Upgrade your original 1984 Macintosh to run OS X Snow Leopard.

Step 12 Thank you.

 Thank you all for reading my Instructable, be sure to leave a comment, rate, and vote.

Thank you to the entire internets, there are many many projects out there that I sourced my inspiration from.

A more specific thank you to NachoMahma, who gave me advice on taking these bad boys apart, and held my virtual hand as I went about discharging the CRT. Also for sharing his love for these original Macintoshes, it was him who first got my mind onto the original classic types, and in many ways sparked this project.

Comments

[amarelli]

Beautiful work but....on a 128 k 1984 mac :-( Tried to resurrect it?

[gmjhowe]

Afraid I did not have the tools to make it into a working system. I did however package all the internals into a box, so it could be rebuilt in the future.

[bishopdante]

that bezel is... rather big! Screen is mini mini!

Would love to see a mac plus double or triple size, now I think about it hehe, bung an old 20 inch CRT in there.

3D scanner, CNC cutter...

Hilarious.

[Macworldwizardz]

Thats a good Instructable. I am just curious to know how long did it take you to do this and how long it took to put together the Instructable. P.S. I rated it 5.0 and subscribed.

[Macworldwizardz]

By the way: This Instructable not only should be featured and have over 20,000 views, but ALSO, this 'ible is good enough to be posted on the Apple's Website. I wish they'd do that!! :) :)

[gmjhowe]

Thanks! I would say I probably spent about 30-50 hours, of the course of about 10 months.

[Macworldwizardz]

OMG! Well I can sure tell it in your hard work!! :)

[embeddedmicro]

I Believe the Apple Licence states that OSX is to be run on Apple hardware.  With this in mind keep the original serial number plate and you are legal.  This is not unlike many other refurb/new projects that are quite legal.  eg 1981-3 DOT Inspected DeLorean. (DMC Texas LLC, brand new built to order)

[helkaancaion]

You can just put in a TFT screen, as you did, and a MacMini and you're done in a couple of hours!!!

[DJ Radio]

Where's the fun in that?

[chrwei]

um, it would be nearly exactly the same mount of work, if not more since the mini probably doesn't have standard USB pin headers on the mainboard, and uses an external PSU so it wouldn't look quite as authentic.  Getting the OS working right would be less effort though.

[DallasDeckard]

Nice work, my friend! I enjoyed reading this one! I love the old Macs. My first Macintosh was a brand new SE (dual drives, no hard drive, 256k RAM) - yes, I'm an old guy.

I think what helkaancaion meant was, not using the board of a Mac Mini, but rather the entire Mini itself. In other words, the complete computer simply tucked inside the case. That way the power would be there already, and you would simply need to plug USB, Ethernet, and so on extender cords into the Mini and then mount them in the serial plugs as you (very ingeniously) did. The screen could simply be wired on one end of a USB cable and plugged into a USB port on the Mini (I suppose, you would know far more about that than me).

Personally, I think your solution was much more fun and innovative, but there are those purists out there that balk at running the Mac OS on a PC motherboard - I'm not one of them.

The only thing I'd love to see you upgrade is the screen. You might not know this, but in the old days there was a little program hack that allowed users of the 9" Macs to utilize more of the screen. We're talking maybe 1/4" of the edges, where Apple had the screen simply darken to provide a nice frame for the screen. I can't remember what the program was called, but it didn't run on all 9" Macs, it may have only run on the Mac Classics or the 9" color Macs, I'm not sure. I only know that it wouldn't run on my SE. ;-( I saw the program running on a friend's Mac Classic, and I was wow'ed at that extra 1/4" of screen space - lame, huh? At any rate, it would just be sweet to see you max out the entire area there available for screen space. Kind of... cathartic, in a way. ;-)

Thanks again for this one, it was lots of fun to read.

[legless]

I have one of those old Mac bricks at home which I still haven't decided what to do with. It still works as far as I know.

As for being old, my first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1.

Hopefully the anti-Hackintosh police don't read this site or will come after you.

[charge11595]

 Mine was a Commodore PET with a cassette backup !  Then the Apple ][ .
I think there's ample room for both the mac mini and the white power supply.

I wonder how he did the toggle power switch  ... also, too bad the front slot is too narrow for a CD/DVD.

Over all, this was a most beautiful hack !

[gmjhowe]

 The Mac mini would have been slightly easier, but I think if I had been installing a mac mini, I would have made good use of the extra space, perhaps using a bigger cheaper 3.5" drive, and adding better cooling.

