Put a vintage Mac in your pocket!

I ran across a blog post that caught my attention it detailed using a handheld computer called pocket chip to run an emulator for the classic Mac OS both of these things are interesting to me and when I remembered that I actually had a pocket chip stashed away I knew I needed to check it out for myself [Music] [Music] pocketship was a compelling product when it launched in 2016 and I did a general review of it not long afterwards it was comprised of two parts the handheld shell with screen and battery and the chip single board computer that snapped into it its specifications were impressive for the time with an arm CPU clocked at one gigahertz 512 megabytes of RAM and 4 gigabytes of onboard flash this should be plenty to emulate a Mac from the 1980s so I set out to make it happen the basic premise is to use an emulator called mini vmac which is a popular choice for running the classic Mac OS on Modern computers normally to get it working on an embedded platform like chip you'd need to compile it yourself which is something that the blog I found touches on I've included a link in the description if you want to check it out for yourself but following those steps isn't necessary as someone on GitHub has already done the hard work for us and in fact getting it up and running is deceptively simple pocket chip has built-in Wi-Fi so I connected it to my network I opened the terminal program and ran a command to show the IP address that pocket chip picked up I'll need this a little later another thing I needed to do was confirm that SSH was installed as it's necessary to actually connect a chip for transferring files in my case it was already set up on my modern computer I could then download and extract the files from the GitHub repository only a couple of these would be necessary I already had a hard drive image set up for use with mini vmac it's one I had put together when I built a tiny Mac plus with a Raspberry Pi zero inside you can either install mini vmac on your modern Windows Linux or Mac computer and build a disk yourself or just download one that someone else set up there's plenty of options out there if you search for them I fired up an FTP client in this case cyberduck but any will do and connected to pocket chip using the IP address I found earlier the connection type is SFTP and the username and password are both just the word chip this dropped me into the chip user's home directory and I created a new folder that I called Mac but it can be named whatever you want from there I copied over three files the mini vmac executable the ROM file included with it and my disk image this took a moment but when it was done I could disconnect and turn my attention back to the pocket chip itself I navigated to the folder I created then confirmed the files were indeed there one last change is to make the mini vmac program executable which took only one command there we should be all set if your disk image is named disc1.dsk then starting mini vmac is easy just dot slash mini vmac then hit enter the screen went black for a minute which had me concerned but then it lit up and the familiar happy Mac icon appeared a few seconds later and I was sitting at the Mac desktop that was downright easy something that surprised me was controlling IT pocket chip came with a touch screen and it worked for moving the pointer it wasn't really meant for the kind of precision needed here so I found it a bit Hit or Miss trying to do what I wanted but it worked eventually I ended up pulling out a wireless mouse and connected its receiver to the USB port on the chip module which was Plug and Play you could do this with a keyboard too if you wanted performance was better than I expected mini vmac is emulating a Mac 2 with 8 megabytes of RAM and navigating through the UI was reasonably responsive it supports 256 colors though pocket chips screen resolution of 480 by 272 is smaller vertically than any Mac ever shipped with so some windows get cut off when you're done fooling around it's as simple as going to the special menu and choosing shutdown like on a real Mac from the time mini vmac will quit back to the terminal window and you can just type exit to return to the main pocket chip screen honestly finding the mini vmac Port has reignited my own interest in this handheld when I first got one in 2017 I was impressed with its capabilities and focus on having fun it's manufacturer the next thing company pushed gaming creativity and tinkering through the pre-loaded software such as pico8 the chip module initially debuted on Kickstarter in 2015 where its price of nine dollars US caught a lot of attention that was a very compelling price for its capabilities especially since it had storage Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on board it proved successful in its campaign and the chip ecosystem looked promising general sales of the chip module stayed at nine dollars and pocket ship launched at an equally impressive 50 bucks it was looking like next thing company was going to become one of the biggest names in singleboard Computing but then it all fell apart in 2017 next thing introduced chip Pro yet despite its name and increased 16 dollar price it wasn't really an upgrade it featured the same CPU but cut the ram down to 256 megabytes and reduced onboard storage from four gigs down to 512 Megs chip Pro was targeted towards buyers who wanted to incorporate it into their own products and had castillated edges for easy soldering to other pcbs instead of pin headers around the same time next thing stopped selling the original chip model saying that it would relaunch with improved specifications it never did other items that next thing sold including pocket chip became backordered which started to look a little suspicious as it included things such as simple cables and other accessories people who had pre-ordered pocket chip months earlier were getting concerned and in November 2017 the company posted an update saying that production was back on track and more units would ship soon yet orders continued to go unfilled and it became difficult to reach anyone at next thing the inevitable news came in early 2018 when it was learned that the company had gone into insolvency it had been hugely in debt and despite the excitement for its products it simply never found a way to be profitable the thing that brought chip widespread attention its low price was ultimately its undoing next thing likely thought that as production volumes increased per unit cost would drop and Chip would end up making money but there was speculation from the start that chip was actually being sold at a massive loss upwards of a hundred percent that was simply too wide of a gap to ever overcome at its retail price and for everyone who had a pre-order that went unfilled the insult added to the injury was when someone from Hong Kong posted on the chip message boards that they had come across 1600 pocket ships they were looking to sell as of 2023 it's actually still possible to buy a chip module according to its site a company that now calls itself pocket ship had tried to become a reseller for next thing back in 2016. while it did receive some inventory it too got screwed out of its orders and is now selling what remaining stock it does have prices aren't as compelling as what next thing was asking though with a new chip module selling for 35 bucks probably closer to what they should have gone for to begin with you might have already banged out an angry comment asking what practical purpose running a Mac emulator on a pocket chip serves frankly there isn't one this is entirely just for fun and in some ways that's the same story for pocket ship itself it slant towards education and gaming certainly made it attractive to hobbyists but that wasn't enough to sell sufficient units and keep Next Thing company in business this was a mistake that Raspberry Pi didn't repeat even though chip was certainly a better value pies have overall been geared more towards general purpose Computing which has made them attractive to commercial customers and consumers alike it's a shame though because chip showed an awful lot of promise it's just a bummer that next thing ended up biting off more than it could chew [Music] [Music]

Channel: This Does Not Compute

Views: 114,927

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Id: Z1_-kPvDmn4

Length: 10min 24sec (624 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2023