There’s something quietly iconic about the IIcx: a workstation-era Mac that looks restrained, tidy, and confident. Same 68030-era muscle as its bigger sibling, but in a slimmer case that feels more “designed” than “industrial.”
Motorola 68030 @ 16 MHz — fast, serious, and very late-80s pro
3× NuBus slots — enough room for real expansion without the huge tower vibe
Memory monster potential — 30-pin SIMMs, built to scale up
Testing Dark Castle with audio on the RP2350 Fruit Jam 🕹️🏰
Jepler spent a bunch of time this week working on getting audio working on the pico-umac port https://github.com/jepler/pico-mac/tree/rp2350-fruitjam to Fruit Jam
Coming soon! Sign up to be notified when these are in stockWe were catching up on a recent hackaday hackchat with eben upton and learne
. Audio on the hardware we're emulating is pretty straightforward: every scanline of the video generator also pops out one byte of PWM data. We have 370 horizontal lines—352 visible and 18 during the vsync—and a 60.15 Hz refresh rate for 22.255 KHz audio approximately. That data is written to $1FD00 http://www.mac.linux-m68k.org/devel/plushw.php . That data is being piped over I2S to the MAX98357
Listen to this good news - we now have an all in one digital audio amp breakout board that works incredibly well with the Raspberry Pi!
and to a speaker for now.
So, of course, the first thing we have to try out is Dark Castle
Dark Castle is a 1986 computer game for the Macintosh published by Silicon Beach Software, later ported to various platforms, where it was p
: famous for great audio and being a surprisingly hard game to play! The audio sounds really good though :)
We're working on the Pico-Mac port https://github.com/jepler/pico-mac/tree/rp2350-fruitjam to Fruit Jam https://www.adafruit.com/product/6200 and one thing we really want to add is sound support for classic Mac games and HyperCard stacks.
Coming soon! Sign up to be notified when these are in stockWe were catching up on a recent hackaday hackchat with eben upton and learne
Audio on the hardware we're emulating is pretty straightforward: every scanline of the video generator also outputs one byte of PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) data. We have 370 horizontal lines—352 visible and 18 during the vsync—at a 60.15 Hz refresh rate, producing approximately 22.255 kHz audio. That data is written to memory address $1FD00 http://www.mac.linux-m68k.org/devel/plushw.php so all we have to do now is pipe that 8-bit PWM signal either out to a timer on the RP2350 microcontroller or To the TLV320DAC3100 I²S amplifier onboard Fruit Jam, for that sweet, sweet 'Wild Eep' https://www.facebook.com/adafruitindustries/videos/1873371666122621
We grew up with a Mac Plus/512K, so getting the Pico-Mac 68000 emulator https://github.com/evansm7/pico-mac working on Fruit Jam https://www.adafruit.com/product/6200 with 1MB+ of RAM was a high priority for those nostalgic vibes.
Coming soon! Sign up to be notified when these are in stockWe were catching up on a recent hackaday hackchat with eben upton and learne
We've got HSTX DVI output plus PSRAM working https://github.com/jepler/pico-mac/tree/rp2350-fruitjam, which means 4MB RAM—that's the most you could get into a Mac Plus and enough to run System 6! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_6 Please note that System 7.1 was the pinnacle of software design, but System 6 was also pretty good. System 6 had some nifty features, such as the "Extensions" and "Control Panel" system programs, like After Dark with the famous Flying Toasters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark_(software).
Note that we're still working on audio, so you can see the high byte of the memory space used for audio that we've mapped into the video RAM for visualization. http://www.mac.linux-m68k.org/devel/plushw.php has more details on how that works - its 8-bit PWM audio reads "one byte per scanline." We'll have that output on the I2S DAC for speaker or headphone output.
What were your favorite extensions from the classic Mac era, and why was it Talking Moose? https://talkingmoose.com