Astonishing, I had a pinned comment on this video and UA-cam deleted my OWN pinned comment! So let me do it again... Ideas that this copied the MSX can't be right. The MSX came out in 1983 while this came out in 1982. It must have just been coincidence and I suppose the Z80, AY sound chip and TMS9918 VDP were extremely common chips and found in all sorts, like the Coleco Vision and what not. Video from DJ Sures who has a ton of old NABU stuff htat belonged to his father: ua-cam.com/video/FFaWJu3hDP4/v-deo.html Some videos from Leo Binkowski, a software developer for NABU back when the company was operating. News report: ua-cam.com/video/yKV-nH3rLHE/v-deo.html Inside a NABU development machine: ua-cam.com/video/QlpZFAX4MZo/v-deo.html There is a comment from James Ware, the seller of the NABU systems on eBay: James Ware Holy Schnikes! Adrian, I really don't know where to start. But first let me just say thank you so very much for your presentation of the NABU Personal Computer. Because of your review I am selling a lot of computers today. (I will give you a total of today's sales at the end of the night.) I need to keep this short (right now) because I have to go downstairs, test NABU Computers, and get them ready for shipping. It's a time-consuming process and I average only 3 computers per hour. Yikes! Yes, I am the guy, back in 1989, who bought all those NABU Computers (and Adaptors). And you hit the nail on the head; with my MAC 512K Computer I put together the manual and the schematic using MacWrite and MacPaint. That's why the schematic looks so odd. I had to draw every part to create a library of components. Fortunately, I had a rough schematic as a guide and did not have to reverse engineer the system. I am an embedded systems software engineer of 40+ years and over the years I have designed a lot of circuits. I bought these computers for a project that never got off the ground and they have been in storage ever since. (More to come.) There is a SBC CPM port for the NABU already, along with a CF card schematic (For slot 0.) It's super early stages and just runs CPM over the serial port, but it's a start! github.com/randomvariations/nabu.cpm
As someone involved in the development of this system I can verify that the hardware design was indeed derived from the MSX design. The MSX was DESIGNED before the NABU PC (although the MSX "came out" later).
Looks like YT has a lot of glitches with the comment section management. Many comments I recently wrote have also disappeared. Maybe the IA moderation system is a bit too zealous.
Holy Schnikes! Adrian, I really don't know where to start. But first let me just say thank you so very much for your presentation of the NABU Personal Computer. Because of your review I am selling a lot of computers today. (I will give you a total of today's sales at the end of the night.) I need to keep this short (right now) because I have to go downstairs, test NABU Computers, and get them ready for shipping. It's a time-consuming process and I average only 3 computers per hour. Yikes! Yes, I am the guy, back in 1989, who bought all those NABU Computers (and Adaptors). And you hit the nail on the head; with my MAC 512K Computer I put together the manual and the schematic using MacWrite and MacPaint. That's why the schematic looks so odd. I had to draw every part to create a library of components. Fortunately, I had a rough schematic as a guide and did not have to reverse engineer the system. I am an embedded systems software engineer of 40+ years and over the years I have designed a lot of circuits. I bought these computers for a project that never got off the ground and they have been in storage ever since. (More to come.)
Do you have the teletext television adapters still available? Did they use the NAPLPS Line 19 teletext VITS protocol and data? I use to have four of the original 1980s Sony decoders, and an EEG line 19 data encoder. Sadly, not anymore.
I was one of the original games developers for NABU. I worked on Roulette, Pac-Man, Q*Bert, Miner 2049er and most other games for updates and bug fixing. Later I became the director of Content Development. I can demonstrate it running the network menu, most of the games and software, and CP/M 3.0. As a matter of fact the demo systems used two NABU PCs wire together using an RS-422 crossover cable. One system had a hard drive (10 MB!) and made the NABU PC think it was connected to the NABU ADAPTER, which is what actually downloaded the data from Cable systems. Though the hard drive of the demo system hasn't survived the decades, the floppy backups and floppy drives still worked, and some of the cable games and applications survived. It wasn't an MSX machine. MSX came around the same time, and was VERY compatible, so man.y NABU games made it into the MSX ecosystem and some MSX games were easily ported to NABU, boosting our catalog of over 150 titles.
There was a tank game for the Nabu, in a 3D maze with magnets. I've been trying to track that one down for literally decades. Are you familiar with it?
Woah, crazy to think people who worked on such a niche product would find a video all these years later. Seems like a lot of people worked on it and it wasn't a side project.
The son of the original CEO / owner of Nabu is currently working on an ESP32-based adapter and is in conversation the folks at York University to set up / host a Nabu service.
And he just happens to have grown up here in Thunder Bay and visits every summer. He brought a bunch of interesting NABU stuff to our Retro Computer Club meet-up a couple months ago.
