Live data from Hacker News

MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

axio.ms

91–100 of 180 posts

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#91
post #79

It's a shame monitors don't provide 5V from pin9 of the VGA connector... Would be nice to be able to power things from the monitor connection. IIRC, SCART provides +9V.

Pin 9 is there to power the EEPROM in the monitor fromthe computer even when the monitor is turned off, so monitors providing 5V there would lead to same kind of problems as there are with DisplayPort pin 20 and cheap cables that connect this pin through (which would be correct for DP 1.0, but there are no DP 1.0 products).

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#93

How are these people finding VGA cables in the street :S I needed like 10 or so VGA cables recently for an art installation and asked everyone I could and nobody had any lying around... I ended up having to buy new ones which seems a shame considering how many are thrown away!

Any business with an IT department should be drowning in them. Monitors still ship with VGA cables even though they are rarely used. So if you know anyone in a smaller IT dept that doesn't have really draconian rules over assets they would be more than happy to give you a pile of them.

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's what sets the RP2040 apart from other micros. I think of it as being analogous to the recent advent of "software-defined radio" -- the RP2040's PIO are fast enough to allow for software-defined Composite video, software-defined VGA, software-defined DVI, software-defined USB, etc etc etc.

What other micros are you talking about? STM32 can easily do it (I suspect that any ARM based micro can), and I've seen some vga libraries for ESP32. There's not much special about the RP2040 other than it's price and brand name.

On other typical 32b MCUs you end up doing this kind of bitbanging purely from software, while RP2040 has the PIO which is kind of programmable bitbanging accelerator. Similar hardware blocks in other MCUs are either single-purpose (think USART), or much more limited and mostly only found weird automotive parts.

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#96
post #92

I wondered if anyone had written an IWM simulator, and I didn't find one, but I did find this FPGA project: https://www.bigmessowires.com/2017/12/07/fpga-based-disk-con...

Somewhat related, there's a MiSTer implementation of the Apple II: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Apple-II_MiSTer

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#97
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be surprised how much trash there is in the city around us, that you suddenly start noticing when you have a diy project. Let me share you some moments of my own with you. I was leaving university campus with my buddies, talking about building magnetic card reader to check contents of my campus library card. Just as I was explaining magnetic heads to one of the guys I see a random cassette player few meters…

Unfortunately, some of use are not so lucky, at least I am not, haha. I got the idea to tinker with satellite dishes to make a simple radio telescope. I remember riding around and constantly seeing old DirectTV satellite dishes constantly on the side of the road for trash. Before this idea. So I figured, oh, I can easily get my hands on one. As soon as I committed to that project, I never saw a single satellite dish…

If it makes you feel better you probably would not have been able to just pick up the dishes and use them without buying extra parts. I had DirectTV and when I cancelled they came and took the feed horn off the satellite dish but left the rest of the dish. I’m not sure how much a feed horn would cost but at least the dish wouldn’t have been immediately usable. I also was interested in making a radio telescope but gave up when I realized DirectTV took that part of the dish

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#98
post #55
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be surprised how much trash there is in the city around us, that you suddenly start noticing when you have a diy project. Let me share you some moments of my own with you. I was leaving university campus with my buddies, talking about building magnetic card reader to check contents of my campus library card. Just as I was explaining magnetic heads to one of the guys I see a random cassette player few meters…

A million years ago, I spent two cold nights standing on my head in the driver's side footwell of my E36 BMW, installing an inexpensive Wal-Mart-sourced CodeAlarm remote starter to make my then-wife happy. It worked great. It could even operate the door locks and roll the windows up with the fob (none of which sounds very special for a modern vehicle, but my car was not equipped with remote-anything from the factory…

> Over a decade later, the fob got destroyed in an unfortunate boating incident.

I kind of feel you dropped the lede here. Need to hear this story as well.

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#99
post #92

I wondered if anyone had written an IWM simulator, and I didn't find one, but I did find this FPGA project: https://www.bigmessowires.com/2017/12/07/fpga-based-disk-con...

Someone's trying to reverse-engineer the IWM, but they have not yet quite succeeded: https://www.applefritter.com/content/iwm-reverse-engineering

Re: MicroMac, a Macintosh for under £5

#100
post #92

I wondered if anyone had written an IWM simulator, and I didn't find one, but I did find this FPGA project: https://www.bigmessowires.com/2017/12/07/fpga-based-disk-con...

Someone's trying to reverse-engineer the IWM, but they have not yet quite succeeded: https://www.applefritter.com/content/iwm-reverse-engineering

Found this in that same thread, an IWM implementation in MAME: https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/devices/mach...
Post reply on HN