I Made My Own Mac! You Can Too!

A word of caution, don't waste too much time perusing Facebook Marketplace, otherwise you'll end up like me, a couple thousand dollars poorer, and with like 20 vintage Macs worth basically nothing. There is one machine that I am pretty excited about though, and it's this one, because it's the first computer that I really have any recollection using, a 1998 iMac G3 in Bondi Blue. Now, as a five-year-old, I admittedly didn't do much more on my dad's computer than play as Pablo in Backyard Baseball. I certainly didn't understand how iconic this machine would become, nor did I understand how lucky I was to have access to it. Because you see, the Bondi Blue model is in fact rather rare. What most people confuse with the original iMac is in fact the Blueberry, released a number of months later. The main distinguishing factor between these two machines, other than the slightly different blue hues is that the original Bondi Blue model Had an IR receiver built into the left speaker. Now, what was the point of this AppleTalk serial-based infrared sensor, you ask? Ah, it was mostly used to communicate with Palm PDAs, but also these similarly colored Apple eMate. Cutting-edge stuff. It's even got a touchscreen with handwriting recognition. Take that, iPad! But the earliest computer that I can remember as a child? Not one I ever used, but remember seeing frequently in my dad's office? Heavy son of a gun! A Macintosh Color Classic, released in 1993, my birth year. Powered by a Motorola 68030, this machine had the same architecture and general capabilities as the original, iconic 1984 Macintosh, the computer that started it all. And I would love to experience that era, one I have never lived. I've literally never used an original 128K Mac. Unfortunately, they're pretty expensive and difficult to find working. But even if you do get lucky and find one, it's hard to find the software, to get the modem up and running, you know, to get the vibe of what it would have been like. So we're just going to make our own Macintosh instead. Now, look, there are a multitude of really fantastic projects having recreated Classic Macs, but I've watched almost all of them and they're pretty involved. So they take either a lot of time, a lot of expertise or a lot of money, and oftentimes all three. I just want to make something beautiful, but on the cheap, something that doesn't require much time or skill, something that you can recreate at home. And so how will we do this? Well, the way you do everything, buddy, with some chest hair and a $35 Raspberry Pi. And this Pi 3B Plus is a rather old one at that. Though there are newer generations of Pi to use instead, these old 3Bs can be had for quite a bit less money. And they still offer a quad-core design that's roughly 150 times faster than the highest clocked 68K processor ever. So I think we're good there. The reason I elected to use this over a newer, say, Pi 5 is because the very handy Macintosh Pi project hasn't been updated for a couple of years and doesn't support the latest two flagship Pi models. But also, the latest two flagship Pi models don't support the legacy OSes. Because while this is just effectively a fancy install script to combine a bunch of other resources for emulating classic macOS, including low-level input support, virtual modem installation, and a resolution-flexible launcher, its one-command install saves hours of setup time. And while Mac OS 9 might run better on, say, the Pi 4's extra horsepower, systems 7 and 8, they don't need the additional compute. And, uh, I don't know if you noticed, but I already have very little hair as it is. I can't lose even more debugging. That was supposed to be a fun project. Speaking of fun, the Macintosh Pi also installs BMC for Commodore emulation, in the event that I wanted to do some 1980s gaming. The process is fairly straightforward. You download the recommended Pi OS version from the Macintosh Pi GitHub, you use Etcher to write it to an SD card, and then you pop said SD card into the Pi. You enter the command line, clone the Macintosh Pi repo, and you run the install script. My grandma could do it. That's it. Now, it does take a fair bit of time to install, but once it's done, All's I gotta do is type Mac OS 7 and, uh, check this out, I'm running Mac OS 7. Yeesh! Ain't that easy. But a Mac is nothing without its software. And as someone who's played around with vintage Macs a lot and floppy emulation, oh, it's a nightmare. Trust me, emulation is great. All you gotta do is, well, step one, plug in your Pi. Step two, launch the Raspberry Pi desktop environment by typing start x. Step number three, open up the Chromium web browser built into the Raspberry Pi operating system. And then number four, navigate to your software of choice on Macintosh Garden, Macintosh Repository, or one of the many websites online that host old Mac stuff. All I gotta do now is download it. And what has been downloaded is a .sit file, not unlike a zip file, it's just a compressed archive, one that we have to unarchive with Stuffit Expander, an old school application. And we can do that from right within macOS. So we're going to launch macOS 7 via the command line. And thanks to the magic of Macintosh Pi, there is a Unix server that shows up as accessible on our desktop. And this is just a shared folder, our downloads folder, within the Raspberry Pi desktop environment. So you download something, and it shows up in here automatically, which is awesome. I've got the .zip file, and I just unarchive it. And that's it. Now, I did unarchive it on the server, so I've got to reopen that up to refresh. And here you go, the application. I'm going to drag this into the hard drive, and I'm ready to go. Ta-da! But who wants to paint? Let's do some math. This is Microsoft Excel version 3.0. And look at that. Emulation's so fast, I can't even see the splash screen. Copyright 1995? Yeah, okay. So this is pretty old. Uh, and let's just start typing numbers. 