@@8_Bit It seems John Kelly, one of the main devs, has always held a candle for the NABU computer and network system, and was involved with the YU preservation project. If he's the CEO you're talking about then his enthusiasm must have rubbed off on his son.
I live in Ottawa and had one of these for a while. I first used it at a computer camp as a kid and then my parents rented one for a while through the cable company (Ottawa Cablevision at the time I believe.) These things were so many light years ahead of their time, it was incredible. On-demand, two way, streamed content and channel-based subscriptions. So many things we'd see in wide use all these years later. I used this so much and was heartbroken and actually cried when my parents told me we had to return it because the company was bankrupt. Even though you can't do much with them now, I think I'm going to have to get a hold of one of these. EDIT: After shipping and fees, I just spent $165CAD on a computer I can do literally nothing with but look at. I regret nothing.
We gotta get this thing up and running with new software if only to help some Ca-nerd-ians hit some warm fuzzy nostalgia on their early computing life! An menuing system simulating the original seems like an obvious must-have.
@@carpespasm I couldn't agree more. I have zero programming knowledge and wouldn't even know where to begin. I want to see the Toronto Science Center at one point had a NABU exhibit where they actually had back-end gear up and running and a system you could play with. I wonder if any of the NABU founders are still about to talk to.
The total price is still dirt cheap for a brand new working unit. You'll pay way more for a vintage machine in any condition on eBay shipped domestically. You can try and arrange your own shipping or contact someone you know to pick it up for you. Depending on your location, you could even drive down. Massachusetts isn't that far from Canada's border. Regardless, it's an incredible deal and the keyboard poachers will surely snap them up even at that price.
Thanks to patron Nick R for sharing this link to a rudimentary port of CP/M that was just created: github.com/randomvariations/nabu.cpm Also David (of the TRS-80 Diag ROM fame) disassembled the ROMs. It turns out the ROM on our systems is the 4K version -- which is very simple, but the ROM on BitSavers is the 8K ROM which has floppy disk booting capability, with a boot menu. The use the 8K ROM on the system, some minor modifications need to be made (cut a trace and jumper two pins) to change the chip select logic to 8K. Comment from viewer Daniel Hansen: The son of the original CEO / owner of Nabu is currently working on an ESP32-based adapter and is in conversation the folks at York University to set up / host a Nabu service.
You'd better make another video to help get all this new work really get going. I just pulled the trigger on one of these from the listing you linked. Hopefully I'll see something useful from it in my little retro museum corner here at home. Worst case, it's another random box of crap my kids have to get rid of when I die.
It sounds to me like the CEO's own family were pretty enthusiastic about the service, and were probably as sad to see it go as to see the income go. It doesn't sound like it would be that hard to trick one of these into going to a website over a WiFi emulator for the Adaptor module, so this may prove to be rather presentable without being a huge ongoing expense.
@@kaitlyn__L yeah sadly this comment got unpinned and disappeared entirely for me. It's back for me now but I had already made a new pinned comment. Grrt
I bought one of these a little while ago. I'm not too far from the eBay seller so I picked it up in person. Gotta say I was pleasantly surprised to see the seller is someone who appreciates these lovely machines and is keeping up with what the retro computing community is doing with them. Sounds like he's put at least some thought into working on a disk controller, too. I have a feeling the NABU PC will finally be getting a chance to shine!
This computer was part of my childhood, with lots of great memories. I worked as a delivery boy for the local Ottawa Penny Saver (a free publication) and one of the perks was a Nabu system offered for free. This was in late 1984 or so when they were trying very hard to increase the popularity. The games were lots of fun, and I've been wanted to find copies of them for years with no success. One of the weaknesses of the system was the unidirectional implementation for the data. What this meant was that *all* the programs were transmitted over the cable, repeatedly, over and over. Depending on the timing of when you selected a title and where the stream was it could be almost instantaneous, or several minutes, before your program started. I still own a couple of Nabu systems in my collection.
This is one of those channels that I just barely understand most of what is going on, but it's just so comfy...like watching MASH as a kid. I can put this on and work on my own stuff, check in and out on what you're doing and feel like I'm kind of just hanging out with my brother or friends from college doing projects. Keep doing what you're doing, you inspire others, even in unrelated fields, to continue working on our projects :)
WOW! What a trip down memory lane... I bought one of these systems from an electronics surplus store (Addison) back in the early '90s, and as you found out, it doesn't do much. Mine came with both the computer and the cable interface adaptor. The cable interface adaptor had one of the most complex RF circuits I'd ever seen. Having done much work on Z80 based systems, I disassembled the ROM and worked out the memory map, and reverse engineered parts of it. However, without a way of accessing any local storage, it was mainly just a curiosity, requiring burning eproms to try anything.
@@gklinger I dug up some old test code I had thrown together. I had written some basic i/o routines in assembly and some test code in C using Archimedes CZ80. I forgot that I had used it as proof of concept for a project that needed video and keyboard. Sadly the project never got off the ground. I think what the Internet has thrown together in the milli-seconds since Adrian's video came out immediately surpassed anything that I scrounged up back in the day. Truly wonderful when people are all working toward a common goal!
