Turning an old iMac into... a 240hz gaming monitor?
love me love me say that you love me fool me fool me go on and fool me oh wow F congratulations you got a broken iMac you replace the motherboard with one of those Chinese boards that convert the display to an HDMI One display technology in the iMac G5 is so old my grandma has more resolution in it the backlight sucks this video is terrible is this what you try to pass as something original on YouTube now so I really got into it when in the intro I said this has no apple Parts in it I was serious and it really has a resolution of 2560 x600 a refresh rate of 240 HZ and it's not just a display because that would be boring this is a thing that I built for a very specific use case but I'll tell you about that later and uh I'd rather show you and tell you what it is because it's kind of difficult to explain so you connect it to whatever you want using one USBC cable that was my MacBook Pro there but let's use my steam deck here for a change which is actually the intended thing that I build this for so as you can see now my steam duck through this one single cable there is no trickery here it is outputting video to this display here and also getting power but also as you can see it is getting access to this mouse and keyboard they do work and that's because the ports on the back of the iMac here do actually work and they connect through that single USB cable not just that but the webcam here too is working I'm not turning it on now because it has a super wide fov and I don't want to show you my massive room but I have some beeroll here so you get access to all of that you get access to speakers and you also get access to something very special so we have Office for Mac 2011 here which doesn't work on the steam deck unless I do some vm3 which I'm not doing today but yeah if I put it here there is a working DVD drive that's also connected through that single USBC you get access to all you need to turn your steam deck or laptop into a small party machine I have my steam controller dongle thing here let me actually plug it in the back let me actually uh put my steam duck back into gaming mode very often when I hang out with my friends we want to play some party games or something like Mario Kart which I never ever would emulate on my steam deck I would never do that and we pretty often would like to have a fast way to get a bigger screen to actually see what you're doing and something that can instantly let us connect controllers to my steam deck and just play stuff this is precisely that it's basically the best hidden sleeper Party Machine that I could ever build I really viy with the aesthetic of the inck G5 but right now they are very useless machines so I wanted to build like a sort of scene prop that also is functionally something that I can use when I am doing stuff so I can actually display stuff on here very easily and and I haven't told you the best part so let me actually unplug this right now this was pluged to the wall using a charger but I am European as you can clearly tell from my uh hair and my accent which means that of course I designed this to be fully USBC compliant this is a fully portable USBC monitor I can literally just plug my power bank into it plug my steam deck and now we should get access to all of the goodies that have jam packed inside here hopefully yeah un likee my pight webcam video I actually designed and built this from scratch I didn't follow any instructions everything that you see here is something that I had to figure out myself and uh it is a bit juny but let me tell you how I built this because uh it's an interesting story since I was a kid I've seen a lot of people take old iMac like this one and especially the iMac G4 which makes sense because that's probably the best looking computer of all time and retrofitting them with newer Parts you see people putting M1 Mac M inside of them or Intel KN and hacking toshing them but the design of this iMac is Iconic even after 20 years this panel is not the iMac G5 and its successor the white Intel iMac came in various different sizes I think the 17 in one is the best candidate for modding because 17 in is small enough to let me retrofit a new laptop panel I can go to a website like panel.com and find a panel that is exactly the same size and aspect ratio as the original one but with double the resolution double the refresh rate rate or even four times the refresh rate newer backlight technology and way way thinner of a body and that's exactly what I did I bought this Boe display for about 80 you might have seen it in my last video I was using it there and after buying a display board actually three of them I had to figure out which one was the best one I can adapt its EMB bettered display port connector which is meant for laptops to basically anything and in this case I went for USBC display port out after doing some digging I managed to get the perfect specimen the perfect guinea pig to work on a 17 in iMac G5 that was sold for parts and buy for parts I mean everything was removed from it except for the housing like the physical case and the panel this panel right here that was perfect for me because if I screw something up I wouldn't end up killing a working iMac so I I wouldn't feel that guilty about it and also for €1 I couldn't really go wrong and so I order it I wait a bit I get it and I immediately start checking what I got because it would have been weird for someone to try and scam me when I was buying a broken iMac but you never no these days I got the package and everything was exactly what I ordered which is great except for the fact that after I started opening it up there are like some screws here that you need to remove and then you just take the Basel out for years I have been under the impression that IM g5s have their display their panel mounted on the Basel and if you go to iix