A tiny Lego Macintosh powered by an ESP32-S3 + 1.69" LCD display.
It looks like a Mac, boots as a ZX Spectrum, loads MacOS 8, and occasionally throws a kernel panic just to keep you guessing.
Because why settle for one retro system when you can mash them all together?
Brickintosh is just me having fun with retro mashups — hope it makes you smile too.
- ESP32-S3 Dev Board with 1.69" IPS ST7789 LCD
- Lego bricks (to taste) for the iconic case.
- TFT_eSPI for LCD driving.
- RGB565-encoded visuals.
ESP_SIM is a simple main.cpp file that uses SDL2 to emulate the output of the ESP32 device. This allows testing and code iterations quickly and easily on the desktop, before deploying to the actual hardware.
Build and flash the firmware using the Arduino IDE or PlatformIO with VS Code. Connect your ESP32-S3 device and upload the code directly to the hardware.
To run the ESP_SIM emulator on your desktop, ensure you have SDL2 installed. Compile main.cpp using your preferred C++ compiler or build system in VS Code. Once compiled, run the executable to emulate the device output on your computer.
- Speccy loading sequence
I wanted to nail that authentic ZX Spectrum vibe before switching things up, so this boots up exactly like the real deal. I could have gone with an American Megatrends-style BIOS boot, but then I am a fan of the ZX Spectrum. And what better than to make it look like the Speccy is loading MacOS?
- Loading MacOS
I used a small bitmap for the progress bar, repeating the middle section so it grows as the bar extends.
- Tunnel
This simple pixel tunnel is just me playing around with some basic effects to get a nice sense of depth and motion.
It was the first effect I wrote, so gave me some experience of the screen rendering speed on the ESP32. Interestingly the speed was initially painfully slow, which I found was due to the graphics library rotating the display for me. From then on I took the rotation into account as I drew the screen content, so the library could use 'zero rotation'.
- DeanTheCoder QR code to GitHub site
I made the QR code transition into a cloud of points, each following an x,y cos,cos curve (kinda like Lissajous plotting) with different multipliers and offsets.
- Retro fire effect
Rather than random seeds on the base line of the frame buffer, I drove the base line with fast-changing sin values to mimic smooth noise — it makes the gradient look nicer. At the end I just stop the seed line so the fire naturally fades away.
- Amiga Boing Ball
The original Amiga ball used a palette trick to fake the rotation. Here I went with actual UV calculations and rotation.
- Spinning donut
This one was painfully slow at first because of all the trig calls. I fixed that by precalculating what I could and adding lookup tables for sin/cos.
- Matrix rain
I borrowed the glyphs from Rezmason’s project and made the green code fall like in the movies, trying to capture that classic Matrix vibe.
- Conway's Game of Life
I love watching patterns evolve, so I implemented this cellular automaton to see life emerge right on the tiny screen.
- Kernel panic
I throw in a kernel panic just to keep things interesting and remind you this is all just a bit of fun.
