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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Pico emulates a Apple Mac 128k
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Mixtel90 Guru  Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 6783 |
Found on The Register Linky and the web site for it Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| EDNEDN Senior Member  Joined: 18/02/2023 Location: United StatesPosts: 118 |
Very cool... I would love for somebody to do the same thing for a DEC Terak computer! Terak_8510/a This computer was used by a lot of university Computer Science departments to teach programming. The University of California San Diago open sourced their UCSD Pascal for it as a teaching aid. (This is the same code base used for Apple Pascal on the Apple 2e) The compiler needed more memory than was available so the Terak port of the compiler would grab the bit mapped screen memory and as the compiler got nested deeper and deeper into the various program blocks you would see the bits flickering on the screen. The flickering (and random pixels on the screen) would move up and down depending on how much storage the compiler needed for the current program blocks. |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 6783 |
Sorry, you'll need a Raspberry Pi for that. ;) Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| PhenixRising Guru Joined: 07/11/2023 Location: United KingdomPosts: 857 |
Thanks Mick. I needed this article  People around me think I'm going bonkers because they don't understand what I do. Thanks to Volhout making the quad decode PIO work, I'm realising what I thought was impossible. People hear me giggling and they suspect that I have found something amusing online and then I tell them that no, it's just what the PicoMite is doing I forwarded the link to all of them |
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| al18 Senior Member Joined: 06/07/2019 Location: United StatesPosts: 205 |
It’s a demo. Those that have been into computing for decades knows that reference. If you really want to emulate a 128K Mac, Mac Plus or a Mac II - use a Raspberry Pi Zero 2w (quad core 1 GHz) which costs $15 |
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Grogster Admin Group  Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9306 |
Very clever!   Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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andreas Senior Member Joined: 07/12/2020 Location: GermanyPosts: 206 |
Many thanks for that article! -andreas |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 6783 |
I wouldn't say it's a demo as such, but he himself admits that it's pretty rough. It is, however, enough to run a couple of genuine applications from that period. But hey, the clever bit is that he's managed to get it to run on a Pico at all, even if it is an emulation of the first Macintosh 128k - not a Mac Plus or Mac II. Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| al18 Senior Member Joined: 06/07/2019 Location: United StatesPosts: 205 |
I’ll admit it’s a very clever program, but why go thru the trouble of making a Mac emulator without the ability to load Mac disk images? |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 6783 |
The original Macintosh 128k had a single floppy drive. The emulation includes emulation of this because it simply isn't possible to connect a floppy drive to the Pico. Anyway, where would you get a new one? It's a weird drive with a weirder control chip that you can't get. The instructions give you details of where to get the image files and compile them into the uf2 ready for loading into the Pico. This is something you have to build. It's a toy at the end of the day. If you want a closer emulation then do it on a PC or on another Mac. Even better, get the original hardware - it's guaranteed to be 100% compatible with all the Macintosh 128k software. :) Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| EDNEDN Senior Member Joined: 18/02/2023 Location: United StatesPosts: 118 |
The fact you cannot connect a floppy disk drive is almost a non-issue. There are many good CP/m emulators that people continue to use. And you just point the emulator at floppy disk images that have been captured using an actual floppy disk drive. These same CP/m emulators are much more useable than the original hardware because floppy disks were very limited in how much storage capacity they had. The original 8" floppies had 125 Kb of storage. But with the emulator you can point it at a 10 or 20 megabyte image. It used to be building large programs would require the user to swap floppies back and forth to give the compiler the information it needed. With the ability to just point the emulator at a larger disk image those problems go away. If I were to do any work to improve the Mac emulator on a Pico I would probably give it access to disk image files saved on an SD-Card. I don't want to build a new .uf2 image with the data set I'm going use. Rather... I would want to be able to plug in an SD-Card with images of useful floppy disks. But that thought isn't meant as criticism of the author's current work. The fact you currently need to build a floppy disk image into the firmware is just an indication of where the author currently is with the development process. And giving the Mac emulator the intelligence to access floppy image files off of an SD-Card is almost trivial. |
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