Apple Lisas are rare now. Here's a rather cheaper way to build your own – and in theory, it can even use original floppy drives.

LisaFPGA does what it says on the GitHub repo: "The Apple Lisa computer implemented inside an FPGA!"

It's an open source project that recreates a complete Apple Lisa on an FPGA board. It's not entirely complete yet, but hardware went on sale in May and you might still be able to buy one – or download the bitstream of the model and build your own.

The Apple Lisa was a very strange computer, in part because it was pioneering new design territory. Apple started the project before the famous visits to Xerox PARC to see what became the Alto – also a radical machine, as The Reg FOSS desk tried to describe in 2023 for the machine's 50th anniversary. After those visits (for which Apple paid Xerox in shares, which the photocopier giant promptly sold), Apple changed course. Now the Lisa would be the first mass-market computer with a GUI. (The "mass market" bit didn't work out, and 2,700 unsold Lisas ended up as landfill in 1989.)

Even so, it was a very important and influential machine: The Register celebrated its 30th birthday and indeed took another look back in 2019.

So it's quite hard to find an Apple Lisa today, and if you manage to do so, it will probably (a) cost you quite a lot of money and (b) not be in working condition. That's a shame because Apple released the source to Lisa OS for the machine's 40th birthday in 2023.

The enterprising developer behind LisaFPGA is Alex Anderson-McLeod, and he built his knowledge of the Lisa and its implementation from an earlier project. Last year, he managed to work out how to compile and build Lisa OS from Apple's source code. This was a particularly difficult effort, and he documents the process of Lisa OS Source Code Compilation at length. We've read the account closely and we think it's fair to say the build process is deeply arcane.

(Sadly, the repo does not contain the source code itself, as the very strange "Apple Academic License Agreement" allows recompilation and study, but it forbids redistribution. To get the code, you'll have to agree to the license on the Computer History Museum.)

Anderson-McLeod learned a great deal about how the Lisa works while rebuilding the OS, and he's applied that knowledge to designing and building LisaFPGA. It is not completely finished – under "Features," the Introduction section of the README states: "Onboard ESP32-based floppy drive emulation (NOTE: THIS DOESN'T WORK YET)."

And a few lines down: "Supports Twiggy drives with an optional breakout board. Note that this is CURRENTLY UNTESTED as I don't have a set of Twiggy drives."

Even so, we are impressed by the effort, and it sounds like a very entertaining bit of kit. The first batch has already sold out, but finished boards were on sale from two official outlets: MacEffects for £264.89, and from Joe's Computer Museum for $350. Both will take your info and contact you when the next batch is ready.

If you can't wait, there is Ray Arachelian's Lisa Emulator Project. The history section is particularly interesting, starting with So, Ray, how come you care about ancient, obsolete machines?

The LisaEm source code is on GitHub, but sadly, Arachelian died of cancer in 2023, which is why version 1.2.7 never got past Release Candidate 4. We feel it would be a good tribute for someone to pick it up and produce a finished release.

In the meantime, we wrote about the remarkable LisaGUI website last year, which recreates the machine's user interface inside your browser. ®