52, 45, 99, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Okay, let's see if I can remember my formulas. Equals sum of cells A1 to A8. And our total is... 428! Woohoo! Excel works! Oh, can we make a chart? Let's see, this is a high graphics intensity thing. Chart. That's sick! That's so cool, that was so quick! Emulation. Carmen Sandiego's America's Past. Require system 6.0.4, which I've got, or higher, with 256 color OR black and white mode. Please, please, you're too advanced. Okay, so I need to come into control panels, and I think it's monitors. And then say, I don't have millions of colors. I only have 256. And now the game launch is fine. The The chief will... Dude, she looks pissed. Oh, the dog. Okay, let's read my email. Amazing new lip zippers lose 60 pounds in 30 days. They even have spam in the fake game. I like that. Okay. Sim Ant. This is one of Benjamin's favorite games from growing up. Oh wow. SimAnt runs radically faster in 16 color mode. Set now for best performance. Okay. Oh my goodness. Yeah, there are surely only 16 colors. Look at that. That looks kind of cool though. Explore the surface. Okay. You're outside! This is called the surface view. Oh no, you can die up here. Well that's intense. Okay, I want to go. Can I go into someone else's colony? I'm dead already? You fell into an antlion trap. Oh, the ugly brute toys with your puny body before sucking your guts out. That's grim. I'd say the video's over, but this doesn't look like a Macintosh. And so that's where today's sponsor comes in. The Bamboo Lab H2D is one of the coolest 3D printers I've ever used. But it's not just a 3D printer, it is a personal manufacturing hub. Huh? Yeah, well, it prints with two extruders, it can laser cut and engrave, it can plot vinyl, it can draw, it probably even makes a decent creme brulee. I don't know, I haven't pushed it that far. But what I do know is that it's about to cook up one very specific dessert, turning this That Raspberry Pi into a charming little slice of 1984, with a generous drizzle of molten plastic. Now, the H2D has a pretty huge 350x320x325mm build volume, and I want to take advantage of the full thing. Now, the original Macintosh had a 9-inch screen that ran at a 3x2, 512x342 resolution, which is super neat, frankly, because while later Macs, like my dad's Color Classic, standardized on 4x3, it is trivially easy to find decent 3x2 external displays online today. And let's be honest, 3x2 is the best aspect ratio ever. So I want to build to that, the original Macintosh. And after some spelunking, I found this. 10 and a half inch 1920 by 1280 panel on Amazon with honestly decent specs. It's an IPS panel, 400 nits full screen panel brightness, and it's got 100% sRGB coverage. It's super thin, weighs almost nothing, can be had for about 60 bucks and can even run off of a single USB cable. But also for the purposes of our project, can also accept external power with video input from our Pi by a mini HDMI. Nice. Now, in designing our reproduction Macintosh, I wanted to make something that was easily printed, of course, but also something striking, retro, yet modern, a stunning homage to the original Macintosh rather than just some cheapo reproduction. And I mean, look, I am incredibly biased, but we settled on this and I think it looks freaking awesome because from the front, it looks like a traditional Macintosh. But then you turn it to the side. That ain't no box. You've got a cantilever display. It looks very modern, but also retro. Super, super cool. And we spent a lot of time on basically every part. I mean, check this out. We even copied the very, very gentle curve of the original 1984 Macintosh display front. Okay, there is a slot here that is precision fit to our actual screen. This allows us to slide the entire thing, case and all, into this display window. So this display window will match basically perfectly with these bezels, but then you've got much thicker bezels on our model because, well, the original Macintosh had thick bezels. And the benefit to that is we're going to have a couple of inches of room on each side to hide our I.O. because we're going to have cables coming off of each side of the monitor. Where do we route these cables? Well, honestly, it doesn't matter because we've got an open air interior behind said display, despite it looking quite thin. That's going to allow us to route the cabling haphazardly because there ain't no reason to make pretty that which can't be seen. And then we've got this slick tray down here that is a sliding tray that will slide in and out of our model. Check this out. In, out, in, out, in. And it's got standoffs, so we can put our Raspberry Pi on there, we can put our micro USB, and we can put our mini HDMI and all the crap that we need to plug into the monitor and to everything else, but we'll still have easy access to our USB and ethernet at the back. And then last, well, we've