Modern apps for a 1986 Macintosh. A suite of native applications for real vintage compact Macs — a Mac Plus, SE, Classic, running System 6 or 7 on a 68000 — that do genuinely modern things by pairing the little Mac with a "brains" service running on a nearby modern Mac.
Your 40-year-old Macintosh gets: a coding companion powered by Claude, a web browser, an AI image generator that "develops" pictures like a Polaroid, a Unix shell, iMessage, and more — all as native black-and-white Toolbox apps, driving them from the actual 512×342 1-bit screen.
The vintage Mac has no internet of its own. It talks over its serial port (or a BlueSCSI network adapter) to a modern Mac on your LAN that does the heavy lifting — fetches web pages, runs the language model, generates images — and streams back plain text or 1-bit bitmaps the old machine can render.
Each app is two halves: a tiny native Plus app (C against the classic Mac Toolbox, built with Retro68) and a Mac-side agent (Node/TypeScript) that does the real work.
| App | What it does |
|---|---|
Macinclaude Code (macinclaude/) |
A Claude coding companion in a VT100 terminal on the Plus. |
Surf (surf/) |
A reader-mode web browser — the modern Mac fetches + simplifies pages into 1-bit text the Plus renders, with clickable links. |
Macinclaude Paint (atkinson/) |
Type a prompt → the Mac generates an image, Atkinson-dithers it to 1-bit, and the Plus paints it row by row so it "develops." |
Plutonix (plutonix/) |
A small Unix subsystem on the Plus — a real shell + pipelines + ~18 stream tools, plus ssh/rsh into your modern Mac. |
Foundry (foundry/) |
Describe an app in a sentence → the Mac writes it, compiles it with Retro68, and delivers the finished app to your Plus. |
The Bridge (bridge/) |
Over-the-air app delivery: drop a built app in a folder and it installs itself onto the Plus over the network. |
iMessage (imessage/) |
Read and reply to messages from the Plus (personal-integration example — see its note). |
| Quote / NetSpeed / Porthole / Sudoku / SerialDoc | A daily quote, a link speed test, a bitmap viewer, a 36-puzzle Sudoku, and a serial-port diagnostic. |
Plus the shared plumbing: net/ (a minimal MacTCP client, app-event logging,
full-screen window helper), tools/ (MacBinary + resource-fork utilities),
and one Mac-side agent per app under agent-*/.
- Bring your Mac back to life — hardware: a BlueSCSI, a ROM, a System, and getting the old machine talking to a modern one.
- Install the apps — put these apps on your Mac, via a BlueSCSI SD card or over the Bridge.
- Build them yourself — the Retro68 toolchain and the Mini vMac emulator workflow.
- Run the backend — the Mac-side agents that
give the apps their powers, and how to point the apps at your own machine
(see also
config.example).
- A real 68k compact Mac (or the Mini vMac emulator) running System 6.0.8 or 7.
- A way to get it online: a BlueSCSI with a DaynaPORT SCSI-network device, or a serial-to-WiFi modem (e.g. a RetroWiFi).
- A modern Mac on the same LAN to run the agents (Node 20+).
- To build the apps: the Retro68 cross-compiler.
The apps ship with a placeholder server address (192.168.1.50). Set it to the
LAN IP of the Mac running your agents — in each app's Settings dialog, or by
editing the #define at the top of the app before building. See
config.example.
Built by Bart Decrem with Claude. MIT licensed — see LICENSE.
Retro68, Mini vMac, and the classic Mac ROM/System software are the property of
their respective owners and are not included here.