{"id":211607,"date":"2026-02-09T10:41:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-09T15:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/09\/paul-rickards-gives-a-decorative-maclock-a-serious-upgrade-creates-a-tiny-working-apple-macintosh\/"},"modified":"2026-02-09T11:00:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T16:00:10","slug":"paul-rickards-gives-a-decorative-maclock-a-serious-upgrade-creates-a-tiny-working-apple-macintosh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/09\/paul-rickards-gives-a-decorative-maclock-a-serious-upgrade-creates-a-tiny-working-apple-macintosh\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Rickards Gives a Decorative Maclock a Serious Upgrade, Creates a Tiny Working Apple Macintosh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Rickards Gives a Decorative Maclock a Serious Upgrade, Creates a Tiny Working Apple Macintosh<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.hackster.io\/news\/paul-rickards-gives-a-decorative-maclock-a-serious-upgrade-creates-a-tiny-working-apple-macintosh-2cf089c0b25f<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-02-09 10:41:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.hackster.io<\/a><\/p>\n

Artist and vintage computing enthusiast Paul Rickards has turned a classic Apple Macintosh-themed digital clock into a fully-working tiny emulator, complete with network connectivity \u2014 by replacing its guts with a Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+.<\/p>\n

“A while back I bought two of those Maclocks with the intention of modding one into a tiny [Apple] Mac,” Rickards explains. “After seeing the success of [Gary Parker] I decided to give it a go. To make a Mac, I’m using a [Raspberry] Pi Zero 2 W, a Waveshare 2.8″ DPI LCD, and the MacintoshPi image which includes Basilisk II and SheepShaver already installed, and they work without X11 running, perfect for the thin-resourced [Raspberry] Pi Zero.”<\/p>\n

What was once a simple digital clock is now a fully-functional, ultra-compact emulated Apple Macintosh. (\ud83d\udcf9: Paul Rickards)<\/p>\n

The Maclock is exactly what the name implies: a clock themed like Apple’s original Macintosh computer, which the company launched back in 1984 \u2014 but in a considerably smaller scale. An on-board bitmap display features chunky pixel graphics, there’s environmental monitoring capabilities, and you even “boot” the system from a teeny tiny plastic floppy.<\/p>\n

With the original innards removed, though, a Maclock serves as the ideal housing for an emulated Macintosh. After initially using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W to prove the concept, Rickards swapped to a Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ \u2014 the last of the reduced-size Model A single-board computers, after the Raspberry Pi 4 launched in larger Model B form only and the Raspberry Pi 5 ditched the “Model A\/B” suffix entirely \u2014 to improve performance and add 5GHz Wi-Fi.<\/p>\n

The Maclock’s original innards have been swapped out for a Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+, which proved a perfect fit. (\ud83d\udcf7: Paul Rickards)<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition to being able to run original Macintosh software under emulation, it also includes networking support \u2014 though while AppleTalk is fully supported, an apparent bug in the emulator requires the network interface to be placed…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Rickards Gives a Decorative Maclock a Serious Upgrade, Creates a Tiny Working Apple Macintosh…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":211608,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/hackster.imgix.net\/uploads\/attachments\/1928701\/_Mp3iG0Cv77.blob?auto=compress%2Cformat&w=600&h=450&fit=min","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[76],"class_list":["post-211607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-macintosh","tag-macintosh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211607"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211607"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":211609,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211607\/revisions\/211609"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}