
Miniaturizing a Mac - kqr2
https://hackaday.com/2017/11/27/jeroen-domburg-miniaturizes-a-mac/
======
THE_PUN_STOPS
Sprite_tm (Jeroen) has long been an inspiration to me. His projects are highly
original and I think anyone who identifies with the hacker ethos will enjoy
the projects on his website: [http://spritesmods.com](http://spritesmods.com)

~~~
hawski
Thanks for the link! I've stumbled upon this site few years ago. Recently I
tried to find it again, but failed.

This is such a great resource.

Edit: what brought me originally to the site was this -
[http://spritesmods.com/?art=macsearm&page=10](http://spritesmods.com/?art=macsearm&page=10)

Mac SE with guts replaced by ARM board. With deyellowed chassis, functional
screen, keyboard and mouse. Also a mod of diskette.

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turtlebits
It's not really miniaturizing if you're using an emulator is it? And emulator
was used for the gameboy color as well.

I was expecting original hardware in a much smaller form factor. Instead this
is just an development board and screen in a custom enclosure.

Emulators on small devices isn't that interesting of a feat, IIRC someone ran
and old version of MacOS on an Apple Watch when it first came out.

~~~
ythn
Leave it to HN to poop on even the coolest of projects.

"What? This tiny DIY rocket that can go all the way to Mars on a liter of
hydrogen didn't use a space elevator? Disappointing."

~~~
Chaebixi
> the coolest of projects.

But running an emulator on an off-the-shelf ARM microcontroller and putting it
in a retro 3D printed case isn't really _that_ cool. Not to say it isn't cool,
but don't get carried away.

~~~
tyingq
The esp32 has a dual core Tensilica Xtensa LX6 microprocessor. It's not ARM,
and he did split functionality across the cores. I agree it's not rocket
science, but it doesn't appear to have been a straightforward task either.

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herodotus
This was one of the most enjoyable talks I have watched! Passion, modesty,
useless and genius.

~~~
szczys
Sprite_TM is my all time favorite hardware hacker. He is a great friend, and I
wish we didn't live on opposite sides of the world so that I could hang out
with him more frequently.

His talks are always amazing. There are two others from the Hackaday
Superconference which I absolutely loved:

* Tamagotchi singularity builds a botnet of tamagochi by emulating the original 6502 based hardware in an underground server farm * Project Details: [http://spritesmods.com/?art=tamasingularity](http://spritesmods.com/?art=tamasingularity) * Talk video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_-e_cJ1-Gs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_-e_cJ1-Gs)

* Tiniest Game Boy Keychain is a hardware tour-de-force... someone else on this thread said they weren't impressed by emulators in small packages. This one should prove you wrong * Project details: I couldn't find it on his site, here's the Hackaday article: [https://hackaday.com/2016/11/28/tiniest-game-boy-hides-in-yo...](https://hackaday.com/2016/11/28/tiniest-game-boy-hides-in-your-pocket/) * Talk video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXAZZfJm-g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXAZZfJm-g)

Those are both flashy, but I love his work on things like reverse engineering
the controller for this hard drive and running his own code on it: * Project
details:
[http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack](http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack) *
Talk video:
[http://bofh.nikhef.nl/events/OHM/video/d2-t1-13-20130801-230...](http://bofh.nikhef.nl/events/OHM/video/d2-t1-13-20130801-2300-hard_disks_more_than_just_block_devices-
sprite_tm.m4v)

~~~
leggomylibro
Wow, he really likes the ESP32, huh?

I always thought the ESP modules used weird Tensilica cores that were annoying
to work with and lacking documentation, but I guess if you've already gone
through the herculean effort of working all of that out, why switch to
something like ARM?

~~~
szczys
He was one of the early adopters of the ESP8266 and wrote a bunch of very
interesting firware for those (like the ability for it to act as an AP to set
up WiFi credentials without additional hardware.

He was subsequently hired to as a software engineering manager and technical
marketing manager at Espressif, who were working on the ESP32 at the time.

I enjoyed Jeroen's recent appearance on the Amp Hour podcast where he talks
about a lot of this: [https://theamphour.com/359-an-interview-with-jeroen-
domburg-...](https://theamphour.com/359-an-interview-with-jeroen-domburg-
sprite_tm/)

~~~
leggomylibro
Oh - well that sure makes sense!

