macintosh-mini ➹

Of all the Maclock mods I’ve seen since I wrote up my review, this is probably the best all-round solution. It uses a custom PCB to drive a properly fitted display from a Pi Zero 2W running SheepShaver, and the result is a clean, self-contained build with none of the cable-routing bodges that plague most of these projects–and still uses the battery, which is great.

I’ve been deliberately not finishing my own Maclock mod, and this is serendipitous–sometimes waiting yields the exact solution you’d have spent weeks converging on from a worse starting point. The custom PCB is the key bit: it solves the button re-use and display connection in one go, which is the part I kept stalling on.

I’ll be using my own macemu build on it, now that the ARM64 JIT work has made SheepShaver fast enough to make even a regular Pi Zero feel snappy…