The MacSAO was my big 2024 Hackaday Supercon SAO project. I wanted to make a little animated Mac after seeing Tom Nardy’s Cyberdeck SAO. 2024 is the 40th anniversary year of the original Mac and seemed like a perfect fit.
The code, schematics and layout can all be found in the Github repository. Reference and the “Byte Builder” are available at aeiche.com/macsao
Project Logs:
- Oh no! - October 30, 2024
- Helpful tools - October 18, 2024
- Production runs - October 11, 2024
- Jiggery-Pokery! - October 9, 2024
- "Painting" in MacPaint - October 5, 2024
- Characters and "Typing" in "MacWrite" - September 28, 2024
- Memory and Light - September 17, 2024
- v1.1 Assembly test drive - September 14, 2024
- Inside Macintosh - September 4, 2024
- From plus to minus, and from minus to plus! - August 25, 2024
- PCBs and first assembly - August 15, 2024
- Parts and PCBs ordered - August 1, 2024
- Test Fit PCB - July 26, 2024
- Screens and sizes - July 16, 2024
- Whoops! And other things... - July 8, 2024
- Now working on the little controller - July 7, 2024
- "I finally invent something that works!" - June 27, 2024
- A couple of hiccups - June 23, 2024
- I guess I need a programmer - June 6, 2024
- Why not share? - June 3, 2024
I chronicled the development of this project over on Hackaday.io. For the sake of having all my stuff live for as long as possible, I’m replicating the project logs here. Many thanks to Rich H for his help exporting the data so I didn’t have to hand copy it.