Stuffing Macs Into FPGAs

A few years ago, [Steve] of Big Mess ‘O Wires fame stuffed one of the first Macintosh computers into an FPGA. While the project worked and was able to run System 6 on a virtual CPU, there were a few problems: it wasn’t exactly stable, and there was no support for a keyboard, sound, SCSI, or serial ports.

Now, there’s a new tiny FPGA board around, and this one is perfectly designed to fit the original Macintosh on it. It’s much more stable, and there is a floppy disk emulator on the horizon, just so you won’t have to deal with all those 400k 3.5″ disks anymore.

[Steve]’s brand new Mac Plus is based on the MiST board, an FPGA board that was originally designed to emulate the first Amigas and the Atari SE on an FPGA and a separate ARM CPU. There’s already been a lot of classic computers ported to the MiST, and the classic all-in-one Macs are the last project that’s left.

In the video below, you can see the MiST board running the classic System 6 at SVGA resolution. That means MacPaint and Shufflepuck in one compact board using modern hardware.

Filed under: classic hacks