Steve Troughton-Smith

Upgrade to OSName 27

What do you meaaaan a Raspberry Pi now costs £300

Linus Torvalds: "And no, that's not the position of the Linux kernel. I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away." https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/07/linux-creator-linus-torvalds-puts-foot-down-on-anti-ai-comments/

Commiserations/congrats? to the seven people no longer listed on the MacStories staff/contributors page, I guess? I hope you all find success in whatever comes next 💛 https://www.macstories.net/about/

The chat experience *is* ChatGPT. Now it's squirreled away in a sub section of a sub pane inside a vastly more-complex app. It's hard to imagine anybody who actually wants to use ChatGPT wants to use it this way, Electron or not. And as a Codex user, I resent having my Codex deleted and renamed 'ChatGPT' instead. I don't want my 'chats' anywhere near my 'work'. This feels like a stupid move that will decimate casual ChatGPT desktop usage

Verified that the kernel boots on a Pi Zero, and that it can boot from multiple different contemporary boot disks. The next big task will be to give it some kind of keyboard and mouse support. The mere fact that I can boot a $5 Pi Zero to the Macintosh desktop — with no Linux or 'OS' — tickles me

The hobby desk may be a mess right now, but the flocked hill turned out great! #warhammer

This demanded a custom build of Lights Off for m68k that runs on the original Mac 128K System 1.0 😄

When I turn HDR back off on my monitor, Liquid Glass looks so flat and dull. There really is a stark contrast — this is a UI designed for HDR brightness values at a per-pixel level. The upshot of this is that the upcoming OLED MacBook Ultra is going to look incredible (and make every other Mac look like garbage). But I can tell right now that my next desktop monitor needs to be a ProMotion OLED or it's not gonna be worth upgrading

"We require all code to be human authored. AI assistance should be limited to menial things (like code completion, regex, or find and replace)." Godot's updated Contribution Policy. My take: saying this kind of thing in 2026, when effectively the entire industry has already moved to using LLM-based agents as the primary IDE, is really naive. 'Code completion' was three years ago. You're only setting yourself up for having to walk this back later https://godotengine.org/article/contribution-policy-2026/

Speaking of gamedev studios that need a shakeup, what the heck has Mojang been doing for ten years? They hired some of the hottest Minecraft mod developers making the coolest things, and… did nothing with them? Minecraft had so much potential — top Minecraft mods birthed entire multimillion-dollar game genres, like Factorio and its ilk — but the actual dev team has wasted their time building and adding one cute animal a year. Minecraft could have been an engine for an entire industry of games

Got hands-on on a Samsung Fold 8, and I regret to inform you that the screen still feels like cheap plastic and you can still feel the crease very distinctly, even on a 'new' unit. If this is the kind of thing Apple is about to ship, if they haven't got some miracle crease-cure and glass-feeling display, for $2,500, then I honestly don't think they should ship. The technology doesn't make up for the feel. Foldables are still theoretical to most customers; buyer's remorse will be through the roof

For decades I, like all of you, have used many a Mac emulator that will error out in weird situations with unimplemented traps or the like, and have no recourse. 'Oh that just doesn't work in ', etc. So it's pretty refreshing, while working on this one, to be able to ask Codex to add all the debug information I need to actually dig in and *fix* these things. And it will happily disassemble the apps triggering the crash to validate the fix against the assembly code

I think I've reached the limit of what I can put in one photograph without building a game board. Here's pilky's dwarf army (so far) in all of its remastered glory #warhammer

A new Markdown editor for the Mac Plus written by @ActionRetro@bitbang.social (with Claude). LLMs are incredible at working on retro computing projects — it can write a 1984-era Macintosh Toolbox app in Pascal as easily as an iPad app in Swift https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheu_r9UGw

Mouse and keyboard now hooked up to USB input in qemu 👌

Misc screenshots from this Raspberry Pi Macintosh kernel, which now runs at 1X speed at 60fps (in qemu, not on real hardware yet) and supports qemu's usb sound device (as well as keyboard and mouse), and running multiple different versions of the Macintosh System

…or this penguin!