[spiceyweasel]

I have a Mac Mini I gutted and installed in a G4 Cube along with 4 hard drives and a Blu Ray player. It looks original save for the slot for the second optical device which sits in the rear slot on the top so I didn't have to cut the plexi.

[chrwei]

I think i would have gone with a 2.5" disk, it's not something I'd want to use much for large content anyway, and it would reduce your power and cooling requirements a lot.  that desktop drive is probably 1/3 or more of that systems power use, not counting the LCD.

[thewalshmn]

this is one of the coolest conversions I've seen and I'm a guy who modifiys everything and I never would of thought of this awesome job

[ethaniel]

Excellent project! I already voted. Have you considered using Pico-ITX hardware? I know it's expensive, not too powerful and a bit hard to come by, but VIA has some interesting (and small) hardware if space inside the case becomes an issue, although I'm not quite sure about "hackintoshing" a VIA processor. Keeping the original case intact was an excellent decision. About mounting the screen, I would have thought of putting a "double acrylic", I mean, first the one you made to fit the CRT space, and right after that a thin, flat one, like sandwiched. That would allow you to work with the acrylic and use it as a mounting base, and bring the screen a bit forward. I would have try fo find a perfect center for the screen though. I'm a bit addicted to symmetry. Anyway, great stuff. If you make an upgrade of this in the future, please post!

[jedikalimero]

many years ago I tried a similar project. My goal was to fit an original Amiga 500 into a regular PC tower but then I obtained an Amiga 2000 so I dropped the project and sold the Amiga 500. I managed to use the PC Power supply, insert the keyboard into a Pc keyboard case and replaced the floppy drive with a modified PC drive but housing the motherboard and adapting the back of the PC case to the Amiga ports was a real nightmare. But I had no dremel or something like it by that time.

[gmjhowe]

 That sounds cool, I was a big fan of the amigas. It is a project I would like to visit, a computer in a keyboard for the modern age.

[jedikalimero]

Mmmm... Computer in a keyboard... Isn't that a laptop computer without screen? :-D

[sheldor]

 GREAT Job!

I had this idea years ago, but now and thanks to your instructable, I will finally put it into practice!

Q: Why use a 7" LCD if the original CRT was 9"? Wouldn't a 9" LCD fit and offer a higher resolution?

You got my vote! :)

[csyms]

 I think this is fantastic, I'm really impressed..

[gmjhowe]

 Thanks!

[TogetherinParis]

 What a wonderful tribute to Apple.  Now I wish that I had kept mine!  

[gmjhowe]

 Thanks! I like to think of it as an Apple tribute also.

[kmpres]

Very nice instructable, and well executed!  I especially like the "Don't do anything you can't undo later" aspect, one of the rules I live by.  I would kinda prefer a larger screen, though, as the original Mac screen was pretty small to begin with.  I'm sure there are any number of trashed laptops whose TFTs would fit once removed from its frame.  Powering it would be slightly more challenging without the USB connection but not impossible.  There is at least one instructable that describes how to convert an old laptop into an ePicture viewer that might be useful in this regard. 

[gmjhowe]

 As I have explained on a few other comments, I already owned the screen, so in a way it was the cheapest option for me, there are alot of cheaper and better options out there also.

I may look into upgrading.

[Devil-le]

Nice work! Very impressive!  but i think it would be better with a "like new" paint (viewed on this site a few days ago) and a bigger screen.

[grumo]

Yup, the only catch, if there is one, is that that old mac looks yellowy, grease remover sprays work pretty well, but make sure it doesn't damage the material, some of them are quite strong!

[qrper]

 Well shoot! I don't know. When I first read the heading, I had this vision in my head that you somehow managed, via magic or voodoo, how to run OS-X on the original Mac. I guess I should have known better, the color display was a good tip. (Although Apple did have a color version of this computer, but it was several years down the road.)

Basically, you shoehorned a new computer into the old case. I was not aware of a mother board that would run MAC OS-X.

Interesting concept, but I was really hoping for some magic!

 

[gmjhowe]

 Many modern motherboards can be used, you just have to use a specific bootloader to load the mac os install.

It would have been nice to get it to run on the original hardware, but at 8mhz, its practically impossible!

[dokhack]

Fantastic work, very clean looking machine. I've been thinking about building one of these for ages now and your project will make it that bit easier. Now all i need to do is get an old mac :)

[gmjhowe]

 Ebay is a good source, if you don't need it working, they come pretty cheap.

Any questions on your build, be sure to ask, if and when you get around to it!

[dokhack]

Thanks and grats on getting featured on hackaday.