The Joystick looks to be an OEM of the Zircon VIDEO COMMAND, which itself was a re-packaging of the Fairchild Channel F's controllers. I used these for years for video gaming, excellent to hold, once you understand the grip, very responsive, and you could hold them for a very long time (unlike e.g. Atari's joysticks)
I knew there was a reason it reminded me of the Fairchild Channel F controller. I hear using it to its fullest leads to a busy and intense version of Pong (I think the system calls it "Hockey," which makes sense).
Based on the pinout shown at 29:10, those DE-9 joystick ports on the keyboard should also be compatible with standard Atari or Commodore joysticks, with only the +5V and analog paddle inputs missing. A thoughtful touch from the original designers...
I bought one last week just because I loved the look of the keyboard and opening the box it totally had that 80's computer smell :) I've been searching youtube and twitter looking to see if anyone else is tinkering with these so you can guess I clicked on this video immediately! Really excited for the potential homebrew for this machine, it's really nicely built.
@@adriansdigitalbasement For collectors of course great. But even if sacrilege 🤣 is the PC not good spare parts donor for other 80 years computer? I like the design I would put in the Case current hardware
Dang it's crazy how Nabu had features that would later be widely available for WebTV in the Late 1990's and Cable Internet in the 2000's under the marketing name "Broadband Internet" that Cable and Phone providers like Comcast and AT&T would do in the 2000's.
The seller is actually selling empty cases for peopel who want to use them for that purpose. Even though the machine has a bunch of good parts, it would be so sad to take it apart to scavenge. It's one thing with a computer like the C64 with tens millions made. but something like this may have had 10k or less machines ever made.
at 60 bucks it looks like a steal, if (and this is a big if) other people develop this thing into something more useful, it could be a valuable very rare museum quality 8 bit machine. Right now I am very tempted to grab one, even when the shipping costs more than double the price for me.
As a Canadian who grew up in the era where this was sold, I am ashamed to say that I knew absolutely NOTHING about this machine! It reminds me of the Telidon/Minitel network that was trialed around the same time, but not available to retail customers the way this machine was. I junkied out on the Telidon machine at our local library for as long as it was available, and still have vivid memories of the graphical text adventure games that were available on it, downloaded over the Bell Canada Vista network at the time. I honestly might buy me one of these in anticipation of people smarter then me developing Coleco, TI/99 or MSX ports of software to run on it over a network emulator or standard floppy disc drive emulator. Very glad you bought this and highlighted it Adrian! Thank you!
That is an amazing machine for pre-85. I'm actually stunned by how well thought out, clean and robustly made it is, compared to what most of my crowd used (C64s, TRS-80 Color Computers and some TI-99's and stuff thrown in). It obviously was designed for a more high-end market than just basic home computing. The whole concept was exceptionally forward thinking, if a bit too high ended for anything like the market was in the early 80s. I'm glad you shared this, I would have never known it existed otherwise. Also I strongly disagree with the disclaimer that "you can't do anything with it out of the box". It's a little like suggesting a blank canvas has no possibilities.
I really appreciate that you inspect the thing before plugging it into mains. I'm always nervous when other popular channels acquire unknown hardware, and the first thing they do is test if it just runs or burns up to dust.
Really tempted to buy one, although it would sit on a shelf looking pretty until some other folks brighter than me develop and publish some software and a way to run it.
See, this kind of discovery is one of the main reasons I like retro channels. This thing is great and I'd definitely be interested in followups if and as people get these things up and running again.
Wow, I used one as a kid. I was one of the lucky kids that would deliver the Ottawa Pennysaver (a free classified-ads newletter that come bundled with store flyers as well). I was paid 5cents/paper. :P Anyway... Near the end of the NABU company's life, the "Ottawa Pennysaver" had a deal with Nabu to get free system rentals for their carriers and the penny saver would "post" their newletter that they used to print for their carriers. The network sent a combination of text pages and software. You could rend or buy the system itself and I seem to remember that there were also floppy drives available but I never got one. (BASIC, Logo was available on the network so you should be able to save your programs). I don't quite remember if there were any wordprocessers or spreadsheets available. :P We just paid for the games package and I remember it to be pretty good at the time. (I had a vic-20 at the time, but it was similar to the early C64 games.) The game catalogue might have changed every now and again. The bidirectional com wasn't implemented locally, but what they did was just continously stream the software on a loop... SO it might take several minutes to fetch your software from the stream depending on when you started to load.
I was wondering how they got it to behave as if it had bidirectional input without actually having that, but it makes sense with the bandwidth being so high they could just yeet all the programs out all the time and let you pluck out the one you wanted as it went by. Considering it could take tape based games several minutes to load that's really not too bad for the time.