got these cavities to fill. So we've got a left and right side panel. And then check this out. The original 1984 Apple logo in six colors. Ah, it's going to be awesome. OK. The main body part is by far the biggest part, and it's going to take the most time to print, so we're going to print it first. I have already brought the model into Bamboo Studio, the slicer software that Bamboo Lab provides, and I've oriented it on my build plate. I've established my support and all of my variables. A lot of this is done automatically if you're a novice printer, but I like to get nerdy with it. And if you are a nerd in 3D printing, you might notice that I'm using 0.8 millimeter nozzles as opposed to 0.4 millimeter nozzles, Which is the traditional size, twice as big. Why am I doing this? Well, because swapping hot ends on the H2D is super easy. So why not? But because it will cut down on our print time significantly. And because those layers are thicker and there's more surface area to stick together, it will make those layers extra strong. Additionally, while you don't typically want to use a larger nozzle, on small prints because it gives us a low poly, low resolution look, I want that on a retro looking machine that's going to be very, very big. These lines up close. We'll look super, super cool. Now, if we look at our slice part, it's saying that it's going to take 19 hours, which seems like a long time, but it's not, because check this out, we are going to use 1,909 grams of filament. I think this is the most filament I've ever used in any print ever. Two kilograms for this main case body alone. That's bananas. That's like two rolls. But if I push print plate, we'll find out that it's not really an issue for the H2D because I've got the AMS, the Automatic Material System. I can load up multiple rolls, and the AMS will automatically detect the color and the print properties of each roll. And because I'm loading three of the same rolls in, once it runs out of one, well, it's just going to automatically switch to the next roll of the same color and keep on printing. Ha! This is going to be so awesome. All right. I've got all my settings loaded. I just pushed send? And it's the moment of truth! It's going to start printing! While that massive part is chugging along, let's explore another cool feature of the dual-nozzle extruder, printing with different, but compatible materials. Dig this fume extractor. It is a sturdy part made out of PLACF. That needs to connect to another piece of the same material, but here is where it gets clever. We can use the secondary nozzle to print TPU, which is a flexible rubber-like material, directly into this part to give us a perfect gasket seal. Pretty sweet, great for a fume extractor. Now the H2D handles TPUs so well that I was even able to print these shoes. This is 3D printed. Seeing a finished shoe created on a consumer level printer with this level of resolution and precision, not to mention size, is frankly nothing short of astounding technology. And so through the power of having two of these things, let's start up a new print on this H2D to fix a problem that I've got, print. The problem? Our slickly designed sliding tray makes accommodations for our Raspberry Pi's USB and Ethernet ports, but not for things like power inlet and various other cables that we may decide to run later on. And rather than just leave a massive hole at the back of the case, well, I'm going to print a flexible cable grommet out of TPU directly into the larger PLA part. This is the perfect example of something that you just cannot do with a multi-material system or filament changer on a standard 3D printer. You truly need a dual nozzle setup. And the H2D, as we'll soon find out, it is going to deliver. Okay, we'll let these things print. See you tomorrow! Oh, good morning. Smells fresh. Just got notice that the printer was done cooking up this part and... Holy, oh boy! Is it big! Look at this! Oh, wow! Look at these supports, they're super easy to remove. Oh, love that. Look at this purge tower! Wow, that looks nice! Pretty good! Needs a little clean-up, but not too bad, eh? I do still need side panels, so I'm printing those on the standard H2D downstairs. But in the meantime, I wanted to show you something cool with the H2D laser. Available in a laser configuration from the get-go, or upgradable from a standard H2D later on, the H2D laser offers both a 10-watt and 40-watt, you guessed it, blue-diode laser, capable of cutting and engraving upon a variety of different materials. And it's still a printer, you just take all of the accessories, you attach them to the front, and boy, have you got yourself a manufacturing hub. Now, Bamboo Lab sells a bunch of pre-configured materials on their website that you can use to make things like this, or like... This. But you can also engrave on just about anything, even something like this. An iPhone. First, you open up the desktop app and import the image or vector that you'd like to cut, engrave, or emboss. And then you place your destination material on the print bed. Or, I guess, the laser bed. The app will then allow you to easily align your vectorized image on your material by taking a bird's eye view of the actual laser bed, which is amazing. And you can even measure the depth of the material to ensure that the laser is in focus. Super handy if you're lasering on something like an iPhone, rather than one of Bamboo Lab's pre-selected materials. And