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If you miss the days when laptops had really cool form factors like the Toshiba T1000, you're going to love this Raspberry Pi project put together by maker and developer Nilseuropa. Using our favorite SBC, he's brought an old Toshiba T1000 machine back to life by using a Raspberry Pi as the main board and has upgraded the system to include support for modern peripherals.
Don't worry—no working T1000s were harmed to create this project. According to Nilseuropa, he's spent time repairing at least 5 of them so far and this project was created using leftover pieces. Restoring old hardware doesn't come without sacrifice and it's not always possible to keep everything. Some hardware becomes donors of "parts boards". That's where the Raspberry Pi comes in, supplementing the gaps left behind by previous repairs.
One of the coolest aspects of a project like this is all of the new additions you can add to a retro piece of tech. You still get the thrill of retro computing but with the added bonus of modern support. For example, the original floppy drive space has been upgraded with a port bay that includes a USB port, SD card slots and a couple of compact flash ports. Nilseuropa also added a 3.5mm jack for connecting external audio peripherals.
The main board he chose for this project is a Raspberry Pi 4. It's connected to an 8.8-inch Waveshare widescreen that features a capacitive touchscreen interface. The Pi is connected to a few port extenders so the peripherals can attach to the outside of the case, along with the keyboard which features some snazzy, colorful keycaps. The unit is also made portable thanks to an included 10,000 mAh battery.
Software-wise, you're limited really by just your imagination. A good starting point would be to run Raspberry Pi OS so you could take advantage of standard computing functions. That said, you could also game on a rig like this pretty easily because of the Pi 4 which adds Bluetooth support—ideal for connecting wireless controllers.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 02, @06:19PM (1 child)
retro is "this thing eats batteries and runs like a snail"
This is about as exciting as gutting an original Macintosh, saving just the plastic case.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday February 02, @10:20PM
It is, or was, a fairly popular thing to do a few years, or decade, ago. It's hard(er) to find good Classic Mac cases now. But it's, or was, quite popular with the SE/30 and those type of machines. I have done it to a few myself, also done it to a few Amiga machines. There was also that time it become a little popular to make Macintosh aquariums ...
The question tho is when is this just the retro computer version of the Ship of Theseus? The Toshiba 1k had 512kb of RAM and a CPU that did about 5 MHz. The slowest PI4 is about 1 gigabyte of RAM and 1.5 GHz of CPU. When or where is the distinction between resurrection, repair and just plain emulation? Put into the old case. Still running in circles around the original hardware.
But as noted this used to be, and in some circles still are, fairly popular. Take some old Classic Mac. Salvage what you can, replace the PSU. Fix any things that can be fixed on the motherboard. Things probably have leaked all over it so it might just be dead or beyond salvage. Keep the case, the keyboard, the mouse etc. Then PI it up. You can now have it emulate 030/040/060 CPU at beyond 060 speeds, the floppy is gone, get a CD/DVD or SD-card reader. The SCSI drive is replaced by some SD-card solution. USB ports. Highspeed networking and internet access. The graphics will be handled by the PI to so you can scale it up to modern displays. That way you can remove that old tube from the case to and lower the weight to but a fraction of the original weight. You can insert a new flat display in it's place. It can even be in colour. System 6 have never run so snappy and fast. Completely usable now.
In some regard it's like a lot of those new FPGA versions of old machines, home computers, consoles, arcades etc. They are now down on a single FPGA. Seen several of them where they had to put in pieces of metal to weight the case down just so it wouldn't feel so flimsy and crappy.
So when is it still the old machine and when is this just a Theseus project?
(Score: 2, Disagree) by EEMac on Sunday February 02, @07:17PM (3 children)
This turns the T1000 into a modern device with a color touch screen, a nice keyboard, and the ability to run modern applications. What a great way to bring a form factor the creator obviously likes into a 2024-era world!
(Score: 2) by Frosty Piss on Sunday February 02, @08:00PM (2 children)
In other words, not really a T1000, just the case...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Sunday February 02, @08:44PM
I can't say I think there is anything wrong with that. The old form factors are actually quite nice.
Case in point many years ago I found a Toshiba T4800CT [preterhuman.net] thrown away in the garbage outside a second hand computer store. I figure the proprietor correctly reasoned he could not even break even trying to sell it.
As I never experienced using these 90s and earlier laptops I took it home and found a way to power it up. It worked perfectly, and I had a lot of fun on Windows 3.11. Probably the biggest surprise is how fast it booted and responded to my events, it was faster than my modern PC. Then I had a go installing Linux on it (Only thing that would boot and detect the HW was an ancient Debian with kernel 2.2.14) from floppies then a SLIP connection to pull packages from the internet (a first experience for me again) and once installed I found it very usable.