That's really neat. The user manual has a diagram explaining how it might take longer to get a program because it's like a big wheel, and you have to wait for the wheel to come around again to the program you wanted. It's kind of amazing that used ones of these hadn't appeared before. I suppose when the network died, people just threw them away (in anger) LOL It would be very helpful to get info on the floppy controller so it could be reverse engineered. I only saw one grainy and low res photo of it ...
@@adriansdigitalbasement I don't know how many people bought the systems instead of renting them here in Ottawa. I do know that when the network shutdown we had to return our rental. Thanks for posting about the auction! I grabbed one for myself. I've been looking for them off and on since I heard about the YorkU reconconstruction project in the early 2000's. I'm wondering if this is from the US test site...? I honestly don't know anyone else that had one, nor if anyone got the floppy drives or bought them out right. I guess I always thought the that non-rental units were useable as a stand alone systems... But that's the vague memories of a 12-13 year old and we were only ever in the Nabu "shop" once to pick ours up.
This is why I love this channel. A lot of what you do may be old hat to you, but to me it's like a whole other world. I certainly hope that you are able to do something with this thing. Who knows, it could start a retro-trend.
The plethora of 8 bit systems throughout the 80s was just completely crazy. Like the cryptocurrency boom that nobody will remember all the variants of 30-40 years down the line :)
A really neat device! Would be amazing if/when someone creates an ethernet interface for it to recreate the network functionality on the internet. There you could upload software to make it accessible to all the users. 40 years later, and a new platform just appears :) What a time to be alive!
I was thinking the same, surely this is an appealing reverse engineering project for someone... giving it life again would be really cool and really, how complicated can it be? :)
Fascinating video on this old and obscure computer Adrian! Great job! And the C64 got Quantum Link in 1985, which would have made the NABU an even harder sell then.
14:23 That joystick was great! It was very precise, fast, responsive and very comfortable to use. It took a bit of time to get used to, but compared to what was standard back then it was very comfortable. Not the worlds most robust construction though as the retention for the trigger switch tended to break. But for anyone who suffered from joystick thumb or carpal tunnel problems from using a normal joystick it was fantastic. It replaced my Tac-II and the other joysticks I tested at the time. Loved the Tac-II for the feeling, speed, build quality and dependability, but it was finnicky when it came to diagonal movement and the feeling of the trigger button was pretty bad. my thumb suffered quite a bit from mashing that button.
Adrian, do you think you could dump the ROM and post it somewhere? I would assume it would fall into the category of abandonware at this point. Given the small size it should be relatively easy for someone with a bit of RE skills to feed it to Ghidra and work out enough of the protocol for talking to the adapter box so that a RPi adaptor simulator could be created (as you suggested).
Someone probably already figured this out, but: if you assume N-8-1, 6992 baud is 7866 raw bits per second, which is almost exactly half the NTSC horizontal scan rate. Doesn't seem like a coincidence given that it's meant to be a cable TV connected device.
Hi Adrian, nice video. Sorry if I go off topic but I would ask you if you plan to show in your channels an Acorn Archimedes or an Acorn RiscPC. These are relatively unknown computers but they represent an important step in Computer Science, since ARM cpus were developed for them. (ARM once meant Acorn Risc Machine).
I had been trying for several years to remember the cable PC "thing" that was being developed in the Ottawa region back in the early 80s - I was living in Toronto at the time - just graduate from Waterloo in 79 .. was awaiting the release in the Toronto area - but it never came and memories faded... I just could not remember the name. Then I saw this video -- and bingo - it all came flooding back ...
I wish I was a programmer to help in situations like this. I hope the retro community will solve the possibility to use locally this beautiful retro device and be (sort of) useful again. The value will surely rise when projects arise and we may see this beautiful boxes be used for retro sessions for now on. Thank you very much Adrian for all your work!
It should be trivial to create a ROM with some Z80 debugger/assembler and at least get some kind of basic interaction with the machine. Eventually some OS/ROM could be ported maybe from MSX and give the machine a second chance! Thank you for the great video Adrian!
Maybe the weird-looking arrow keys are left and right fire buttons so you can play games without a joystick? (Which, BTW, look identical to those used by the Channel F.) And to me it seems like NABU stood for something more comprehensible in another language (French?) and then was mangled to make an English translation fit the same letters.
Wow. this video has been up < 1 hour and that ebay link has sold 20+ already!!! With this many hobbyists getting that, there is going to be some nice development for this forgotten system
@@joecan Currently showing sales of 25 per hour. I hope people are patient with him as I'm sure he didn't expect them to sell all at once. He replied to this video, and apparently he tests them all and can do about 3 per hour. I just hope he doesn't get buried in this.
