something worth posting.
I know a lot of fellow vintage computer and electronics enthusiasts are also into Ham Radio and other neat RF stuff. LORA and Meshtastic are certainly interesting hobbies to get in to.
I've been building a native Meshtastic client for classic Mac OS, targeting System 6 on real 68000 hardware. It talks to a Heltec LoRa node over the serial/modem port (RS-422, level-shifted to the Heltec's UART) and gives you a proper native UI: node list, channel list, and a scrolling chat window, all built with the standard Toolbox — Window Manager, TextEdit, the works. It will work on system 7+ but you will lose out on the coolest feature (Macintalk) until I build version 2, which will use Macintalk 2/3 for the speech synthesis.
The stack:
Cross-compiled with Retro68 (m68k-apple-macos target)
Written in C, built and debugged from VS Code on the PC side
Runs on real hardware — I've had it going for hours at a stretch on a Mac Plus, 512K and LC II
It talks to a Heltec V3 board running standard Meshtastic firmware over serial, parsing the protobuf packet stream directly
There's also now a genuine 512K edition — boots straight into the app with no Finder loaded (same trick a lot of 128K/512K-era games used to squeeze out every available byte), so it actually runs on a real, unexpanded 512K Mac.
My Favorite feature is the Speech output. Messages can be read aloud through MacinTalk, so incoming mesh traffic gets announced audibly.
I made a Youtube video demonstrating the app
All the files, diagrams, instructions are on my website https://salvagegeek.com/macmesh
Still actively developing this. I’d love to hear your feedback if you want to test it out. I’m sure there will be lots of bugs to report. I’d love to hear any ideas for new features or changes. I'm sure most of you will probably be wondering what LORA and Meshtastic actually is too.
One of the next bug fixes will be working on the page buffering as sometimes it can look like a bit of a disco party when updating node lists. I’d also like to be able to add channels directly from the app.
I know a lot of fellow vintage computer and electronics enthusiasts are also into Ham Radio and other neat RF stuff. LORA and Meshtastic are certainly interesting hobbies to get in to.
I've been building a native Meshtastic client for classic Mac OS, targeting System 6 on real 68000 hardware. It talks to a Heltec LoRa node over the serial/modem port (RS-422, level-shifted to the Heltec's UART) and gives you a proper native UI: node list, channel list, and a scrolling chat window, all built with the standard Toolbox — Window Manager, TextEdit, the works. It will work on system 7+ but you will lose out on the coolest feature (Macintalk) until I build version 2, which will use Macintalk 2/3 for the speech synthesis.
The stack:
Cross-compiled with Retro68 (m68k-apple-macos target)
Written in C, built and debugged from VS Code on the PC side
Runs on real hardware — I've had it going for hours at a stretch on a Mac Plus, 512K and LC II
It talks to a Heltec V3 board running standard Meshtastic firmware over serial, parsing the protobuf packet stream directly
There's also now a genuine 512K edition — boots straight into the app with no Finder loaded (same trick a lot of 128K/512K-era games used to squeeze out every available byte), so it actually runs on a real, unexpanded 512K Mac.
My Favorite feature is the Speech output. Messages can be read aloud through MacinTalk, so incoming mesh traffic gets announced audibly.
I made a Youtube video demonstrating the app
All the files, diagrams, instructions are on my website https://salvagegeek.com/macmesh
Still actively developing this. I’d love to hear your feedback if you want to test it out. I’m sure there will be lots of bugs to report. I’d love to hear any ideas for new features or changes. I'm sure most of you will probably be wondering what LORA and Meshtastic actually is too.
One of the next bug fixes will be working on the page buffering as sometimes it can look like a bit of a disco party when updating node lists. I’d also like to be able to add channels directly from the app.
