I stumbled over a Maclock on AliExpress - one of those tiny Macintosh-shaped desk clocks. And I had a Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-2.8B on the bench already. So you can probably see where this is going.

How hard can it be?

The board fits basically perfectly inside the Maclock enclosure. ESP32-S3 dual-core at 240MHz, 8MB of OPI PSRAM, 480x640 ST7701 RGB LCD. The LCD is portrait, so the classic Mac’s 640x480 screen gets rotated 90° and lands 1:1 on the panel. Like it was made for it.

Spritetm already did the hard part years ago - minimacplus is his Mac Plus emulator for smaller ESP32s. I took it, ripped out the parts that didn’t apply, wired up the OPI PSRAM for 4MB of Mac RAM, and rerouted the video to the ST7701. The Musashi 68000 core runs at about 5.5MHz on this board - about 70% of the real 7.83MHz. Close enough.

The really fun part was the input. No room for a keyboard, no room for a mouse. So I put a BLE GATT server on the ESP32 and wrote a little HTML page that talks to it over Web Bluetooth. Trackpad, click button, on-screen keyboard - all running in the browser on my phone. Pair, type, click.

That is exactly the kind of thing I would have put off forever. Web Bluetooth, BLE, JavaScript, ESP-IDF all in one evening? Not without Claude Code. Honestly not. Said and done, and it works.

Fun tajming too, with Apple’s 50th birthday right around the corner.

Feel free to grab it at github: esp32_mac.

Happy hacking!