Awesome.. I think I will be getting one. It will be interesting to see if anyone, including myself, can make a rom to get it to boot and run some code. You are right, the architecture is much like that of the MSX. So porting those games over, shouldn't be too hard. It would be an interesting project to take on. Very nice that it has all that documentation for it, makes for a great start in getting this computer running by its self, with a custom Rom. Thanks for showing this, I had no idea this computer even existed until now. 👍👍
Your channel is probably the one I watch the most. There have been many updates to the NABU in terms of making it a functional and a usable system since this video was posted. I facing only one problem; the PSU is 110v and in my country it's a 220v forcing me to use a step-down transformer. However, in the NABU's technical manual something interesting was mentioned and I quote: "The transformer primary has two 110V windings. They are connected in parallel for use with 110V supply, and in series for use with 220V supply". Would you please help in showing how such modification could be achieved? There are many NABU owners that would love to make such modification and keep using the original PSU that came with the NABU. Thanks
I wouldn't be surprised if Adrian's soon gonna get a packet with an EPROM saying "plug this into your NABU instead of its ROM" and he plugs it in and turns it on and it plays a version of the 8-bit dance party demo he has on the C64.
We didn't have a disk drive for ours when I was growing up, but I do believe they were available to buy or rent. The NABU Network had a word processor available and I think you could use it to save documents. I imagine they'll be brutal to find though.
Fascinating video. I have ordered one and can't wait to get some code into it - at least via rom to start with. Look forward to another video on this computer in the future.
hey Adrian! another great video and fun-filled stroll down memory lane. I really miss the wide diversity of ideas and approaches in the first decade (or so) of the personal computer revolution. z80 and 6502 (c.f., Apple /// and IIGS) systems were still popular, and the IBM PC hadn't completely established itself as the de facto standard. At the time, there was still uncertainty about how compatible "PC compatible" just had to be. I confess I miss the displays of creativity and ingenuity that were in the marketplace, as systems builders were trying to carve out their particular niche. call me crazy, as I haven't done any systems hw/sw work in over 15 years, and yet I just bought one. the clean design and interest and enthusiasm by Adrian's crew persuaded me to take the plunge, poke around a bit, and maybe contribute something useful! and no bodge wires?!?!?
Just ordered one. I'm curious to see how a potential scene for this shakes up since there's so many of them suddenly available, and it's got a decent design that's a cousin of other existing 8bit machines that could serve as a good kickstart toward a software library. Maybe with a disk emulator or RF loader of some kind and bigger rom it'd be an approachably priced machine for tinkering with. The existing way it expects things to be loaded in also sounds like a fun reverse-engineering project for those interested in such a thing.
@@peterboon8280 it's kinda worth it though. I would have much prefered to snag one for $20 if i had known about it, but the guy selling them has kept them for 30+ years and documented as much about it as he could, and is still keeping the price kinda reasonable. Granted you could pick up a working c64 for about the same, but not a new old stock one, and the nabu seems primed for tinkering. If a vintage computer is for sale in the woods and no one is around to see it's good price, does it make a hobbyist scene? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Also, it's still a steep discount from their 1990 price of $89 with ads in the back of magazines. :P
@@peterboon8280 tbh , $60 is still very cheap for a 40 year old new in stock 8 bit computer. Especially one that has very low production numbers, because it was a flop.
Sounds like a perfect addition would be a “Cloudberry”, i.e. a Raspberry Pi or similar configured to talk RS422 and essentially be the second box, serving up an OS and other software, potentially while being connected to the internet and a tentative software library. Ideally it could be put on one of the expansion ports inside if that would work (if it is configured to be able to boot from a peripheral connected there), especially as there are already power headers available inside as well. Otherwise it could also reside in a miniature version of the case and connect to the actual port on the rear. Sounds like it could be a fun toy for the small community that ends up having one of these machines.
Raspberry Pi is overkill for the internal headend interface. I would think an ESP8266 or ESP32 would be way more than enough and much easier to deal with. The actual headend server being run on a Linux box (which could of course be an RPi). I notice ebay is showing 40 units per hour being sold! I expect the price to ramp up a bit soon. Sadly not for me, being in the UK it's got everything incompatible about it - NTSC vs PAL, 110V vs 240V, and of course huge delivery charges and our extortionate import fees, duty and VAT.
It seems you can connect to the Adaptor port with a USB-RS422 adaptor connected to a RasPi or any other computer and you wouldn't need a separate Adaptor, just the headend software. Less HW, not more. The serial rate on the port is 111kbps but apparently it's close enough to the standard 115200 to work in most cases. Not sure what the specified clock tolerance is on RS422 but on RS232 IIRC it's 4%, and 4% less than 115200 is 110592, so as long as the crystal oscillator on the NABU hasn't drifted too far down and the device you're talking to isn't clocked too high, it should work.
