Suppose you were insane and you wanted to make your own---not a mock-up of course but the real thing. You get yourself one of those fancy FPGA SBCs and a free 68000 core, then program in the rest of the virtual logic based on the schematics, and soon you've got your Lisa-on-a-chip. You change the video state ROM to support the new tall layout (of course you're going to keep that 2:3 pixel aspect ratio) and make whatever other hacks are necessary to drive that Apple Portrait Display you're cannibalising. Who knows where you got those slim floppy drives from---maybe tearing apart some 3.5" USB drives from somewhere. (Not even you are crazy enough to try and simulate Twiggies.)
Sounds amazing, let's do it!
Although at this point I wouldn't bother with a CRT or twiggies anymore, I'd use a nice 1080p rotateable display, and our buddy Steve Chamberlin already has that fancy twiggy emulator here:
https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/(Actually at this point, I'd stuff a Raspberry Pi with an LCD in a case like so:
https://vintagemacmuseum.com/remembering-the-lisa-with-a-pixl/ - As neat as the Lisa on an FPGA is, it's overkill when you can do it for $35, plus case, LCD, SD card, etc.)
By a lucky coincidence, you have an aunt who owns a factory that does one-off injection-molding jobs for prototypers who won't settle for 3-D printing, so copying the case isn't as tough as it might be for some.
Ah, the good old "... And Roberta's your aunt" line! Love it!
Now comes the hard part: how do you hack the Office System to use a different screen size?
You can't do it directly because of the memory layout. You'd need to rewrite the guts of the OS to make it work, specifically the QuickDraw stuff. Can it be done? Yes.
Is it easy? Nope* (that asterisk indicates an exceedingly large-ish quantity of "nope").
However, that photo and the article was posted as a historical data point of what Frog Design had prototyped. ofc floppy drives that slim did not exist, and likely never existed as 5.25"; 3.5" ones used in slim laptops came in the late 90s for things like thinkpads and even some powerbooks.
This was part of a design contest of sorts where Apple went out to various design houses and asked for free submissions so they could pick the best one, and the winner was Frog. They asked for various designs for things like the Lisa, IIc, and Mac, and that was what they had submitted for the Lisa based, presumably on what Apple told them in the specs. They did win the IIc according to the podcast.
This post wasn't meant as hey, let's build this thing that never was and never could be built with 1982 technology, but it is an interesting thought experiment.