it you can actually confirm that that I wasn't just having a pipe dream or a harh pipe dream in case you're R Cuomo that's actually correct so why was my iMac having its display mounted on the body which was a problem for me because I wanted to just yank that out and mount my own display and mounting it on the Basel is just easier if you are beginner like me well this is not a normal iMac G5 it's an iMac G5 eyesight and even though they look completely identical on the outside they are two completely different machines on the inside and so I was kind of screwed I now had to figure out a way to make that work the most logical solution here probably would have been designing an adapter bracket that made my laptop panel thicker and added some screw mounts and I didn't do that I didn't do that and I decided to just do this the oldfashioned way and by that I mean copying what the normal iMac G5 does mounting the display on the bathroom the first thing that I did was just see if my actual panel was the right size and I I tested that by literally taping it on the Basel and it worked okay nothing CAU on fire the panel is precisely the same size as this original piece of trash and so for a brief second there I could enjoy the pleasure of taking a look at what I could eventually build and now it was time to build it so let me show you what my solution to mount the panel here is I I got to take my screwdriver one second this is the fanciest screwdriver set that I've ever owned let's open this thing up and show you uh everything that I did editor F bring me a dream give me the best b roll that I've ever seen because this camera angle is kind of weird and I don't even know what I am doing so after you remove those screws there you just have to uh basically take out this Basel here there are two metal clamps here on the top that I removed you shouldn't have remove them but I removed them this is not coming out yeah I forgot a screw this one of the weird ones too because Apple really wants to make my life difficult for no reason and I also got the wrong bit now there are so many bits here looks like a Nintendo 64 commercial all right so you go here you go here let me show you what I cooked there are several tables here that are sandwich between the screen and everything else and I got to disconnect them so my solution for mounting the panel on the Basel has been a combination of a lot of stuff first and foremost a lot of electrical tape but I didn't want this to be like the thing keeping everything together because you should never rely on tape too much because if it's too hot or too cold like Cy Perry uh it loses its stickiness so yeah never use that for like permanent mounting here I basically use it for like lining everything up but the real sauce here the thing keeping everything together is this plastic back plate that by using some Magnetic Tape here and some here basically holds everything in place using magnets this Magnetic Tape is meant for like curtains but uh yeah I just put some here some here and it's basically keeping everything closed together pressed together to avoid the panel popping out it took me three attempts to design a back blade that will not only fit with some innocent plastic being sacrificed in the process but also to figure out where to split the plastic parts since I can't print this back plate in one piece in either of my home printers I have an A1 and an A1 Mini and both of them can print this entire piece in one go for some reason the first time around I really wanted to use my A1 Mini instead of my full size A1 and the bambo A1 Mini has a smaller bed compared to the A1 so I had to make like super small parts and I didn't really think this true I was basically ending up with a F Breaking Bad plates in having to Like Glue the parts at the edges with no contact surface second version was way better and I actually designed a real proper way to join the parts by using some super strong double-sided tape that came with a user manual for some reason but I made this one too wide so the eye me wouldn't close and after making a third version triming the sides I managed to make it work finally if you're wondering why it has this peculiar shape that's because we also have here a working webcam I got a USB webcam module from AliExpress it's not the best but it's acceptable and it fits perfectly here and I just taped that one down I didn't bother building anything fancy for that but what I did bother building something fancy for our speakers here let me actually put this back and while I put this back small story time to tell you about the speakers here because you might be wondering what are those speakers and why are they so small why are they mounted that way there's this playay board right here that I use to control the laptop panel this is one of three boards that I bought and it's the only one that turns on automatically when you plug in a cable and that's important because I always meant this board to stay inside so the user wouldn't have access to the buttons to turn the monitor on now this board right here is perfectly fine for handling video however when you're building a display instead of an iMac housing you also want audio you want to be able to have some speakers built in because it would be weird to not have them it wouldn't be convincing so it has this connector right here that on this board is unmarked but on the other two boards that I got they have the same connector and there it is marked a speaker connector after checking the AliExpress listing again they were talking about this as a two wat speaker interface which doesn't really help me figure out whatever cable goes here but after using Google Lens I managed to figure out that this was a ph1 25 connector and after searching that on AliExpress I managed to find some speakers specifically made for these kinds of boards using this connector