@@drgiller The actual NABU-to-Adapter bit rate is 111.86kbps (3.574595MHz colorburst / 32), reducing the error vs. 115200 to 3% ... so, 30% out-of-phase by the final stop bit, assuming 8N1 framing. Likely to work if there's any dead time at all between characters... assuing the RasPi's ttyAMA0 UART is not capable of supporting this odd bitrate directly
@@jordanhazen7761 I've seen a number of people refer to dead time between characters as a determining factor. I think this is incorrect in theory, perhaps partly correct in practice. The receiver is supposed to synchronize on each start bit (the falling edge from the mark to space transition, plus half a bit, is the sample time). The stop bit, a 1 or mark (same as the idle bit), is in effect a single-bit enforced "dead time" between the last data bit and the synchronization bit (start bit) for the next byte. If it samples correctly as a mark, the byte should be accepted, and the receiver should prepare to immediately resynchronize to the next start bit, half a bit-time later. Certainly some UART implementations (especially bit-banged without oversampling) may not resynchronize properly (or at all), but that would be a flaw in their implementation: on RS-232 at least, a total error between send and receive baud clocks of less than 5% is supposed to be tolerated per the standard, even with no dead time between characters. I believe RS-422 is the same specification other than the physical layer (differential signaling).
Hmmm, that enclosure looks right on brand for an idea for a custom system I have been planning to build for a while (morphing hardware platform) In particular those 4 "slots" are right on the money for one of the main features of the system. Are these available empty? Or maybe with just the power supply on them?
@@cass6409 Especially he also sells the smaller (in height) enclosures meant for the cable modem box. These come stripped of all electronics, and only have a simple linear power supply.
I never heard of NABU, and I used to work in the computer industry in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I worked for a company that was called Micom and eventually transitioned to become Philips (yes, part of the gigantic Dutch Philips company). When I first started working there, we built dedicated word processors, as in they could only do word processing, but they did it very well. There were two basic systems, one was 8080/64K (1MHz) based, and the other was Z80/128K (4Mhz) based. I think what made those systems so desirable is that the terminals (display and keyboard) were specifically designed for the word processing functions. So you had specific keys for Disk (meaning you wanted to do something with the 8" floppy/floppies), Duplicate, Erase, Format, Save, Load, Print, Cancel, etc. The interface was text only, but when you pressed the Disk key, you would get Disk? on screen. Then you could Cancel, or press Copy, Save, Load, or if you Print, it would display Print? and then you could press Page or Document. Secretaries of the day just loved those systems, and when we transitioned away from the word processors to the PCs (our first PCs were purchased designs from a company called Corona in Westlake Village, California), there was a lot of resistance from the secretaries who had used the word processors. Eventually, the word processor line evolved into a smaller system that used 5 1/4" floppies, and that system (still a Z80 based machine, still 128K, but it now could run C/PM). That, too, eventually was discontinued. We even had a competitor down the road in Montreal that was sold as Lanier in the US.
Hey Kostas, I worked at Phillips in Ottawa from 1987-1995(Phillips service had been bought out by Fujitsu by around 1991). I remember that we were still repairing the MICOMs long after they stopped making them. In fact they had some on display at the museum of science and technology in Ottawa and we still had clients using them. I knew a few people who moved from the Montreal office to come work in Ottawa. Oddly enough I had never heard of this NABU system but then again, Ottawa was the Silicone valley of Canada at the time so there were so many tech companies at the time.
Andre, it's sort of amazing what those systems could do. On an 8 bit system, with 128K of RAM, you could be copying files in both directions, printing a document (on the Qume daisy wheel printer, which was bi-directional), and be re-paginating a document, all at the same time, and everything ran smoothly. PCs really couldn't do that until Windows NT at least, and they needed a 32 but CPU with 10 Million times the horsepower, and gobs of RAM. I remember talking to some of the repair techs who came over from Europe, and they said that there were a lot of these units (under the Philips banner) at NATO's HQ in Brussels. I know DND had some in Ottawa, and we even had a Tempest project going at one time,so they may have been in the Pentagon or even the CIA. I worked at the Micom/Philips factories (both Town of Mount Royal and Ville St. Laurent) from 1981-1991, in a variety of roles, from bench tech to ICT Specialist/Leader.
Picked one up with the converter box to make it a complete set. There is another YTber that is working with some interface to have a PC talk to it and is talking about hosting a server that holds games for everyone to be able to access. Going to wait to see what happens. If anything I will open the converter box and reverse engineer it for others to looks into.
That joystick was actually quite ok to use, with short movements and increased sensitivity over the "normal" brick with a stick type which I found had longevity issues if slammed around in the heat of excitement while playing. The dot matrix printer looked very much like the Tandy DMP 100 I had connected to my TRS 80 with the "enormous" 8K of RAM when I first dabbled in BASIC, a skill required to do more than play a game or two at the time. Todays programmers would do well to have a try at the tight coding needed with only 8K of memory. Eric
I understand it's extremely unlikely to happen, but I'd like to put in my vote for you to explore the MicroBee Z80 computer from Australia. Which was also saw some success in Scandinavia in the early 80s. Keep up the great work!
