The Apple Lisa Inside an FPGA!

[Nickr93]

I will take one as well!

 

[wottle]

Good idea, I'll make an account on hacker news and start answering some questions.

And wow Joe, you're actually the second person who's approached me about potentially being a reseller! I don't have a problem with that at all (in fact, that would be great), but there's just so much happening with this project right now that it's pretty overwhelming. I expected the video to get a few views and that's about it, but I'm constantly getting emails and messages from people asking me all sorts of questions and making proposals/offers. Maybe send me an email and we can work out some details, just keeping in mind that I might take a minute to respond in the midst of all this chaos. I'm also in the middle of final exams right now, which doesn't make things any better. I'm okay with as many people reselling them as possible, but my only big condition is that nobody asks for exclusive rights to selling boards.

I'm glad my boards helped get your Lisa up and running again!

Having used @JCM-1 for distributing my much less ambitious hardware devices that are similarly much cheaper (percent wise) to make in bulk, I highly recommend partnering with him. He seems to have the logistics of selling and shipping things worked out much better than I would!

Also, it might be worth checking out @ThisDoesNotCompute's post over on tinker different about his bulk SE/30 reloaded buy. It was a lot of work.

That said, I'm a huge fan of the ESProfiles and would certainly be interested in a group buy if you decide to go that route. Add me to the growing list of people committing to a buy. Although I'm think I saw you respond in the Youtube comments that you are considering trying to make one compatible with the Lisa case. I'd love to have a fallback plan if mine ever bites the dust, and also would love the performance improvements you've incorporated into the board.

Great work!

 

[nickpunt]

Great job Alex! Plugging this into a 9" CRT and 3d printing a 2/3's size Lisa would be a pretty sweet little project.

 

[mattsoft]

This is amazing and one of the most interesting FPGA projects around! I would definitely buy one if available as well. Mind simply blown.

 

[shirsch]

Having used @JCM-1 for distributing my much less ambitious hardware devices that are similarly much cheaper (percent wise) to make in bulk, I highly recommend partnering with him. He seems to have the logistics of selling and shipping things worked out much better than I would!

I'll second the suggestion on Joe. Great guy! He's exactly who I had in mind when I made the suggestion about partnering on the Lisalist.

 

[luRaichu]

I'm not here to buy one but I think it'd be funnier if it was a Mini-ITX form factor board

 

[AlexTheCat123]

Having used @JCM-1 for distributing my much less ambitious hardware devices that are similarly much cheaper (percent wise) to make in bulk, I highly recommend partnering with him. He seems to have the logistics of selling and shipping things worked out much better than I would!

Also, it might be worth checking out @ThisDoesNotCompute's post over on tinker different about his bulk SE/30 reloaded buy. It was a lot of work.

That said, I'm a huge fan of the ESProfiles and would certainly be interested in a group buy if you decide to go that route. Add me to the growing list of people committing to a buy. Although I'm think I saw you respond in the Youtube comments that you are considering trying to make one compatible with the Lisa case. I'd love to have a fallback plan if mine ever bites the dust, and also would love the performance improvements you've incorporated into the board.

Great work!

I've heard a lot of good things about Joe from a lot of people, so I'm leaning pretty strongly towards going with him! I think I'll FINALLY find the time to respond to him today...

Yeah, I saw that thread about the SE/30 Reloaded. Luckily, this is far from my first time dealing with JLCPCB and their assembly service, so I kind of know what to expect and how to design something that they can handle. All of the previous revisions of this board have been assembled through them without issue, so there shouldn't be anything on there that's a problem. I was also careful to protect the SMD components fairly well and have the "strong" through-hole parts sticking up higher than them everywhere in an attempt to avoid putting any load on them, so hopefully that reduces the chance of damage during shipping too.

 

[Jdoc68k]

I’ve ordered a handful of items from @JCM-1 as well- great service! I’m in for one of these boards as well.

 

[DCB]

I replied in another thread, but I am very interested and will buy at $150 or less as long as they can be shipped in the US, since I am not near any of the big shows.

