ESP32-P4 Runs Classic Mac OS: A BasiliskII Port on a $40 Devkit

A Macintosh Emulator Boots on the ESP32-P4

Every so often a project lands that makes me grin at the spec sheet, and this is one of them. Austin McChord has ported the BasiliskII 68k emulator to the ESP32-P4, and the result is a genuine classic Macintosh running on a touchscreen dev kit you can hold in one hand. It boots real Mac OS, draws a real desktop, and responds to real clicks. For anyone who grew up with a beige box on their desk, watching that Happy Mac appear on a modern RISC-V microcontroller is pure retro computing delight.

The port targets two commodity boards: the M5Stack Tab5, a 5-inch panel at 1280x720, and the Waveshare ESP32-P4-WIFI6-Touch-LCD-10.1, a roomy 10.1-inch display at 1280x800. Both are inexpensive, off-the-shelf hardware, which is exactly what makes this so fun.

What the ESP32-P4 Is Actually Emulating

Let's talk numbers, because the numbers are the good part. BasiliskII presents a virtual 68040 CPU, and on the ESP32-P4 it clocks in at roughly 2 to 3 MIPS. That puts the emulated machine in the neighborhood of a Macintosh Quadra 610, a respectable early-90s workstation. From there it happily boots anything from System 7.1 up through Mac OS 8.1.

The display pipeline is clever. The emulator renders an internal 640x360 or 640x400 framebuffer, then scales it 2x to fill those high-resolution modern panels. Color depth spans 1, 2, 4, and 8 bits, and the whole thing refreshes at around 24 FPS. That is not a slideshow; it is a usable, interactive desktop. Menus drop, windows drag, and the cursor keeps up.

RISC-V Doing 68k Duty

What delights me here is the layering. The ESP32-P4 is a modern dual-core RISC-V part, and it is spending its cycles pretending to be a Motorola 68040. A RISC-V microcontroller interpreting CISC opcodes to resurrect a 1990s Mac is exactly the kind of cross-generational engineering I love. The fact that the P4 has the memory bandwidth and clock headroom to keep a 68k emulator fed at interactive speeds says a lot about how far this class of dev kit has come.

Open Source and Ready to Build

The best part for tinkerers: the whole project is open source on GitHub under amcchord/M5Tab-Macintosh. That means you can read the port, flash it to your own board, and start experimenting without reverse-engineering anything. Pair one of these panels with a system disk image and you have a pocketable classic Mac for a fraction of the cost of vintage hardware, with none of the leaking capacitors.

Projects like this are a reminder of why I got into hardware in the first place. A cheap modern board, a decades-old operating system, and a clever emulator layer combine into something that is equal parts nostalgia and technical showcase. If you have an ESP32-P4 touchscreen kit gathering dust, this is the weekend build to reach for.

Sources: CNX Software — "Macintosh emulator works on ESP32-P4 display devkits from M5Stack and Waveshare" — July 5, 2026; GitHub — amcchord/M5Tab-Macintosh — July 2026.