This part of the forum was looking a little lonely so I thought I’d post my latest vintage purchase, a 1987 Japan made M0110A with Mitsumi switches, here it is in all it’s yellowed and uncleaned glory:
It’s in surprisingly good condition, and the switches, despite making a real ringing sound, feel great. The current plan is the standard retrobrite and then convert to USB using Hasu’s guide.
I had considered placing the converter inside the case (there is a lot of space in there) but I think I’ll create a converter cable using a 4P4C chord and a pro micro on the end of it, parts should only come to about £4!
It was the modern M0110 that got me back looking at the vintage ones. I really like the layout of the M0110A, it would be ideal if it had a more standard 60% with arrow keys layout. Are there any modern boards that are essentially 60% plus numpad?
Stupid question, but how yellow does the case look to you? I can see that the space-bar is ABS and a different shade to the rest of the dye sub pbt keys, but I have never been around classic Macs enough to know how yellow the case should be!
Maybe a tad, but no more than I usually attribute to the color of that era for cases and things. It looks normal to me. I also may not have good reference for the original color in my head though.
Go for the OG then, honestly I really like this board and once I’ve finished the conversion and get a wrist rest I’ll use it. If you don’t like the switches, change them out and do a hand wire, plenty of people have converted M0110 and M0110s, even seen a Bluetooth mod.
These modern boards are expensive because of what they are, big chunks of milled metal produced in small batches, and we love them for that, but people overlook the vintage, and the modifications you can do to them.
That would super cool. I USB converted one of my M0116 but the original PCB is so fragile compared to modern PCBs, I lifted so many pads and had to patch so many traces, it ended up working in the end but took a couple hours to debug and get it working after desoldering and resoldering switches
I did a M0110 handwire, and some guy commented on my thread with a link to his conversion. He hooked it up so that you could either plug in the existing phone cord or the USB cable. A bit overkill, but seems like a cool concept.
Image here
The only issue with using the converter cable is that the original boards were only 2KRO. If that doesn’t matter to you (and it probably doesn’t for most people), then go for it.
trying to fix it now
