The Mac SE/30 ran up to Mac OS 7, so Dan used Alex Goldcheidt’s BerryBoot boot manager to select between Raspberry Pi OS, Kodi, RetroPie, and Xubuntu. “It was literally plug and play, but I’ll probably remap some keys.” Sixes and sevens
He used an Apple Desktop Bus to USB keyboard/mouse adapter made by tinkerBOY. It’s held in place with a few tiny screws directly into the plastic where it can’t be seen, and a pair of repurposed L-brackets helped hold the screen’s controller board in place.”įrom that point, the main task was cable management, although Dan decided he wanted to connect an original Mac keyboard and mouse. I carefully picked an LCD panel with the right dimensions and made tiny adjustments until it was snug. “I used a mini Dremel to remove some plastic where the monitor bracket connected and this left me with four corners with C-shaped brackets. “The biggest challenge was fitting the screen to the bezel,” he says. He already had a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB model in an Argon One M.2 case, but he added a 1TB SSD, made use of an 18 W power supply, incorporated a USB hub, bought a USB-powered speaker set, and went hunting for a suitable screen, coming across a 9.7-inch 2048×1536 4:3 LCD display by LG on AliExpress. Shelling outĭan found an empty Mac SE/30 shell on eBay, buying it for a good price. “I thought it would be relatively straightforward to use an old Mac case to fit a screen and the various Raspberry Pi components to get things working, so I set off on many long evenings searching for parts,” says Dan, motivated by nostalgic memories of playing Risk on a neighbour’s Mac during study breaks in the 1990s. Instead, this model has been stripped of all its innards and it is running entirely on a Raspberry Pi 4 computer. Photographs suggest it’s running fine 33 years on, but that’s not actually true in this case. Looking at Dan Beimborn’s Mac SE/30, you’d think it was worth the outlay.