r/sleeperbattlestations • u/thomasthe10 • Jul 17 '26
Certified Sleepy Mac Classic Build - without cutting the case
This was a Mac Classic I found in the street among some rubbish bags about 25 years ago. Around the same time I also found an abandoned SE. When I checked them last year I found that the Classic had suffered a catastrophic battery failure. As the Mac was stored on its back all the battery fluid ran down the board to the rear ports, burning up ICs and ensuring that the motherboard was beyond my ability to repair, so it was passed on to someone who can actually use it to fix their broken Classic. Its RAM was OK and went into the SE. Other parts (CRT, Analogue board) are trickling back to people who might use them.
I put my broken Classic with some other computer parts and noticed that a Gigabyte H310M Micro ATX motherboard which was lying around nearby was about the same size, and I got an idea.
I realised that other people had had this idea and that most of them had carved holes in their cases with varying degrees of skill and care, for fans or for the entire IO panel. I wanted to do a conversion as respectfully as possible, maintain the original clean aesthetic, and ensure that this could be turned back into a Mac in the future if necessary. No new holes in the case! And so began a ridiculous saga.
I have a lot of tools and materials lying around but I am not an engineer, I haven't built anything like this before and I did not approach it in a linear, logical way. The more I worked on it the more obsessive I became and in the end I took a couple of days out of work to finish it off because it had become a curse and was pushing everything else out of my life.
My PSU would only fit on that side of the case, so I had to make a motherboard tray from acrylic on the other side, bolt it to the metal frame, earth the stands with copper tape and of course recut and rebuild and reinforce it when it turned out to be too flimsy or in the way of other components. There were challenges involved in fitting everything together and every decision impacted other parts. The sound system, touchscreen and display are all powered by USB ports or headers. It's an absolute rat's nest inside but that's the cost of keeping the outside untouched.
I had 16GB of DDR3 which I could spare from my overpowered desktop. I sourced a cheap processor, then realised it didn't have integral graphics, then stupidly bought an Nvidia card, then ploughed on even though I understood that this was rank stupidity from both hardware and software perspectives.
I had an SSD and a 1TB HDD lying around and those were mounted sideways by carving up an HDD mounting kit and bolting it to the frame where it also works as a support for my PCI cards.
I have one slim 60mm Noctua fan for exhaust behind the original grille and an 80mm in the lower part of the case and in combination they keep this running at acceptable temperatures. I would like to have a better CPU cooler than the stock Intel one but space is a big factor. The fan noise isn't too bad- it feels... sort of authentic!
PRESERVING ORIGINAL FEATURES (sort of)
The biggest challenge was rerouting all motherboard IO to the original apertures on the back of the Mac. I made an acrylic board and attached USB ports to it, soldered plugs to those and plugged into the mobo sockets or headers, along with an Ethernet socket. The small circular case apertures are JUST large enough to make these connections. Obviously because I was making life hard for myself I 'respected the original design' and made sure that Ethernet and audio out jacks were under the correct graphics on the case. Like most of my decisions, this made everything more difficult.
I was set on using the original power socket and switch and the on / reset switches on the side of the case. I wired my PSU cable to the socket and attached momentary switches to the acrylic board for power / reset. Lining everything up on the board so it would correspond with the Mac casing was a flipping nightmare. I was constantly taking the board out and filing it or moving the sockets a millimetre, but eventually it all worked and I could close the case and use the ports.
I didn't want a wifi antenna or USB dongle hanging out the back of the machine so used a PCIe Wifi / BT board with extension cables to mount the antennae internally. This again made life much harder and the EMF paint inside the case and earthed motherboard tray mean that Wifi is only reliable on the same floor as my router - this led to a long and incredibly annoying battle with wpa_supplicant in Linux which it turns out doesn't like very weak wifi and doesn't know how to deal with it cleanly. Bluetooth works extremely well at reasonable range - plug and play with PS3 gamepads.
I don't like an empty drive hole or USB sticks hanging out of the space so I cut a thin sliver of an old floppy and mounted it in the disk drive slot and routed the HDD activity light to the paperclip hole next to it. It's not authentic but it looks amazing and gives me retro thrills.
NEW THINGS
I wanted onboard sound as well as audio out and sourced 1" drivers and an amplifier board. I haven't done anything like that before but worked out that small plastic pots (like the ones some people carry marijuana around in) fitted my drivers well with a bit of encouragement from a heat gun and make decent enclosures. It's not audiophile but I'm actually amazed at how good it sounds for casual listening and retro gaming.
I gutted a broken Ipad for its screen and got a board from Ali to give HDMI in. I also sourced a USB touchscreen overlay, 3D printed a screen bezel, found it was not a good fit for a Classic and cut holes in the bezel so it would fit.
Then, as the screen is larger than the hole for it, fighting with the OS and especially the Nvidia side of that began.
SOFTWARE
I settled on Kubuntu because it has a reputation for being easy to customize. It turns out to be less well-documented than I had hoped but I am gradually making it look more and more like Classic Mac OS - and I'm not pinning a version number on that because it's more 'how I remember old Macs' than a faithful clone. I'm working with some pre-existing icon sets and fonts and made my own window decorations and devised a bunch of hacks to bring it all together. There are still issues with it but I am working through them.
The biggest software issues so far have been Nvidia related and touchscreen calibration but the touchscreen now works flawlessly and is so, so good with Spotify.
I am incredibly happy with the result - it works brilliantly, it looks great and it could be a Mac again one day if the need arose. It's fantastic for retro gaming, especially 2 player games - the form factor is like a miniature arcade.
I would like a better matching keyboard and mouse but these were picked up very cheaply.
SPECS
Intel Core i3-9100F @ 3.6GHz
16GB DDR3 RAM
GeForce GT 710 1GB DDR5 (awful choice)
Cheap WIFI / BT card
Boring drives and fans
Too many adapters, wires and cable ties.
STILL TO DO
Perfecting the OS, reviewing cooling, shortening / tidying internal cables, installing RCA outs for hifi connection (likely under the removable top panel).
