LisaList2

Quote from: Edge Connector on June 19, 2026, 10:45:51 AMThanks for the update! I've been checking the forum regularly out of excitement and this was very welcome. Any chance of an early heads up before it gets posted? I know I signed up in the form but wasn't sure how it was all going to work.

Yeah, if you put "LisaList2" in your name when filling out the form, you'll get notified early and be able to order before the general public is able to order them!

Thanks for the update, you're making impressive progress!

QuoteIt turns out that a LisaList2 member has been working on an SCC core, and he very kindly PM'ed it to me a couple days ago.

That's a very impressive job in itself! If there is an easy way to increase the size of the receive buffer FIFO, that might make a big difference for higher speed transfers.

Thanks for the update! I've been checking the forum regularly out of excitement and this was very welcome. Any chance of an early heads up before it gets posted? I know I signed up in the form but wasn't sure how it was all going to work.

Time for an update on my progress with the boards!

Testing them has been a slow and tedious process combined with all the other stuff that I have to do, but I've confirmed that 46 of the 50 are functional. The other 4 are broken, and all the problems seem to be traced back to shorts in the soldering underneath the FPGA's BGA. I'm talking with JLC right now to arrange a solution (probably refund, rework, or remanufacturing) for those; I don't have the skill to solder BGAs myself!

Out of the other 46, I was only able to get 24 of them fully working because only 24 of the 50 SCCs that I ordered were real. The other 26 were fakes that were completely inert, partially worked but crashed the system sometimes, or were so fake that they prevented the system from even displaying an image on the screen. The seller is going to refund me for the defective ones, but I can't take the risk of ordering more and having them be fakes again, and that also sets the timeline for the boards back by at least another month. So I decided to finally bite the bullet and try to implement the SCC inside the FPGA. I planned ahead and the board already has facilities for disabling the real SCC and putting the FPGA into its place, so it was "simply" a matter of writing the SCC core.

But luckily, I didn't even have to do that! It turns out that a LisaList2 member has been working on an SCC core, and he very kindly PM'ed it to me a couple days ago. The first version I tried had a few bugs, but the version I'm on now seems rock-solid in everything that I've tried so far. So hopefully I'll have a fully tested and working solution here in a few days, and then I can remove the physical SCCs from all the boards and reprogram all 46 of them with the new bitstream. Thank you to the creator of the core once again!

At that point, it shouldn't be too long before I have them shipped out to MacEffects and JCM for resale to anybody who wants one! I'll probably make the GitHub repo public at around this same time, because that's when everything should be finalized for the initial release. The final quantity that'll go on sale is looking to be 41 right now, because I'm keeping two for myself and giving three more to three friends who have been very supportive of me and the entire project from the very beginning, before anyone else even knew about it. Future batches will have the full quantity on sale though!

In this Classic Computing interview session, host David Greelish sits down with computer engineering PhD student Alex Anderson-McLeod to discuss his latest open-source initiative: The Lisa FPGA Project.

The Apple Lisa is one of the rarest, most expensive, and notoriously fragile machines in vintage computer history. Alex's project aims to change that by replacing complex, aging, and frequently battery-bombed circuit boards with a single, modern FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) board. Discover how this project achieves cycle-accurate performance to run original Apple Lisa software while seamlessly introducing modern upgrades like HDMI video output, USB keyboard/mouse support, and onboard hard disk emulation, all while keeping the design completely open-source.

Lisa 1/10 is not a thing...

Officially: it was Lisa, Lisa 2, Lisa 2/10, and Macintosh XL.

Un-Officially; Lisa 1 ( The original Lisa after the Lisa 2 was released), Lisa 2/5 ( Just another name for a Lisa 2 that's not a Lisa 2/10).

To quote the 1988 Sun Remarking Lisa DIY guide:
"Lisa 2: The Lisa 2 has one 3.5-inch 400K disk drive, different disk drive controller circuitry, and a redesigned front panel to accommodate the single 3.5-inch drive opening. A 400K floppy controller, labeled the "Lisa Lite Adapter," is mounted inside the disk drive cage. The System I/0 board is socketed for an AMD 9512 arithmetic processor. It has nickel-cadmium battery backup for the real time clock. One 512K memory board is standard. The mother board has a mouse connector, two serial connectors, and an external parallel connector. The power supply is rated 1.2 A.

Lisa 2/10: The Lisa 2/10 has a completely different motherboard. The mouse connector is different. There's no external parallel connector on the back of the computer. Instead, there's an internal parallel connector and a 10MB internal I hard drive. An interrupt switch has been added. The system I/0 board is also different. There's no socket for the AMD 9512 coprocessor. There's no nickel-cadmium battery backup for the real time clock. The disk drive controller is different. An extra chip on the 1/0 board replaces the Lisa Lite Adapter which was formerly located in the drive cage. The disk drive cabling is different. The wiring harness is different. The power supply is different. One megabyte of RAM is standard. If you have Lisa OS disks, a 10MB internal hard drive, no Lisa Lite card, no external parallel connector, and a 1.8-A 110/220V power supply, yours is at least a Lisa 2/10.

Macintosh XL: The Macintosh XL is exactly the same as a Lisa 2/10. Only the sticker on the box, the operating system, and the instruction manuals are different. Instead of Lisa OS, the bundled OS is Macintosh System software and MacWorks XL, a Lisa program which allows 64K Macintosh ROM emulation. If you have MacWorks XL instead of Lisa OS disks, a 1OMB internal hard drive, no Lisa Lite card, and a 1.8-A power supply, yours is probably a Macintosh XL."

Ooh, that's a good question. I am definitely speaking of LOS 1.2 only. Will try LOS 2.0 and see if anything is different.

That's funny --- I'm pretty sure my Lisa 1 with ROM D is happy to work with just about any weird size of "ProFile" that I set up with a ProFile emulator.

IIRC all the boot ROM does is check to see whether a drive answers the basic handshake in order to try and boot from the built-in parallel port (or put the icon in the STARTUP FROM...) menu. Then when it's time to boot, it reads block $000000 into a spot in RAM and jumps there, and after that there's nothing more that the ROM does.

Checking now... The ROM (at least rev. H) only calls PROREAD once with a block address of 0. So it should work with any "ProFile" from sizes 532 bytes to 8.9 gigabytes...

It wouldn't surprise me though if earlier versions of the Office System and Workshop didn't recognise any size of ProFile besides 5 MB.

(Have you tried Office System 2.0? It's the latest that runs on a Lisa 1 as far as I know.)

So very excited by this thanks so much for this wonderful project!

FWIW, my Lisa 1 machines do not recognize any 10MB ProFiles when attached. I do not know if this is a limitation of the Rev. C / D CPU board ROMS, the I/O board ROMs, or a combination of the two. Therefore a Lisa 1/10 does not seem to be a thing.