once you're ready to go, well, you just select the job on the H2D and ensure that you are exhausting waste air to either outside or Bamboo Lab's optional, very quiet, smoke purifier. You hold down the start button and watch as the blue light does its magic. It's going! Now safety is paramount, and nearly a dozen temperature and infrared flame sensors can detect any flare-ups. And in the unusual event that a fire does start, the printer will kill the task, move the laser module to safety, and then seal up the entire machine from outside air, depriving the fire of oxygen and stopping things before there's any real damage. It's superb at engraving, obviously, but it can also cut. You see, I noticed that despite weighing nearly five pounds, the bottom of the computer, it's just too slippery for a desk. And so using the laser module, I can use a vector file or even Bamboo's built-in shape tools to create and cut out a new foot made entirely of cork, keeping a theme with our original retro design. Begin. Ho, ho, ho, dang. Dang, that's a lot of smoke. Stare into the laser. And that's it! She's done! That was fast! Bop-a-bop-a-bop! Ha ha ha! This looks awesome! Behold! My corked foot! Don't look too close, you gotta pay for that. Did you know that the original 1984 Macintosh had signatures from all of the iconic team members? So you've got Steve Jobs, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, and more. All of their names were injection molded onto the inside of the Macintosh's case. I found a scanned image of all of these signatures online, and I thought it would be super neat to recreate their signatures with a pen on the bottom of my cork foot using the H2D's included cutting and drawing module, which can not only cut vinyl and paper, but, you guessed it, also plot with a pen. Now even though my image is not a vector, the built-in tools let me remove the background and resize it perfectly. All I need to do is secure my cork to the mildly adhesive build plate, load my pen into the pen holder, and then put the lid on, Press start and let my automated autograph session begin. This looks awesome. I mean, we've got all the big names. Andy Hertfelt, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak is over here in the corner. That was mostly honorary. He didn't work much on the Macintosh. Daniel Plotky, Bill Atkinson, who recently passed away. May he rest in peace. Dude was a legend, invented the menu bar, a HyperCard, which predated the World Wide Web. Very cool. All right, so we've got all our parts and we've got to actually assemble them. And well, let's start with our Raspberry Pi. You can screw directly into plastic, but I don't prefer to. There are these things called brass standoffs, or heated inserts, and you basically just take these, you take a soldering iron, and then you push down on them. They melt through the plastic, and it gives you a perfect nut in which to place screws. It works awesome. Oh, you don't think so? Okay, so we'll take our pie, we'll slip it in, and then we just take these screws. Heh. Screw. Eh. This is absolutely more security than is needed. We could probably get away with putting one screw in here, or two at the most, but, you know, smoke them if you got them. You could throw this thing off the bridge into the San Francisco Bay and this pie would stay attached through the millennia. That's, oh, that's adhesive. Turns out that glue sticks. Does its job. Is that perfectly centered? So that's okay. Few things in life are perfect. Don't worry, the other side panel's not It'll be centered. We've got our display. We've got a micro HDMI to HDMI right angle adapter. Because it turns out HDMI cables are pretty bulky. We've got a right angle USB cable for power. Plug in the USB. Oh, yeah. Heck yeah, boy. All right. Time to slide this puppy in. Oh, yeah, boy. Ha, that looks good. Okay, we've got the Pi. We've got the power. We've got the HDMI. Vice versa. Now we just have to slide this puppy into place. Check this out. Oh, you know what? That doesn't fit all the way. But, your boy forgot to design a handle, so this was actually on purpose. Okay, so we've got the power going to the Pi. Power of the Pi. We're gonna push this through the grommet first. Oh, that looks so good. Grommets, TPU. Okay, plug that puppy in. All right, very nice. Look at the HDMI, plug that in. Okay, and then we're gonna lower this puppy into place. That's a long HDMI cable. Probably doesn't need to be that long. I've discovered a flaw in my design. We don't have to talk about that. All right, and now we're gonna put this last power cable to our display through, and there we go. She's in place. I really do want this to fit. It's so close. My design was just a little bit off. Heck yeah, that looks money. Now we will refer to our friend hot glue to affix the last side panel. I want the other one pretty much permanent in place, but this one I need to be able to take off if I ever need to get in here to service stuff, especially the display. So a couple of dabs and a press and that should hold everything in place. Please be hot enough. You know what they say about hot glue, move fast. Okay. A little bit of hot glue did seep through. These sensors are tingling. Ow, that's hot. Glue. Ha ha ha. It is fully assembled in all of its glory, but does it power on? Let us see. Plug in the display. Plug in the Pi. Things are happening. It works! It works! But there is one massive omission. The original, six colors