and they do work I had no idea how to mount them here originally until I figured out that I could use this uh holes here on the Basel in the metal part so I made this ramboo shaped housings for the speakers I modeled them I printed them using my A1 Mini this time because they are actually perfect they're small so I could print them without having to split them into please never do this they do work but their quality stinks they're not good speakers but they are speakers they're stereo and they work so that's how I mounted the display to the front Basel it's a mess okay don't get me wrong this is not how you should do stuff but it works and effectively we just have two cables that uh connect the back that we're going to talk about in a second to the front here this webcam one and the display one and I'm actually happy with how this turned out it's not super clean it's not like perfect but it works and it's not like you're going to notice it when everything is closed unless you have X-ray vision in which case you're probably Superman it is now time to talk about this thing but before we do that let me take a second to talk about today's sponsor bamboo lab you might be rightfully wondering fam what is this background why are you standing in a kitchenette and the reason is that this door right here is only working thanks to my bamboo A1 mini printer that's a weird story basically uh this door has been here since forever and it's a very cheap plastic door it's working using some hooks here on the top that eventually after years of f got destroyed and I couldn't find any replacements for them they were like completely impossible to find and so I just took one of the hooks that still worked one of the plastic hooks I recreated it in 3D and I just printed it in PG with my A1 Mini and now I have a working door here I have a mini ITX case that I'm building for my Nest this was actually a project by a fellow YouTuber that I downloaded I modified this using bamboo slicer to have a window in the front for a USB screen but then I decided I'm not going to use a USB screen so I'm also now printing a different front blade for it which has a fake logo that I'm printing using the multiple colors print feature of the AMS light and yeah I'm a total newbie when it comes to 3D printing but I love my bamboo printers they just work like appliances it's extremely easy to use them I don't have to think about leveling the bed manually or anything like that the printer does everything for me I just need to think about what I want to print and then print it using my computer or my phone I can just use the bamboo handy app so check out the A1 and a One Mini in the link in description and thanks again to Bamboo for sponsoring this video before we go back to the video I want to chime in for transparency and say that some of you made me aware of a controversy going on with bamboo right now since they changed the way Bamboo Connect Works which is essentially something that lets you connect to your bamboo printers using third party slicers I'm going to be honest I had no idea this was even a feature I only used bamboo studio for what I do I'm perfectly happy with bamboo Studio however for the sake of transparency I'm going to leave a link in the description to uh the first article about these changes that bamboo made since I've heard a lot of misinformation about this so I'd rather just link you to an actual news source and let you know precisely what's going on from them that said back to the video if you're expecting some masterfully crafted custom PCB think again because you're about to Embark into a journey to Jun town where everything works and from the outside looks perfect but on the inside it is basically an engineer Nightmare and a potential fire hazard okay ready ready for this let's [ __ ] go all right so I'm taking a p from dkos for this recording with my iPhone because it's way easier to explain what I did here and I've removed everything except for this mysterious box I mean all of you have already figured out what it is and this one which are the bases that are like stuck to the case right now so uh let's start from the brains that make everything work this is a normal USB hub that has a very special feature that basically turns it into the brains of the operation here it has a as you can see here this USBC video output so what this means is that uh if I connect this USB hub to my steam deck or my MacBook Pro anything that supports USBC DP Out video output we can then use this USBC output right here to interface with a USBC screen it is connecting but it's it's not getting enough power don't worry this is normal we also need to give it power so there's this PD input here and we need a USBC cable for that there we go we have this one right here let's plug it here let's connect a battery Bank okay we have enough power here let's plug everything back again and as you'll see here now we are going to have our steam deck connected to the USB hub which is providing it a video output and also power thanks to the PD Port now why are we going through this USB hub here if we can just connect the monitor directly to the steam deck the reason is that I don't just want to get video output here I also want all of the ports here on the back of the iMac to work and that's what the USB C Hub is supposed to do here the ideal solution here would have been designing a custom PCB board that is emulating the max motherboard fitting every single hole here perfectly but right now I don't know how to design custom PCB so like configures I make do and my extremely brain D solution is using USB extenders and Splitters I have a bunch of them right here and I'll explain what we're going to do with them but yeah essentially I just put a lot of extension cables here trying to make them fit perfectly uh in the holes on the back of the iMac and after cutting the external