Enclosure
So now I had a display, software that could emulate a Macintosh Plus fairly well, plus a microcontroller it could run on. What's still missing? A nice box to put it in, obviously!
I decided to 3d-print one on the nice Formlabs 1+ SLA printer my work has. To do this, I first needed a model. I wanted to build one from scratch. Obviously, to do this it would be best if I had a real Macintosh Plus at my disposal. I actually have one in my posession, but it was half a continent away... Luckily, I could get my hands on the next best thing: some kind soul uploaded the dimensions of an original Mac 128K (which has almost the same case as the Plus) to the iFixit wiki.
I still do all my 3d modeling in OpenScad, and after some sweating and cursing to get all the curves
looking like they should, I had a nice model of an 1-to-6-scale Mac.
The mouse was also created from the iFixit images, but because it needed to fit the (relatively large)
optical mouse sensor, unfortunately it couldn't be scaled to 1/6th of the real thing. The scale is more
like 2/5th, making it seem somewhat large next to the tiny Mac but also making it way more usable for
non-scaled-down human fingers.
So now all that remained was to print the thing. I exported the design as various STL files and used
the Formlabs 1+ to print them. This went fairly well, althought the resin was somewhat old so I put a few
more supports than the default in to make sure I wouldn't get a mis-print. The end result came out pretty
nice; the only regret I have is that I didn't put locking clips for the two halves in the design. I eventually
worked around that by just sealing the two halves together using a drop of superglue.
