ITXPlus: A ITX Sized Macintosh Plus Logicboard Reproduction

Nycturne

Tinkerer
Dec 18, 2024
85
48
18
The HD15 connector is a standard VGA output generated using GuruThree's Raspberry Pi Pico based converted - you can see the big 40pin footprint for the pico module on the right side of the board. PSU connector is a standard 24pin ATX connector

This actually raises an interesting point I'd probably need to dig into, but if someone already knows at least part of the answer, it would help.

So it looks like this converter reads in data using the original timings, and spits out a letterboxed version of the screen data using VESA timings (based on my not-so-careful reading of the code). So if I wanted to make this more of a pass-through of the Mac timings and let an external upscaler deal with it, I wonder if it's possible to simply bridge HSYNC/VSYNC to the outputs, and feed the video input to the RGB lines as outputs? I could probably tweak the converter code to be more of a passthrough, and even probably minimize the buffers involved when in that mode, but I'm kinda curious if the analog signals are close enough in this case to just skip the conversion outright.
 

max1zzz

Moderator
Staff member
Sep 23, 2021
253
627
93
28
I wonder if it's possible to simply bridge HSYNC/VSYNC to the outputs, and feed the video input to the RGB lines as outputs?
You could quite easily just jumper HSYNC, VSYNC and video through and remove the pico module however this will leave some extra resistors in line that may or may not cause issues but those could easily be removed. However I will also be adding internal video headers for both the mac and VGA side to the release version of the board which would make this easier
 

max1zzz

Moderator
Staff member
Sep 23, 2021
253
627
93
28
It's late and I'm not doing a full write-up tonight, but I'll just leave these here (excuse the potato video, it's that or a massive file and I cba with trying to compress it right now)
2A7E93C6-225D-4F73-BAF4-2D95FBDDA02C.jpg

 

Nycturne

Tinkerer
Dec 18, 2024
85
48
18
You could quite easily just jumper HSYNC, VSYNC and video through and remove the pico module however this will leave some extra resistors in line that may or may not cause issues but those could easily be removed. However I will also be adding internal video headers for both the mac and VGA side to the release version of the board which would make this easier

I thought that might be the case, but the ability to focus on things outside of work lately hasn't been great and so I'm not as certain of my thought process in areas where I'm only somewhat familiar as I normally would be. Prolonged stress isn't fun.

This really does sound like it'd hook into my setup rather nicely.

And the video looks great.
 

MeTheMac

New Tinkerer
Feb 20, 2025
48
7
8
Mars
RetroPods.io
It's late and I'm not doing a full write-up tonight, but I'll just leave these here (excuse the potato video, it's that or a massive file and I cba with trying to compress it right now)
Dude, that's awesome! So excited to pick up my own (if you start selling them)!
 
Last edited: