Miniaturizing a Mac | Hacker News Reader

Miniaturizing a Mac

hackaday.com

178 pointskqr222 comments

Sprite_tm (Jeroen) has long been an inspiration to me. His projects are highly original and I think anyone who identifies with the hacker ethos will enjoy the projects on his website: http://spritesmods.com

Thanks for the link! I've stumbled upon this site few years ago. Recently I tried to find it again, but failed.

This is such a great resource.

Edit: what brought me originally to the site was this - http://spritesmods.com/?art=macsearm&page=10

Mac SE with guts replaced by ARM board. With deyellowed chassis, functional screen, keyboard and mouse. Also a mod of diskette.

his article on the ubiquitous arm controller, even hard drives, was quite.. shocking.

It's not really miniaturizing if you're using an emulator is it? And emulator was used for the gameboy color as well.

I was expecting original hardware in a much smaller form factor. Instead this is just an development board and screen in a custom enclosure.

Emulators on small devices isn't that interesting of a feat, IIRC someone ran and old version of MacOS on an Apple Watch when it first came out.

The guts of the device are irrelevant to the user of the device. That was true of the original and it's true of this replica. As long as you can't tell the behavior from the original, and it's not relying on a connection to a larger system somewhere else, I'd consider it a success.

While I disagree with the GP and believe this project is interesting, I can also empathize with his disappointment and sympathize with his original expectation.

The use of the word miniaturization in the title was a poor choice. The audience of this article is not users, but hackers. In that context, the word miniaturization takes on a different connotation (if not meaning). The title therefore is a poor and misleading descriptor of the events that occurred (as evidenced by the GP's expectation and subsequent disappointment).

Leave it to HN to poop on even the coolest of projects.

"What? This tiny DIY rocket that can go all the way to Mars on a liter of hydrogen didn't use a space elevator? Disappointing."

> the coolest of projects.

But running an emulator on an off-the-shelf ARM microcontroller and putting it in a retro 3D printed case isn't really that cool. Not to say it isn't cool, but don't get carried away.

The esp32 has a dual core Tensilica Xtensa LX6 microprocessor. It's not ARM, and he did split functionality across the cores. I agree it's not rocket science, but it doesn't appear to have been a straightforward task either.

How about writing the emulator and interfacing the (non-ARM) chip with an inconvenient video interface? He used someone else's m68k emulator, but wrote the emulation for the rest of the hardware as custom code.

I come her to learn something. If "hacking" is something I can do myself over weekend, I do not learn anything.

And some HN folks are familiar with Mac hardware. For example PSU was little piece of art. This is really, really disappointing.

You can write a Mac emulator to run on an ESP32, outputting scaled video on a MIPI DSI screen over a weekend? That's really damn impressive.

Have you done anything that impresses and inspires people in a similar way?

Personally, I'm amazed someone can be so joyless.

This was one of the most enjoyable talks I have watched! Passion, modesty, useless and genius.

Sprite_TM is my all time favorite hardware hacker. He is a great friend, and I wish we didn't live on opposite sides of the world so that I could hang out with him more frequently.

His talks are always amazing. There are two others from the Hackaday Superconference which I absolutely loved:

* Tamagotchi singularity builds a botnet of tamagochi by emulating the original 6502 based hardware in an underground server farm * Project Details: http://spritesmods.com/?art=tamasingularity * Talk video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_-e_cJ1-Gs

* Tiniest Game Boy Keychain is a hardware tour-de-force... someone else on this thread said they weren't impressed by emulators in small packages. This one should prove you wrong * Project details: I couldn't find it on his site, here's the Hackaday article: https://hackaday.com/2016/11/28/tiniest-game-boy-hides-in-yo... * Talk video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXAZZfJm-g

Those are both flashy, but I love his work on things like reverse engineering the controller for this hard drive and running his own code on it: * Project details: http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack * Talk video: http://bofh.nikhef.nl/events/OHM/video/d2-t1-13-20130801-230...

Wow, he really likes the ESP32, huh?

I always thought the ESP modules used weird Tensilica cores that were annoying to work with and lacking documentation, but I guess if you've already gone through the herculean effort of working all of that out, why switch to something like ARM?

He works at Espressif according to the article so that might have something to do with his choice of platform. Super impressive.

He was one of the early adopters of the ESP8266 and wrote a bunch of very interesting firware for those (like the ability for it to act as an AP to set up WiFi credentials without additional hardware.

He was subsequently hired to as a software engineering manager and technical marketing manager at Espressif, who were working on the ESP32 at the time.

I enjoyed Jeroen's recent appearance on the Amp Hour podcast where he talks about a lot of this: https://theamphour.com/359-an-interview-with-jeroen-domburg-...

Oh - well that sure makes sense!

There are plenty of high level languages (Python, Lua, Arduino (yes, I know that's not a language), BASIC, Javascript, and even Lisp) for ESP that they're pretty damn easy to work with now.

Never useless. "Junk hacking" be it for security or for hardware hacks like this. It often ends up being surprisingly important and useful in expected and unexpected ways :)

See: Travis Goodspeed - A Keynote in Praise of Junk Hacking. It is a very enjoyable talk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com