Gingerbeardman
blog.gingerbeardman.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2021
Gingerbeardman writes about classic Macintosh software, Japanese pixel art, emulation, his own apps, and game design.
What HN saysHN links it for retro Mac projects, especially running classic Mac OS on an iPad Pro, and for its coverage of TRON and IntelligentPad.
28HN people shared it
8linked it in comments
127stories submitted
2.2Kstory points
2 months agolast shared
2021people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Turning an iPad Pro into a classic Macintosh6 people · 357 points · first shared 2021 · 35 comments on HN
- 2Today I shipped 20 apps and a screensaver4 people · 4 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 3Emoji History: The Missing Years3 people · 149 points · first shared 2024 · 62 comments on HN
- 4Tomoya Ikeda – Macintosh Artist3 people · 146 points · first shared 2021 · 6 comments on HN
- 5List of vintage Japanese pixel/dot art software3 people · 15 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 6When Playdate Stopped Being Fun3 people · 9 points · first shared 2025 · 3 comments on HN
- 7Macintosh Magazine Media: 1 million files3 people · 9 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 8Beltrunner: Game Design Postmortem3 people · 3 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 9PSA: Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data and accounts2 people · 128 points · first shared 2024 · 32 comments on HN
- 10Emigre typography and graphic design magazine (1984–2005)2 people · 62 points · first shared 2024 · 10 comments on HN
- 11Recovered: Sega Exclusives on Palm OS (2019)2 people · 55 points · first shared 2022 · 4 comments on HN
- 12Macintosh Drawing Software Compared (2021)2 people · 29 points · first shared 2025 · 3 comments on HN
- 13Working with classic Macintosh text encodings in the age of Unicode2 people · 18 points · first shared 2022 · 3 comments on HN
- 14Show HN: Wormhole for Perplexity Comet2 people · 14 points · first shared 2025 · 5 comments on HN
- 15Tetris for Sharp Electronic Notebook (1989)2 people · 13 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
msephton · 2026-08-21
Great to see these screenshots. Thanks for posting! Nintendo joy cons run a version of micro TRON. And the software IntelligentPad used a lot of TRON concepts. https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2023/05/17/intelligentpad-component-ba…
rpastuszak · 2024-12-07
thanks! to my knowledge iSH is too limited for my use case (it's more of an emulated linux environment). I might give UTM another shot. I can see that there's a "proper" distro but for iPhone 7 though!
btw if you're into this kind of stuff, check out MacPaint on iPad via UTM. It looks lovely! I can't find the link now, but check out Matt Sephton's blog for that:
https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2023/10/21/list-of-vintage-japanese-pi…
(ps I write about this stuff occasionally too https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/til/weekly/58/#h-interesting-articles…
bombcar · 2024-04-28
Using an iPad as system 7 seems right up this alley, and insanely interesting
https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2021/04/17/turning-an-ipad-pro-into-th…
pvg · 2024-01-24
HN thread at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26854990
And some follow-on posts by the author
https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/tag/emulation/
JKCalhoun · 2022-10-09
Very cool. I got MinivMac running on the Raspberry Pi — with a 7" LCD display I made pretty convincing "classic Mac" running on modern hardware.
I may have to revisit it. I was able to get THINK C installed and was trying to figure out again how to open/compile one of the old apps that I had written back in the late 80's. The thought of writing Mac "Toolbox" code again, using ResEdit is hilarious to me.
EDIT: wow, guy has some great 1-bit art too [1]. MinivMac Raspberry Pi on the workbench [2].
[1] https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2021/03/22/asanegami-morning-hair/
[2] https://imgur.com/XgnGYH9
0x38B · 2022-10-09
A sibling post shows UltraPaint running on his iPad Pro: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2021/04/17/turning-an-ipad-pro-into-th…
surprisetalk · 2025-01-06
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earthboundkid · 2023-12-14
I think a good comparison is how long it takes for people to make games on the PlayDate. The PlayDate has a weak processor by modern standards, but it also has a lot of modern little touches and a modern SDK.
Yoyozo[1] is a recently released PlayDate game. The first toot about working on it on Mastodon[2] is from Sept. 5 and it got into the PlayDate store on Nov. 21. Elsewhere the creator said he put about a month into it. So a lone dev working on a legacy-like platform can launch a game in a month. I think Yoyozo doesn't have quite as much depth as Donkey Kong (not as many screens, no enemies), but it was made by a lone dev, so it probably all balances out. I think people are basically still capable of the same level of output, maybe a little higher, if they're willing to work on a limited platform.
[1]: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2023/11/21/yoyozo-how-i-made-a-playdat…
[2]: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@gingerbeardman/111013661521052756