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Is it a Lisa????? Is it a Macintosh????

Posted by: mactjaap on 2015-04-14 10:15:04 Today I acquired this very special Lisa...uh ...Macintosh..uh... machine! It is Lisa modelnumber A6S0300P, so a Lisa XL. But the inside is totally rebuild. It has a Macintosh motherboard with lots of memory "piggy bagged". In total 2 MB. The monitor of the original Lisa is used and is working. Some kind of hack is made to make this possible. It looks like it is done very professional. Anyone knows if it is done by a company? Or could you "do it yourself"? Lots of pictures: View attachment 6118

Posted by: olePigeon on 2015-04-14 10:26:58 Hah!  Nice RAM. 🙂  My guess would be Sun Remarketing.

Posted by: insaneboy on 2015-04-14 10:28:02 Not sure about the stacked memory...    but there was a Macintosh XL that was a modified Lisa...

Posted by: Macdrone on 2015-04-14 10:31:48 Looks like a Mac motherboard with say a shall I say a 128 board since it does not say 128 and 512 by the part number upgraded on board to 2 mega of ram. Neat upgrade and really clean. If I had a Lisa case I would do the same thing if the old parts did not work. At this point you could almost put an SE 30 board in there pretty easy.

Posted by: snuci on 2015-04-14 10:34:19 It is a Macintosh is Lisa clothing.  It's definitely not Sun Remarketing or Apple would have cut off all ties.  They already had something better and it was the Macintosh XL.  I should also mention this gets top marks for a hack that uses a  Lisa case 🙂

Posted by: unity on 2015-04-14 10:38:38 Thats a first. A 128k in a Lisa Shell. The RAM upgrade is sweet. Add a SCSI card interface and you would have one of the fastest Lisas out there - at least on appearance. And I agree, not a Sun job - they had no need to go to these extremes unless it was some sorta experiment by them. edit: I wonder what is up with the ROMs? Additional addressing for the RAM? Video modification? 800k drive?

Posted by: mactjaap on 2015-04-14 10:49:07 Maybe good to know that this Lisa is a 220V and is found in The Netherlands.

Posted by: olePigeon on 2015-04-14 11:03:17 So is the XL CRT/analog board compatible with a Macintosh motherboard?  Or is this particular computer simply a nicely done hack?

Posted by: unity on 2015-04-14 11:21:45 Its been so long since I have tinkered with a Lisa - but I think normally the motherboard would interface here. So this looks made for this application and I wonder if it has some video adjustment stuff on it. I gotta say I keep looking at this hack in awe. Its so cool. But dont so well. Not your typical at home hack job.

Posted by: mactjaap on 2015-04-14 12:51:54 It is on my work now. I will try to lift the top and see how this is connected to the videao board. I'm also curious about the PSU. I can't find this number... and .7A is also not standard.

Posted by: HAL2001 on 2015-04-14 14:10:15 Saw it too on Marktplaats. Very odd, but nice.

Posted by: Byrd on 2015-04-15 03:20:34 Whatever it is, it's a true work of art, and a lot of skill would have been required to get this up and running.  Did you obtain it as a "Lisa", only to find this inside?  I'd be quite excited to come across something like this.

Posted by: Paralel on 2015-04-15 04:13:35 You have to love the stacked RAM... Someone put alot of love into this hack/upgrade, that's for sure.

Posted by: ScutBoy on 2015-04-15 08:56:10 Yes - this mod was done with some foresight and care. Without seeing the CRT board and circuitry, it seems like it's completely reversible as well. Like someone said upthread, I'd like to find the guy and have him do the same mod on one of my donor chassis, but with an SE/30 board instead 🙂

Posted by: MinerAl on 2015-04-15 09:54:13 The inside of the Lisa is cavernous.  If you had a 12" monochrome Mac Monitor('s guts attached to the Lisa's tube or replacing the Lisa's CRT entirely), you could pretty much drop any monochrome capable Mac LoBo in there. I'd do it with a SE's guts, so it would just be a nice, simple, slightly-overclocked Mac XL with an internal SCSI HDD, and square pixels.

Posted by: mactjaap on 2015-04-15 10:00:22 @Byrd No I did see immediatly that this was not an "ordinairy" Lisa XL. It was also clearly stated. I was amazed because I own a Lisa XL with nothing more then video board, monitor and case. So I already asked on this forum if such a kind of hack is possible.  Quote is it possible to connect the monitor to any kind of more modern Mac? Like a Plus or a Macintosh II? Not really, no.  https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/13945-lisa/ Now I found one with exactly what I wanted. Very nice. I made some fresh new pictures to show how the video part is done. Will post then later tonight...

Posted by: Gorgonops on 2015-04-15 11:25:43 Per one of the comments I made on that old thread, my gut feeling is that the circuitry that drives the Lisa's monitor might need very little modification to work with a Mac motherboard; both systems had about the same vertical resolution and frame rate; the only real difference would be the pixel clock (IE, number of pixels per line, which in this case would be 512 vs. 720) and that's something that you can generally change, within reason, without modifying the monitor. Does that adapter board that's between the Mac motherboard and the Lisa's card-edge have any active components on it? (transistors, etc? I'm not sure what that white thing is, is it by any chance a piezoelectric buzzer replacing the speaker that's driven by the Mac's analog board?)

Posted by: mactjaap on 2015-04-15 11:37:04 This is more in detail about the video hack. Maybe the chip on the small board explains what is done?

Posted by: unity on 2015-04-15 12:04:29 That board does not appear to be a one-off. Interesting.

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