Thanks!

 

[KGLlewellyn]

I'd love to register my interest for one of these boards as well. Thank you so much for all your incredible work. Also I can vouch for Joe, good guy, he helped me out with my crap soldering iron hahah.

 

[terrier]

OP updated the thread over on lisalist2 yesterday - he's hoping to have 50 boards at VCF Southwest for ~$300/each:

JLC just finished manufacturing the boards, so they should be shipped out pretty soon. Hopefully they'll be here by VCF; it's going to be really close!

I just added a neat feature that very few people will probably ever have a use for, but it comes in handy for me sometimes with LOS experimentation, as well as with Xenix's hard drive size limits. If you connect one of the pins on the GPIO header to 3.3V, then the FPGA will intercept any reads to address FCC030 and always return 88 instead of A8, making software think that it's running on a 2/10 instead of a 2/5. Pretty neat, right?

Quote from: bmwcyclist on May 12, 2026, 12:55:58 PMDid I miss where the price was posted?

Sorry, I completely forgot to respond to you! It's looking like about $300. I really wanted it to be cheaper, but the prices of chips have gone up quite significantly since my last order. Take the FPGA for instance. When I placed my first order back in November, it was $20 apiece, but now it's like $50. And many of the other chips have increased by similar proportions too. It sucks!

 

[cmholm]

I'll pile on with another "kudos" and "take my money"! Unfortunately, I won't be at VCFSW this year, so I'll have to take my lumps if none become available remotely from Alex/Joe/whomever.

 

[AlexTheCat123]

I'll pile on with another "kudos" and "take my money"! Unfortunately, I won't be at VCFSW this year, so I'll have to take my lumps if none become available remotely from Alex/Joe/whomever.

Don't worry! Whatever happens (unless I were to die or something, but that's pretty unlikely), they will ABSOLUTELY be available for sale online. The only thing that's up in the air is whether or not they'll be here in time for VCF, but if not, then they'll just all go up for sale when I get home from VCF anyway. And if the first batch sells out, then I'm planning on doing more batches after that too.

 

[Joopmac]

Really great, Alex! I am curious how the Lisa interface would feel @ 75Mhz FPGA

I also love your ESProfile, rock solid and fun to build!
Makes me remember i whipped up a nice bracket for in the drive cage. Let me find the STL

 

[lisa2]

Really great, Alex! I am curious how the Lisa interface would feel @ 75Mhz FPGA

Alex can confirm this, but the 75Mhz is the master system clock not the 68000 clock speed. @75Mhz the CPU speed should be around15Mhz that is still 3X the stock Lisa's 5Mhz CPU.

 

[AlexTheCat123]

Alex can confirm this, but the 75Mhz is the master system clock not the 68000 clock speed. @75Mhz the CPU speed should be around15Mhz that is still 3X the stock Lisa's 5Mhz CPU.

Yep, that's absolutely right! The 75MHz number refers to the Lisa dot clock, not the CPU clock. The stock Lisa has a 20MHz dot clock and divides that by 4 to create a 5MHz CPU clock, so my 75MHz dot clock gives an 18.75MHz CPU clock, for a 3.75x speed increase.

Sorry if I didn't make that clear enough! I just never think in terms of the the CPU clock because it's pretty much solely used to clock the actual CPU and nothing else. The dot clock is used for tons and tons of things, so I always think of clock speeds in terms of it as opposed to the CPU clock.

By the way, I tried to go higher than that, but 75MHz was the max that the hardware and software would support. The FPGA could've actually gone faster, but the SDRAM chip started getting intermittent above 75MHz, so I had to cap it there. Also, most of the Lisa OS's will start acting weird when you increase the frequency too much because you have to keep in mind that the COP421 is still running at stock speeds this whole time in order to keep the time/date and keyboard interface working properly, and the timeout counters for COP communications expire too fast as you increase the dot clock to absurd levels.

The 3.75x increase still feels really significant in normal use though. It feels like a completely different computer, and going back to a stock Lisa feels painfully slow!