Reminds me of another early cable set top box. In Southampton UK in the early 90s there was Videotron Cable TV and they offered a "Videoway" set top box that could do basic interactive stuff and play a few games. The UK Videotron company just seemed to operate in Southampton & London but I believe it was related to the French Canadian Videotron company and I'm pretty sure it was the same Videoway box, but modified for the UK PAL TV system rather than NTSC.
I just tried to find some more info on that service/hardware, but all that comes up easily is videotron still being a company in Quebec and a video of what seems like the staff of the UK videotron office dancing to some disco for several minutes. Look for "Videotron UK Video". Nobody's speaking on camera that you can hear, but their mouth movements seem very British. Seems like it was probably their tech support office?
I worked a bit with Dave Dunfield in 1993 as a freshly minted engineer with the Ontario Telepresence Project. He built these serial protocol converter boxes for controlling VCRs that we affectionately called "DBoxes". At one point someone brought a Nabu 1100 system into the office, but I don't think it ever got turned on. At the time we were using SparcStations and 486 PCs running SCO UNIX.
WOW -- the winner of that is probably pretty mad. At least it sold for $400 and not $4000? It would be awesome if the museum released the code they used to emulate the network protocol and the OS they had for the system.
@@adriansdigitalbasement My understanding is York have a good chunk of the original library, which was discovered on disk a while after the emulator project, but due to copyright it's unlikely to be released any time soon. I think there's a MAME port of one game for NABU out there but that's it. And yeah the auction would have sucked. Imagine paying $50k for a Lisa 1 and then someone turns up 1000 of them in an old warehouse and starts dumping them for $59. Not quite the same but still.. Lol
It amazes me that the IBM standard for physical keyboard layout was not immediately adopted! I mean it was obvious that was going to be the future! What a cool find!
I'm not so sure it was immediately obvious. From my understanding there was a lot of grumbling when it first came out. And recall that what we call the IBM standard now was at least the third keyboard layout IBM released for desktop PCs.
Also: the 101/102 key layout we now think of as the quintessential IBM layout wasn't introduced until mid-1986. The NABU keyboard was designed some time in 1982 or 1983. Only the original awkward PC layout was out by then, and only PC clone manufacturers were copying that layout for compatibility reasons, as it was generally not very well reviewed. I don't know what date ANSI first adopted the IBM 101 layout as a standard but it was certainly after 1986 and probably into the 1990's.
First thing to do is compare this machine architecture to SVI328 and MSX to see if there are enough similarities. Maybe it's possible to convert one of these into a workable SVI328 and run software from there. Perhaps feeding the software through the cable connection using an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.
It seems like there are many similarities but one bad thing is this only has 8k of ROM while the MSX had 32k. That's probably a bit of a hinderance. On the other hand, someone already has a working CF card interface for this. (See my pinned comment.)
@@adriansdigitalbasement Perhaps it's only a matter of studying the expansion connectors and see if it's possible to add or replace the 8k ROM with a full 32k or something like... Just to add the MSX or SVI memory mapping.
@@adriansdigitalbasement There's a CF interface? This means that's possible to load software to this computer? There's somewhere a software repository for this computer?
@fcastellanos another person on UA-cam has a NABU running with the original software catalog being served to it from a PC through a USB to RS422 serial adapter. He wrote the server program and a NABU developer still had all the software. So it won't be long before there will be a web service established so a NABU can be put online with a simple adapter to party like it's 1983. Or download everything and run your own server.
@@fcastellanos sorry, but the expansion connectors only support 16 addresses, and Z80 I/O instructions, there won't be any option to use them to add rom space, but then you could design a circuit that would give you the ability to read out ROM's of any size.
It is cool I like to learn more. Way ahead of its time. Closest we ever had to that was on the SEGA Genesis called Sega Channel on our Cable. They might have gotten the idea for it from the NABU.
I SO want to get one of these and make an adapter to use RC2014's CF or SD cards with it, and code up the interfaces for the CP/M API, and turn it into a capable CP/M machine. :)
Getting the software over TV cable network instead of disks sounds convenient and since it was a subscription service I can imagine it was a cheap alternative to actually owning a computer and software. Guess as computers become more affordable the demand for something like this dropped or was not big to begin with if they were launching in regions where people could afford to buy their computers.
This is an awesome time for us younger microcomputer enthusiasts - who'd have thought a basically brand-new 8-bit machine would come out of the woodwork this many years later? Thanks for the heads-up, Adrian, you're always bringing us something interesting to gawk at! Yeah, I bought one. Of course I'm waiting for the retro tech community to do their _thing_, and I'm super excited to see what wild things people are going to be able to do with this sytem. But I'd imagine even without too much effort we could get something like Collapse OS running on it. That's what I'm going to try when my NABU arrives ;)
Regarding the bidirectional cable network stuff, even in the early days of cable Internet there were a lot of smaller cable ISPs which only used cable for the download, and required you to dial in for the upload. The cable provider in the smaller city where I went to college was like that, and it wasn't until Comcast bought them out that they started to provide true bidirectional cable Internet.
