To kick off MARCHintosh, I built this tiny pint-sized Macintosh with a Raspberry Pi Pico:



This is not my own doing—I just assembled the parts to run Matt Evans' Pico Micro Mac firmware on a Raspberry Pi Pico (with an RP2040).
The version I built outputs to a 640x480 VGA display at 60 Hz, and allows you to plug in a USB keyboard and mouse.
Since the original Pico's RAM is fairly constrained, you get a maximum of 208 KB of RAM with this setup—which is 63% more RAM than you got on the original '128K' Macintosh!

Jeff Geerling is a software developer, author, and open-source contributor known for his expertise in infrastructure automation and Drupal development. Readers can learn about DevOps practices, Ansible automation, and web development with Drupal. With blog posts, tutorials, and open-source projects, Jeff Geerling shares  insights and best practices for building and managing web infrastructure.

Jeff Geerling

A hobbyist build of a miniature Macintosh emulator using a Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) running Matt Evans' Pico Micro Mac firmware. The setup outputs to a 640x480 VGA display, supports USB keyboard and mouse, and provides 208 KB of RAM — more than the original 128K Mac. The post covers hardware assembly (PicoMicroMac v2/v3 board, microSD adapter, small VGA monitor), flashing the UF2 firmware, formatting a FAT32 microSD card with a Mac OS disk image, and booting into System 5.3. Key limitations include the 208 KB RAM ceiling (blocking larger apps and games), no sound support, and no AppleTalk or SCSI. The entire build costs around $20, compared to the original Mac's ~$8,000 in today's dollars.

I built a pint-sized Macintosh