rubber on some of them or straight up [ __ ] up some others I managed to sort of make it work however I also wanted a USB C Hub to connect to my steam deck or MacBook not with a mail plug like this but with a female plug so I bought these couplers here which actually fit perfectly and they are rated for Thunderbolt yeah effectively thanks to them we have female ports to connect our power and our devices directly to the back of the iMac these are definitely not be spoke and they stick out a bit but it's fine it's it's fine and now we have to figure out well everything else and that is really just a combination of usba a Splitters usba a to USBC converters and trial and error modifying cables hoping that they're going to fit properly on the back of the iMac I am very proud of how I managed to make the three USB ports here work because it's literally just a very cheap cable that I stripped from its protective Rubber and then physically stuck on the case here with some very strong tape I had the same with the audio cables here about a very cheap USB sound card and I used audio Jack extenders to extend the audio input and output Jack to the back of the iMac and also just stuck everything there using that tape I also tried doing this for the ethernet port but the cable was way too thick even after modifying it so the only way to have ethernet here would be having the cable sticking out and I mean that works if I really need to use it but right now that and what was the video output of the iMac are not connected to anything I don't have anything coming out of those ports but now let's talk about was on the inside because there's a reason if I made this spaghetti mess and asides from getting the USB splitter to work it's because I wanted some devices to be integrated here and to Simply connect to whatever device it's connected to the USB hub with one cable let's start with the elephant in the room the super drive here which is not an original Super Drive I did buy one however it didn't work it didn't want to like take discs so I returned it and I bought a bootleg one a fake one from Amazon that one worked perfectly so I opened it up I discovered that I had to like break the housing in order to just get access to the rboard and after reusing one of those first failed attempts of building a back plate for my LCD panel I managed to mount it on the back of the iMac I managed to make it align perfectly and after connecting it to the hub it just works which is insane let's open VC audio CD come on it's it's reading it's a city there we go oh these are the internal speakers that I put in the display they suck they are not the Apple ones okay I switch to the steam de ones uh but yeah we have a working City Drive here too the webc come from the front Basel of course also connects to the hub that is pretty straightforward but the thing that I'm most proud of here that I managed to connect to this and get it to work is the fler dongle which is the small dongle right here that lets me use infrared remotes with this family Mac the iMac G5 originally shipped with the Apple remote the first gen one I have this one new in box that we're going to open today we're going to make it non-collectible this is extremely challenging to open for some reason after replacing the death batteries which were here for 20 years now with some that I stole from a zigby button and setting up the remote using the Flair app this is not sponsored by flare by the way I just really like their dongles I can use this apple remote with whatever is connected to this monitor iMac thing f also since we are recording our own infrared signals we can literally use any remote we want we're are not limited to the Apple remote so you can literally take your AC remote and use that I don't know why you would do that but it works the iMac is specifically designed to accommodate for infrared signals because it has a translucent part in the Basel here which is where the original infrared module will sit I've just taped my FLIR dongle to sort a point there from the inside and it works they just super junky on the inside but from the outside it's totally slick also since the USB hub actually comes with a built-in micro SD card reader I put a half gigabyte micro inside of it which gives me a lot of space for my Steam games it's not super fast but it's fast enough for a lot of games and especially retro games and party games which is why I build this entire thing in the first place you know that photo of Steve Jobs having an ey NE like this yeah I kind of get it now because after spending two weeks building this and tailoring it to my specific needs I've been using it a lot and I've been loving it however I have to of course accept that it's not perfect and that I could make it way better it's just that I've never worked on something like this Hardware modding retrofitting from scratch before so uh this has been a learning experience and there is a lot of stuff that I could improve here from how I mounted the ports on the back here because the tape is working and it's holding everything in place but it's kind of Wiggly it's kind of janky what do I mean by jankiness for example in setup is that if I disconnect the power from the display now okay and then I plug it back even though it starts getting power again makes this ticking bomb sound every time uh but yeah it's powered now again however as you can see we got no video output because every time you plug something to this monitor you have to remember you need to First plug the power cable in and then only after you do that plug the uh data cable to your device it's it's weird but I don't know if the problem here lays in the display board or the USB hub there is a problem with the handshake where like if I don't plug the power in first then uh the display can't even like recognize that something has been plugged in it's weird also another