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MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

under £5 A microcontroller Macintosh This all started from a conversation about the RP2040 MCU, and building a simple desktop/GUI for it. I’d made a comment along the lines of “or, just run some old OS”, and it got me thinking about the original Macintosh.

A Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller (on a Pico board), driving monochrome VGA video and taking USB keyboard/mouse input, emulating a Macintosh 128K computer and disc storage. Second version did double-buffering with the goal of making the IRQ handler’s job trivial: poke in a pre-prepared DMA config quickly, then after the critical rush calculate the buffer to use for next time. By adding a 64K table of counters to umac, booting the Mac and running key applications (okay, playing Missile Command for a bit), we get a profile of dynamic instruction counts.

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