Pining for Simpler Days? Pico Micro Mac Turns Your Raspberry Pi Pico 2 Into "The Worst Macintosh"
Matt Evans' Apple Macintosh 128K emulator has now been updated for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2, with support for audio and 464kB of RAM.
Apple fans reminiscing over a simpler yesterday can now build a working Apple Macintosh with audio and support for up to 464kB of memory — running on a tiny Raspberry Pi Pico 2 or compatible RP2350-based microcontroller development board.
"Pico [Micro] Mac with Audio has been published," pseudonymous vintage computing enthusiast and developer Retro-Theory writes of the emulator, which targets devices built around Raspberry Pi's in-house 32-bit RP2350 microcontroller chip. "[It] includes PWM [Pulse-Width Modulation] or DAC [Digital-to-Analog Converter] based audio [which you can] specify at build time."
The Pico Micro Mac emulator was originally written by Matt Evans as a way to, in his own words, put "the worst Macintosh in a cheap, portable form factor." That's perhaps a little unfair, though not without some basis in truth: Pico Micro Mac emulates the original Apple Macintosh all-in-one desktop computer, a breakthrough success for the firm on its launch in 1984 — but that was later rebranded as the Macintosh 128K following the release of the Macintosh 512K, which had four times the memory to considerably expand its capabilities.
Evans' emulator was originally made with the original Raspberry Pi Pico, and its RP2040 microcontroller, in mind, and includes the ability to increase the video resolution from the original 512×342 to 640×480 and to boost the Macintosh's RAM to 208kB. It hasn't been updated in a couple of years, though, so Retro-Theory took it upon themselves to update it for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and the more powerful RP2350 microcontroller — adding support for up to 464kB of memory and the ability to output audio either as lower-quality but extra-hardware-free PWM or by adding a DAC chip for higher-quality sound.
Retro-Theory's fork of Pico Micro Mac is available on GitHub, under the same permissive MIT license as Evans' original; those wanting to try it will need two 66Ω resistors and a 100Ω resistor to connect the video output into a VGA-compatible display device.