I built a pint-sized Macintosh

I built a pint-sized Macintosh

To kick off MARCHintosh, I built this tiny pint-sized Macintosh with a Raspberry Pi Pico:

This is not my own doing—I just assembled the parts to run Matt Evans' Pico Micro Mac firmware on a Raspberry Pi Pico (with an RP2040).

The version I built outputs to a 640x480 VGA display at 60 Hz, and allows you to plug in a USB keyboard and mouse.

Since the original Pico's RAM is fairly constrained, you get a maximum of 208 KB of RAM with this setup—which is 63% more RAM than you got on the original '128K' Macintosh!

Hardware

I was inspired to try this out after seeing the setup on Ron's Computer Videos and Action Retro.

And almost two years ago now, I bought all the parts for the build:

As with most of my projects, the parts have been sitting in a box long enough that a new version exists which makes the build even easier! Ron (of Ron's Computer Videos) designed a 'V3' version of the Pico Micro Mac adapter, which makes the setup much easier:

It integrates the microSD card adapter right into the main board (no need for a little 'microSD card HAT' soldered precariously on top of some header pins)

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