Macintosh Guided Tour, qemu-system-arm

Aside: I think I might have fried a Raspberry Pi 4 via the GPIO pins trying to set one up 🥲 I have this beautiful little 3D-printed Kevin Noki case that would have been absolutely perfect for my mini Mac, but I didn't have the pinout instructions and decided to wing it. Also now Raspberry Pis cost a whole heck of a lot more than they used to

Internal and External floppy support & MacPaint

Finishing a bunch of pilky’s dwarfs today #warhammer

Keyboard and mouse via uart, I can finally click around the OS now

Flocking some polystyrene like it's 1995 #warhammer

Not updated for today's release of Codex GPT 5.6 Sol/Terra/Luna: Xcode

SmoothTalker

This emulator work has also highlighted that the archives of the original Macintosh system disks on the internet aren't pristine, and not everything functions out of the box like it should ☹️ To be expected, of course, but it's a shame there are no 'original' copies preserved Backup Disk 690-5023-A Guided Tour 690-5002-C System Disk 690-5003-C Write/Paint Tour 690-5006-C https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1762-mac-system-1-x

It takes a billion tokens to build a Mac

The original Macintosh is /barely/ a computer; it's a ROM-based UI framework on stilts. You can boot to the startup screen Happy Mac just by feeding the bytes of the ROM to an m68000 one by one. It does almost nothing out of the box

I might never have seen this 'Amazing' game. Or the 'Training' menu in Finder 👀

Here's a three-photo focus-stacked shot of the dwarf army, captured by Reeflex using the iPhone Air's main and only camera. Who needs Photoshop? #warhammer

My desktop monitor supports HDR, but I never use it because HDR sucks on LCDs. I turned it on for a bit just to see what Liquid Glass looks like on it, and everything sure is more glossy and contrasty. Maybe someday Apple can do an OLED Studio Display…

Oof, macOS 27's Mission Control has been hit with behavioral changes in beta 4 that have ruined the way I use macOS 🫠 It also feels really janky, like they're trying to sneak out a SwiftUI rewrite in a beta 4

more snek #warhammer

The internet doesn't really keep a list of software that ran on the original 128K Mac, and I'd kinda like to know what to test my emulator against. Beyond MacWrite and MacPaint, did this model Mac actually have any compatible apps?

Case in point: Mini vMac halts with a system error during this Macintosh Guided Tour disk. My emulator fixes the underlying SysError, so I can continue into the rest of the tour. If I only had vMac to work with, I would be none the wiser

WIP skellies & snek #warhammer

It’s re-basing time

Little bit of @OpenSCAD@floss.social and a Bambu, and I have the perfect configurable movement tray generator for Warhammer Fantasy / The Old World

USB is 'easy' in qemu — Codex had no problem whatsoever adding working keyboard, mouse, and audio devices — but trying to bring up real physical USB devices on an actual Raspberry Pi is a nightmare. It was a nightmare back when I was writing my own Pi kernels by hand a decade ago, but it's still a nightmare today

My movement tray generator has been pretty motivating: all I have to do to finish this Battle March force is to fill out the empty trays, one by one. Feels achievable. So that’s the next bit of hobby… #warhammer

Working my way through these skeletons… #warhammer

@nileane@nileane.fr the one that hurts the most is fullscreen spaces now show the window title, not the app name

@nileane@nileane.fr really laggy on an M1, and lots of them are outright broken or missing in this build

"Has anybody ported swift-embedded to the Macintosh 128K yet?" Yes, apparently. Well that's one less thing I have to do 😂 https://github.com/DominoTree/modern-m68k-toolchains/

If I knew how to re-cap my boots-to-checkerboard Mac Classic, I probably wouldn't have dreamed about making a Raspberry Pi Mac for the past decade 👀

@amonduin@mstdn.ca @andybold@hachyderm.io 1) that's not macOS 27 2) that's not early-2000s Aqua So it doesn't touch on what I'm comparing, at either end