Apple logo. Though much slower, a 0.2mm nozzle works great for fine detail on small parts, and in the Bamboo Studio software, I merely paint the six colors that I'd like to use and we're off to the races. Except for, wait a sec. 3D printers, they don't have ink, they just melt a roll of plastic into pretty shapes. So we need six colored spools, plus our beige one. And how the heck am I going to load all of this filament into one printer? Well, with the AMS seen earlier, two of them, in fact. This will load a color into the extruder, spit out the necessary plastic, unload that color, load the next color, spit out the necessary plastic, rinse and repeat, layer by layer. Wow, despite how tiny this little print is, it looks great with every color showing through nicely with a little bit of glue. We can slip our capstone into the part and hey, look at that, our computer is complete. But an homage this is not without the proper peripherals to match, and thus, an Apple Keyboard 2 from 1991. This thing, despite being older than me, looks fantastic. But because it's so old, it doesn't have USB, so how the heck are we going to plug it into our Raspberry Pi? Aha! With the help of this. The ADB Wombat. This clever little board takes the ADB signal, which stands for Apple Device Bus, it was a proprietary bit serial signal that Apple used on all their peripherals through like the mid-90s, and converts it to USB. So we can use it not just on our Raspberry Pi, but on any modern computer. And what's super neat about this is it's bidirectional. So if you have a classic Mac, but you don't have the peripherals to match, but you can use a modern keyboard and mouse on an old Macintosh computer, which is great, especially because optical mice are so much better than those rollerball mice. But there is one thing that gets even more complicated with these old Macs. They've all got a button right here on the keyboard. You might be thinking, what the heck is that? Well, that's the power button. Most old Macs had power switches, but not power buttons. And to turn them on without an official Apple keyboard, you'd have to like shunt two connectors at the back of the computer. It was a whole thing. And so this ADB controller just integrates a little black button to turn on your classic Mac with a single button press. Pretty neat. I don't have an ADB mouse though, unfortunately, and so I decided to just use an MX Master 3. No, just kidding. I decided to print one in the exact same color as my recreation Macintosh. And that is where Maker Supply and Maker World comes into play. The reality is sometimes you need a little bit more than just extruded plastic to complete your vision. Like for this mouse, I needed all the mouse bits. Bamboo Lab partners with creators all around the world who come up with great ideas and then offers their projects at a very low cost. I think this whole mouse was like $13 so that you can build your own. Go beyond the plastic. The thing is, is that a mouse is a great idea, but not everybody likes their original design. And thanks to the Maker World community, which is filled with tens of thousands of makers that are uploading free 3D models all the time, there are hundreds of variations of this mouse project design, and one of them just so happens to be a 1980s ADB-styled mouse, which is pretty slick. I found this inside of the Bamboo Handy mobile app. I was able to download the model and send it to my printer without having to do any work on the computer. I didn't have to have any knowledge of my 3D printer. I didn't set up the print profile. Nothing. I just said, go, and it printed it. Easy as that. Pretty freaking awesome. Okay, so I've got my mouse. I've got my keyboard. I've got my computer. What else is there to do? Oh, why don't I open up this virtually mounted CD-ROM and play SimCity, baby? I need to run it in 256 color mode. Okay, sure. Maxis presents Oh, this makes me miss the Sims. They massacred my boy. Okay, owner name. Big Pooh. Okay, easy mode? Yes. 1900, 1950, 2000, or 2050, of course. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba! Ooh, there's still newspapers in 2050? I'm not sure they knew what was going to happen. It's going to happen. Okay, let's build a road. I don't know how to play this. I've never played it before. Right on top of the mountain. Beautiful, beautiful. Oh, power plant needed. How the heck do I freaking build a power plant? Newspaper, Windows, Budget, Maps, Orientation, Population, Industry, Graphs, Names, Disasters! Can I just create a disaster on command? Disasters. Air crash. Oh no, because you have no police or firefighters, the National Guard has been deployed to your city. Oh, this is serious. Power. Power, oh, power plants. This will bring up a list of the currently available power plants that you may build. This list will grow as time passes and technology progresses. Okay, so let's click it. But I only see power lines. Do I have to click it again? No. Let's build a power line. I didn't... Am I embarrassing myself? I'm not an old. I don't know how to do this. I HATE SIMCITY! So, that's all for me. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like, if you didn't, that other button works okay too. Thank you so much for watching! I gotta figure out how to build it. And as always, stay safe. How's the fire doing? Oh gosh. It's bad. It's bad. Abort! Abort! Quit the game! Oh no! I can't write to my CD either! Everything's going wrong. Don't save.