One reason why the TFA might have chosen the Plus: the SE and SE/30 consolidate a lot of glue logic that are on PALs that can be cracked into not-so-easy to crack ASICs. The SE/30 has a notorious “GLUE” chip that has 80 pins, and most likely won’t be cloned anytime soon.
I wonder if it would be easier to design a new Mac model from scratch(ish) and put drivers in the ROM. AFAIK Basilisk II doesn't emulate a real Mac but the System doesn't notice because of ROM patches.
Very cool. I think this is probably the way forward for various types of retrocomputing now that original chassises are disintegrating due to aging plastics and parts are becoming more scarce.
It’s a much higher bar to clear, but I’d love to see this treatment for some PPC 603/604, G3, and eventually G4 era Macs… I love the idea of building an ITX G4 cube.
As you get into more and more modern designs, there are more high speed signals and the motherboards get increasingly more complex.
Not that it can't be done, but the work to reproduce something made at the cutting edge in the 2000s feels like it'd be an order of magnitude harder than 70s/80s designs.
Though I'm always amazed what the retro communities will do to preserve the tech for future generations!
My memory is that the Power Towers were incredibly hard to service. If correct, that's a shame, because the IIci I used at work was lovely to work with.
I’ve read that the predecessor to the 9600, the 9500, wasn’t the easiest machine to work on. The 9600 had a more convenient pull-down case, which was continued in the designs of the beige G3 tower, the blue and white G3 tower, and the G4 towers.
The Front Side Bus of the Pentium III maxed out at 133 MHz, single transfer (and was often configured at 100 MHz for lower spec CPUs), and the AMD K6 was even slower. I don't have much PCB design experience, but my understanding is that 133MHz is quite achievable for hobbyists these days.
68040 CPUs are easy to find. Motorola was shipping them in ASTRO mobile radio infrastructure equipment well into the 2000s, and a lot of that gear is getting scrapped now.
Considering that we've moved from wire wrapping to being able to design and order multi-layer circuit boards, and we've gone from 74 series and basic PALs to CPLDs and FPGAs that regular people can program, I don't think what tinkerers can do will hit any barriers any time soon.
The ability to recreate classic computing is wonderful, both in preservation of history and in making things available to people who hadn't even been born when these machines were new :)
Fortunately for later CPUs, especially on the PC/x86 they are usually based on reference designs, and the amount of documentation available in electronic form much greater. Late 2000s is when they started closing up and being more secretive, and I'd consider that a greater concern.
FPGAs hold a lot of promise, but as I understand have limits on performance and can be on the power hungry side which can preclude some later CPUs and make portable form factors impractical.
Retrocomputing and retrogaming are going to get a boost from a hybrid approach: using uC boards like the Raspberry Pi Pico to emulate each individual component. You get timing accuracy that's close to FPGA, but at $5 a pop, the components are cheaper than an FPGA board would cost.
The Connomore 64 is an example of a complete system built this way. I'm sure Mac, Amiga, and Atari ST clones will be incoming. https://github.com/c1570/Connomore64
One reason why the TFA might have chosen the Plus: the SE and SE/30 consolidate a lot of glue logic that are on PALs that can be cracked into not-so-easy to crack ASICs. The SE/30 has a notorious “GLUE” chip that has 80 pins, and most likely won’t be cloned anytime soon.
I wonder if it would be easier to design a new Mac model from scratch(ish) and put drivers in the ROM. AFAIK Basilisk II doesn't emulate a real Mac but the System doesn't notice because of ROM patches.
Very cool. I think this is probably the way forward for various types of retrocomputing now that original chassises are disintegrating due to aging plastics and parts are becoming more scarce.
It’s a much higher bar to clear, but I’d love to see this treatment for some PPC 603/604, G3, and eventually G4 era Macs… I love the idea of building an ITX G4 cube.
As you get into more and more modern designs, there are more high speed signals and the motherboards get increasingly more complex.
Not that it can't be done, but the work to reproduce something made at the cutting edge in the 2000s feels like it'd be an order of magnitude harder than 70s/80s designs.
Though I'm always amazed what the retro communities will do to preserve the tech for future generations!
That’s alright though. SE/30 was Peak Macintosh anyway.
The 9600/350 was a thing of beauty.
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_9600
My memory is that the Power Towers were incredibly hard to service. If correct, that's a shame, because the IIci I used at work was lovely to work with.
I’ve read that the predecessor to the 9600, the 9500, wasn’t the easiest machine to work on. The 9600 had a more convenient pull-down case, which was continued in the designs of the beige G3 tower, the blue and white G3 tower, and the G4 towers.
Though, the late 90s feels achievable.
The Front Side Bus of the Pentium III maxed out at 133 MHz, single transfer (and was often configured at 100 MHz for lower spec CPUs), and the AMD K6 was even slower. I don't have much PCB design experience, but my understanding is that 133MHz is quite achievable for hobbyists these days.
Things very quickly go off the rails after that.
Heck, I'd be happy with a board that had the power/emulation of a 68040 so we can run MacOS 7.6 and some of old apps from back in the day.
68040 CPUs are easy to find. Motorola was shipping them in ASTRO mobile radio infrastructure equipment well into the 2000s, and a lot of that gear is getting scrapped now.
Considering that we've moved from wire wrapping to being able to design and order multi-layer circuit boards, and we've gone from 74 series and basic PALs to CPLDs and FPGAs that regular people can program, I don't think what tinkerers can do will hit any barriers any time soon.
The ability to recreate classic computing is wonderful, both in preservation of history and in making things available to people who hadn't even been born when these machines were new :)
Fortunately for later CPUs, especially on the PC/x86 they are usually based on reference designs, and the amount of documentation available in electronic form much greater. Late 2000s is when they started closing up and being more secretive, and I'd consider that a greater concern.
I imagine FPGAs would be a great way forward for retro computing, just like it is for retro gaming.
https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/
FPGAs hold a lot of promise, but as I understand have limits on performance and can be on the power hungry side which can preclude some later CPUs and make portable form factors impractical.
Retrocomputing and retrogaming are going to get a boost from a hybrid approach: using uC boards like the Raspberry Pi Pico to emulate each individual component. You get timing accuracy that's close to FPGA, but at $5 a pop, the components are cheaper than an FPGA board would cost.
The Connomore 64 is an example of a complete system built this way. I'm sure Mac, Amiga, and Atari ST clones will be incoming. https://github.com/c1570/Connomore64
Nice! Makes me want to buy a Mac again.