rplacd

I have PowerBook 180 with a 10MB memory expansion – I don't know off the top of the head whether they're compatible. However, if you're interested, I'd be happy to sell one to ya... as long as you take the bottom half of my PB180 along with it! I'm too afraid to disassemble it again to see what I'll break, and the damn thing is a white elephant at this point.

Haha, I'm sorry it came to that! It's beautiful. Hope too many other people didn't bug you...

Hey, well done! That's a beautiful hack I think the usual "I did it" demoscene demo video for full-motion video is Bad Apple – here's Bad Apple on an 8088 clone with a SoundBlaster card, a C64. You could be the first to get one running on a 68k compact Mac!

I know, I'm really really enthused about the fact that, somehow, this was the year when all a whole bunch of repro projects came together! I blame the pandemic.

Hell of a victory lap, y'all deserve it! Would send y'all a virtual beer each if that was possible.

MAZEL TOV! congratulations on a live, healthy one!

Honestly, why the hell not. I think I'd learn a lot from this project about how the Toolkit works. Macintosh Common Lisp is fantastic – it's a good way quickly working and prototyping with the Toolbox. Here's an article from MacTech. However, anyone you create on it probably won't run on a Mac with less than multiple MBs of RAM. Also, as a fun aside: as a joke, I tried to do a similar IMGUI prototyping environment, but with JavaScript (I used Duktape for a modern JavaScript environment.) It took 45 seconds to initialize the VM on System 7 on a Macintosh Classic.

Incidentally, I wonder if your PCB layouts would still show which pads on an original SE/30 board are connected to each other. I imagine it'd be useful for repairs/bodge writing/troubleshooting.

I'd choose the Classic II as a good starter Mac. Actually, I have a really soft spot for them. I'm inclined to think that the Classic II AB will be more robust: it's a lot less dense, there is no longer a separate PSU; Apple also moved the fan to a different location in the case for better cooling. A couple of other reasons, some that may or may not be relevant to you: – the Classic II's construction is a lot simpler than the SE, and so disassembling one to get to the logic board is a lot more straightforward compared to the SE; – doing simple mods like replacing aging fa

Out of curiosity, what's the socketed accelerator you've cloned there? Not the PDS one sitting on your desk – although I'm now pretty curious about that too

Oh, stupid me, you're right. That's what I get for posting late at night. Least I can do is actually look it up. I'll be lazy and give a ballpark figure – I think 9 power pins (including fan voltage supply), plus an FPU select pin. So we can get away, conservatively, with 86. Ack, I'll look over this more properly in the morning!

Ah, drat! Welp, I guess I'll stay up for another hour searching the internet... 96 pins for the '020 PDS interface – I looked it up in Designing Cards and Drivers for the Macintosh Family, v3.

Bravo, bravo, bravo! You're an inspiration. I would very, very much love to read a worklog, just to get some insight behind the process.

Did a little internet shopping for off-the-shelf dev boards that might work, just for fun. If you want to do a lot of work for a relatively low price, Lattice has the iCE40-HX8k breakout board that exposes 4 * 40 = 160 IO pins. So 120 for PDS, which leaves barely enough for memory, 40 pins for DRAM or whatever (not including power supply pins.) Solder in 40-pin headers, stack a daughterboard on top, who knows. But what can you do in 7680 logic blocks? If you have a Terasic dev board with an HSMC connector (which cost multiple $100s, are only on their higher-end dev boards

A practical way to help push this project forward would be to chip in a few bucks to Kai to help cover the costs of getting PCBs made! I've done that before.