$14 Mac clone made with a Raspberry Pi Pico

Action Retro set out to make the cheapest possible Apple Macintosh, and their offering is beautifully simple—and, at $14, pretty durned cheap. You'll need a Raspberry Pi Pico and some other bits and bobs to follow along.

Today, we're using the Pico Micro Mac project, along with a project from the endlessly cool @RonsCompVids , to build an entire Macintosh 128K inside of a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller!

Hacakday's Bryan Cockfield:

This build relies on the fact that modern microcontrollers absolutely blow away the computing power available to the average consumer in the 1980s. To emulate the Macintosh 128K, this build uses nothing more powerful than a Raspberry Pi Pico. There's a little bit more to it than that, though, since this build also replicates the feel of the screen of the era as well. Using a "hat" for the Pi Pico from [Ron's Computer Videos] lets the Pico's remaining system resources send the video signal from the emulated Mac out over VGA, meaning that monitors from the late 80s and on can be used with ease. There's an option for micro SD card storage as well, allowing the retro Mac to have an incredible amount of storage compared to the original.

Sure, there are other microcontrollers that could run old operating systems even cheaper than the Pi, but only if your time is worthless.

Previously:
• The joy of troubleshooting the Raspberry Pi
• Making a flying saucer clock (with data storage) controlled by a Raspberry Pi
• Raspberry Pi Pico 2 arrives for $5