Summary
Macs older than this century should not be used by anyone as a daily driver, but many are pieces of computing history that a lot of people want to keep alive and, occasionally, play around with. Someone managed to backport Universal Control, a very modern Mac feature, to the Macintosh Classic, released 35 years ago. Well, kind of.
A developer has successfully brought a feature reminiscent of Apple’s Universal Control to the iconic Macintosh Classic, a machine released in 1990. The project, dubbed “MacFriends” by its creator Bart Jackobs, allows you to move your mouse cursor from a modern Mac’s high-resolution display directly onto the classic black-and-white screen of the 35-year-old computer. Apple’s Universal Control, in case you’re not entirely aware of it, is a feature integrated into recent versions of macOS, allowing a single mouse and keyboard to control multiple iPads and Macs wirelessly.
Universal Control was a feature first conceived and launched by Apple in 2022, so there’s no way one of these very old Macintosh computers would be able to work with it at all. This uses some clever workarounds to replicate the functionality. The technical heart of the project is an Arduino Nano—this small board is connected to the Macintosh Classic’s Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) port, which was the standard for connecting keyboards and mice long before USB became ubiquitous. The Arduino is programmed to emulate a native ADB mouse and keyboard. The microcontroller listens for commands and translates them into signals that the vintage Macintosh can understand, which are then translated to mouse input and keyboard input on the old computer. Pretty neat, all things considered, and it provides a similar degree of functionality to Universal Control, albeit with a lot more extra steps.
On the software side, a custom piece of software developed by Mr. Jackobs monitors the mouse and keyboard activity on the newer Mac. When you move the cursor to the edge of the modern display, the software captures the input stream. Instead of moving the cursor further on the new Mac, it sends the corresponding movement and click data—along with any keyboard strokes—over a standard USB serial connection to the attached Arduino. The Arduino then injects these inputs into the Macintosh Classic’s ADB port, causing the cursor to appear and move on the Macintosh Classic’s screen. It’s not exactly Universal Control, but it’s functionally identical.
MacFriends requires a USB cable between the modern Mac and the Arduino, so it’s not exactly a “wireless” experience like Universal Control is. But it’s still pretty cool. You probably don’t have an old Macintosh Classic lying around for this, but you can read more about the project and the ins and outs of ithere.