The one thing I remember I really liked about it was the keyboard. It was the best keyboard I ever experienced on a laptop, and it is the second best keyboard I've ever used (the first being my full size Cherry keyboard). I even liked that the CTRL-key was where caps-lock is on a modern keyboard (which I ended up preferring to the modern layout). The build quality was also excellent, and it had a sturdy feel to it. I didn't even mind that it was almost 5cm thick and I didn't really notice the weight as being an inconvenience to portability.
However with the best will in the world the device was of no real use, so I did think seriously about gutting it, putting in a raspberry pi, and then wiring up that lovely keyboard with something a bit more modern to use as an actual laptop. With all that space inside I could have filled the case with batteries and probably ended up with a week of continuous runtime on battery.
Thing is, it worked perfectly and I could not bring myself to gut what was effectively a fully working piece of computer history. So I ended up using it as a serial console to my home-lab systems, the Linux ssh client was old but still supported so I could ssh or connect to the serial console with minicom for admin tasks.
So this guy taking a non-functional T1000 and turning it into a usable modern machine is something I approve of. He didn't gut a working piece of history, but instead used some spare parts to build a retro machine (after restoring 4 other machines). From TFA looks like he kept the old T1000 keyboard, which might be as nice as as on my T4800CT for typing if not nicer. Old-style formfactor and input devices with modern innards capable of modern computing with an increase in battery power, what's not to like?
I do sometimes wish modern manufacturers would kick the "everything must be smaller and thinner" habit, including switching to those "chicklet" keys which even now, many years later, I hate typing on compared to the previous non-chicklet keyboards. I would not mind a laptop the same form factor as the one I am currently using (Thinkpad X201 [thinkwiki.org]) with the same keyboard. Just give me some more modern HW and better battery life (it doesn't even have to be more powerful).
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday February 03, @07:21PM
I dunno if there's a proper term for it... cyberpunk maybe? It's sorta like cos-play, some people out there would like to see an alternate world where tech went in a different direction. As we all grew up we were given glimpses of what the future could look like and sometimes that was appealing. I personally would love to take a case from an original Mac, plunk a modern display and maybe a raspberry Pi or something and make it a useful doohickey in my house. Why? It's a cosmetic thing. I think the t1000 looks pretty cool, too.
It's about scratching an itch, not resurrecting a dead device.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by Rich on Monday February 03, @01:53AM (2 children)
Related to the topic of possibly keeping only the shell of a retro machine. I've already posted this on one of the journals, but I'll repost it here so those who haven't read that can chime in.
I've kept around a PowerBook 150 (Classic Mac, 68030/33, 640x480 with 4 shades of gray), mostly for use as a serial terminal (although it only has one works port, so it's not good for bidi traffic monitoring). I got it out a few months ago for that purpose, and it was mostly dead. Alternating completely dead or Sad Mac chime on power-up, screen polarizer delaminated with crystalized glue, the batteries have been dead for over a decade, but optically the whole box is in a very nice shape.
I've got the "Service Source" manual, but that doesn't go past "replace logic board". There are no schematics around for this specific model, I guess it's a distant relative of the SE/30, so some reverse engineering and going through the serial Sad Mac decoding shown by Adrian Black on his SE/30 journey might be possible. I've also heard of methods for restoring these delaminated screens. Yet it would me a massive endeavour and unlike Adrian, I'm not set up for making my living off trying to repair such stuff on camera.
A reddit thread calls it "Arguably the worst Mac ever" (https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/kf6xkv/arguably_the_worst_mac_ever_the_powerbook_150/ [reddit.com]).
I wonder what I should do with it. Some conversion could use the trackball for authentic Missile Command and Marble Madness....
What would you do?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Monday February 03, @12:25PM (1 child)
Why not donating it to someone who would endeavor the repair?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Monday February 03, @04:35PM
Who would?
Fixing a Sad Mac on a '030 with that amount of undocumented custom chips and no schematics is definitely upper league. Few could pull it off and those might not be interested in spending their valuable time on a budget 68K Mac with a sorry feature set from when everything else already was PPC. These "Digital Retro Park" guys are nearby. I have never been there, but they've got a page for object donations. https://www.digitalretropark.net/objektangebote/ [digitalretropark.net]. I guess I should visit anyway, and might ask whether they're interested, but I feel they wouldn't be too happy with the level of wreckage.
Whoever is willing to do the reverse engineering for the Sad Mac fix and document that for future generations, and also the repair of the delaminated screen, drop a reply here. You can pick it up for free.
As far as I am concerned, the economic thing probably would be taking the heat gun and pulling the good chips (e.g. '030, SWIM) for ebay for more worthy Macs. The cool thing to do would be to do a CM5 carrier in the shape of the original logic board, with RJ-45 instead of the MiniDIN-8, and a dual USB stack where the SCSI was. Mandatory feature for "nerdness achieved": full GCR/MFM floppy support. Dead NiCds out, Li in. Also STLs for a new display bezel. However, I've got a lot of other much more important projects to finish before, so it's not likely going to happen in this life of mine.