RetroPie 3 - Macintosh

This project was completed March 29, 2020 by Mitchell Hollis.  It can also be viewed on Instagram here and here.

My friend was helping his dad clean out his garage and found an old Macintosh Classic II.  He brought it over to see if there was anything cool we could do with it.  We fussed with it for a while but weren't able to get it to run, so it seemed like the next best option was to use the enclosure for something else.  (Note: please be careful when messing with old CRT screens, they can hold onto a high voltage charge even when they've been unplugged for a while).  After kicking around several ideas we settled on just throwing in another Raspberry Pi running RetroPie.  We went back and forth about what to do for the screen and ended up deciding to build a sort of shadow box where he could put a faux terrarium (it was getting a little conceptually busy for my taste, but it's what my buddy wanted).

There was plenty of room inside to mount everything, and the IO holes in the back worked well to access the Raspberry Pi's HDMI and Power ports, so the biggest technical challenge was getting USB ports and a power button in the front of the Mac.  It turns out that the floppy disc slot was just high enough to accommodate the USB ports and a small button.  I had an old Amazon Basics USB hub laying around (unfortunately I don't think they sell this one anymore), and was able to trim the PCB until the ports them selves stuck out a bit.  I mounted the hub to a block of wood and added a little aluminum plate to hold the button as well.  I'm super pleased with how slick and clean this came out.

I made a box out of scrap wood to sit where the CRT was and hold the terrarium.  I painted it black and glued a sheet of acrylic to the front and piece of a mirror to the back to make it look deeper.  The top of the box was hinged, so that it was easy to access when the Mac's shell was slid apart.  I stuck aluminum plumber's tape and adhesive LED strips to the inside of the lid to shine down on the terrarium screen.  The LEDs were wired to the 5v pin on the Raspberry Pi so that they came on when it was booted up.

And that was that, time to spend some time testing it.

I 3d printed a treasure chest and Cthulhu statue to send along with the console.  Here's the final result populated with fake aquarium plants.
I've ended up making a few of these, all in different enclosures.