thing you got to keep in mind when you're using this is that it uses a lot of power so if you want to plug a battery Bank you got to have a pretty beefy battery Bank in this case I am using a 20 Vols one it's like USB PD rated and everything and it works fine one very peculiar problem is that the USBC cers deers however their name the male to female things here that I'm using to convert the cables into ports only work on one side which is not normal but the most important problems here are actually related to the USB hub that I'm using because so this is working pretty much perfectly with my uh steam Deck with my phone when it comes to my MacBook sometimes it doesn't like some stuff that is plugged inside of here for example the DVD drive doesn't work pretty often I don't know why it's working with my steim deck it's not working with my MacBook however uh that already happened with other devices my MacBook is kind of Moody when it comes to what USBC stuff I'm plug into it so maybe it's a Macbook Problem by far the biggest problem that I have with this was with my Windows computer because even though it supports USB CDP out out output it is not providing the USB hub and the monitor with enough power I think that's because it doesn't expect like a fullon USB hub connected to a video Port that said I actually love this I'm using it super often and I I'm looking forward to have this as part of my like video set in the background displaying stuff because it has this like perfect y 2K aesthetic and uh now it's also got Modern Hardware so I am extremely happy with what I designed and made here in order to complete a look here I've actually bought this apple USB keyboard that was originally shipped with the iMac so that's actually its keyboard is was actually meant to go with this computer and even though it's a membran keyboard it's a pretty good membrane keyboard I could happily live with that honestly what I couldn't live with at all is actually the mouse it's got no right click button because Apple used to be like that uh it's also like extremely slow extremely it's it's not good what the hell is happening now okay uh yeah so I I would suggest you get a proper Mouse I just wanted to get this one because like to complete the look here I I needed one okay I couldn't really avoid it but if you're actually planning on using this daily please get a decent Mouse don't do this if you're wondering how much I spent to build this it was around1 to $125 including everything however that cost could have been brought down significantly if I didn't buy most stuff locally if I bought everything from China the price would have been significantly lower and yeah I know there's going to be some people in the comments saying stuff like oh you spent a lot of money just to make this look like an iMac when you could have bought this generic display from Amazon and like yeah that's true I know that some people don't like apple I know that some people think that this is a useless effort but my monkey rain really likes this kind of Y Tok static and I really wanted to create something that was both modern and look like something from 20 years ago that's pretty much it when I was a kid these computers were like the object of my desire I really wanted one of them but Apple products were expensive my family didn't want to spend for them so today as a grown adult I'm trying to bring back those memories and enhance them and also try to bring something useful to life in the process because remember that this iMac if I didn't buy it was destined for the Landfield so I actually turned something that would have been waste into something very cool and that's going to be a part of my set from now on also about all of the jankiness you have to keep in mind this is the first time I try to build anything like this from scratch without any instructions and going forward I would like to learn how to actually design pcbs because it would make projects like this look way cleaner and it would spare me having all these weird issues with like USBC that are probably also connected to how much I am string to have here that's something that I can't ignore that said going forward there is one thing that I really would like to build and it's still based on an iMac but it will be the G4 because this looks so good and that would be retrofitting and iMac G4 with modern computer hardware and I was actually thinking about like putting a framework motherboard inside of the computer if you don't know framework they make computers that are repairable and upgradeable and they also sell the individual parts for repairs and also just like for DIY projects like this ones on their website so you can go there and actually buy a modern laptop motherboard that is also straight up design for DIY project someone on the framework forums actually did this with a vintage MacBook Pro they retrofit a new framework motherboard inside of it so what you see here is a modern computer and they made custom boards for everything and oh my God I I really want to build something like this someday it's so cool I guess that's it for today this video was the Natural Evolution of my eyesight one some of you were like oh you didn't actually build this you're just following instructions well guess what look at this sh look at this fire hazard is your fault I have to say making this gave me a completely different understanding of how much effort fellow YouTuber bring shout out to him by the way way he's a great guy but I now get how interesting and also difficult it is to retrofit something from scratch but it's also very addicting and rewarding so there is also that side and also considering his aid for physical media and the fact that I literally went out of my way to put up DVD drive inside of this IMC thing I guess I'm canonically his enemy now I didn't want to be his enemy okay I'm sorry he
2025-04-03 14:53
