Revive Your Old Macintosh Classic with a Raspberry Pi
If you have a broken Macintosh that can’t be repaired, you can follow this tutorial to bring it back to life.
It would be an understatement to call the original Macintosh 128k computer anything less than revolutionary. It was the brain child of Steve Jobs, and starting in 1984 it was sold alongside the more conventional Apple II computer that was primarily developed by Steve Wozniak. The Macintosh had its detractors, but there is no denying how important it was. It was responsible for bringing both the GUI (Graphical User Interface) and the mouse into the mainstream — though it wasn’t the first computer to have either feature. If you happen to have a broken Macintosh that can’t be repaired, you can follow offiicialnerdhut's tutorial to revive it using a Raspberry Pi.
This guide is intended for the Macintosh Classic, which was sold from 1990 to 1992. That said, it is likely that you could get it working with many of the other Macintosh models that were sold in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. As long as the CRT (Cathode-Ray Tube) display is functional, you should be able to follow this guide. That CRT is, of course, monochrome. That means you won’t get a color picture. But you will be able to see your Raspberry Pi’s desktop pretty clearly in grayscale. You can even run an emulator on the Pi to reproduce the Macintosh functionality.
This entire project relies on the Raspberry Pi’s ability to generate a VGA (Video Graphics Array) signal. Most people connect displays to their Raspberry Pi through the HDMI port, which will give you the best picture quality and performance. But you can also use the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output) pins to generate a VGA signal. This requires the coordination of HSYNC, VSYNC, and data signals, but the Raspberry Pi has built-in utilities to handle that. By setting those to the configuration described in the tutorial, you can output a video signal that the Macintosh understands. With the original motherboard removed, you’ll have plenty of space inside of the Macintosh enclosure to house the Raspberry Pi — and whatever other hardware you want to use in the setup.