Yes, in older systems, every amplifier along the line (could be many dozens between you & headend in pre-HFC/fiber days - hundreds or thousands system-wide) would need to be replaced with a 2-way capable version capable of filtering out and returning low 4-42MHz frequencies upstream. TV channels in US/Canada began at 54MHz, but a dead band between the up/down paths was necessary to avoid cross-feedback. Early demand for two-way was only for pay-per-view ordering, more advanced scrambling schemes, and a few reverse video feeds from remote studios for public access channels, local government use, etc.
I worked for Shaw in the 90's and they had an offering where you could download Genesis games via a cart that plugged in and was attached to the coax cable. Took about 5 minutes per game to download.
Man, Canada had some weird computers. Our neighbors to the north also beat Compaq in shipping a PC compatible with the Hyperion. Christine McGlade (of You Can't Do That On Television fame) recalled driving to work with a Hyperion computer on the back of her motorcycle.
Wasn't the Hyperion one of those DOS/BIOS-compatible but not-quite-PC-compatible machines, like a Tandy 2000 or TI Professional? Back when it was thought MS-DOS would follow the CP/M model of apps being well-behaved and always going through the BIOS?
The Telidon (the technology behind NABU) is the father of multiple video communication systems like the Videoway that I spent so much time on as a kid. Great innovation for it's time.
MSX you say? It would be cool to have MSX games run locally without the network on these machines. I really like the design, it's so simple yet still has some style to it. Running Metal Gear on it maybe? That would be neat :)
Metal Gear is a MSX2 game, not MSX1. But there are tons of great Konami and Activision (among others) MSX1 games that would be fun to play. Or perhaps with the right ROM(s), you might be able to run MSX BASIC and games out of the box.
IMO It is the best way to use it ,if it is actually MSX compatible.making an sd adapter connected to one of expansion slots or connecting a programmed raspberry pi or similar to the adapter port will do the job.
At least port map is different, keyboard interface is different and it lacks keys (select, F1-F5). I'd imagine you would need some bodge wires, disk/tape interface, and obviously MSXBIOS (EP)ROM. But it seems to be easier than assembling MSX from scratch (which is doable for MSX-1, not as much for MSX-2 without a bunch of custom chips). Since the docs are available, I wonder if someone comes up with a conversion guide
@@jwhite5008 Yeah, much of that can potentially be addressed with a custom BIOS, like the key and possibly port-mapping. Wont be a 100% compatible, but good enough for many of the early MSX1 stuff I guess.
The 8251 is a serial uart, one of the 1977 offerings from Intel. Most parallel ports were supported by a data latch like an LS374 and an input buffer to read the status pins like an LS244 or 245. A one-shot was often used to trigger the strobe when the port was written.
I work for York and they do have the setup to be seen. I haven't been able to contact the curator since COVID started, but I do have it in with him as I owe him some ATI video cards for the museum.
Ottawa resident here. I never owned one of these, but I was around when they first came out. IIRC, price was around CAD$700 for the system, and then you needed to subscribe to the cable service. Both cable companies in Ottawa (Skyline, Ottawa) carried NABU service, probably another $10/month or so. The computer is useless without the cable service, as you have seen. Worse, the software was "cycled": the set of programs available changed over time, so the local TV guide had "NABU listings" alongside everything else. And this explains why the system wasn't successful: its entry cost was much higher than Commodore machines (the most popular in the area at the time) and you were tied down to the cable service. Overall not great value.
Why I just bought one of these I don't know. But I got one one the way. Thanks for the impulse purchase dude! :P Looking at the specs, it probably could have done well on the market if it had a disk drive or at least a cassette port. Streaming software is a dead end nowadays, much less in '82 when people expected to own their shit. I wonder if it's possible to rig up a Raspberry Pi to serve as the 'network' for one of these? Mine will probably just be on display only, but it'd be an interesting project.
So the sx-64 had a case that seemed to be from an oscilloscope... This definitely looks like it started life as a hifi component 8-track tape machine. I often wonder about where cases come from, I'm sure not all of them are one off designs.
@@DishNetworkDealerNEO if you Google 'some work on the sx64 lemon64' you can see mine. I don't have it any more, I sold it to a guy in Montreal. Cool little machine for sure!!
@@chrisyboy219 I’ll check it out. I’ve considered replacing the Sony Display with a high resolution 4:3 HDTV LCD display with NTSC to HDTV converter, and adding a second speaker underneath with a stereo SID Chip board that breaks up the voices and putting the C-64 Mini board into the empty space and adding the USB Port to the monitor side grill between the Top and bottom halves. The 4:3 HDTV Monitor would have extra inputs and a remote control to control it and direct it to use the other HDMI inputs, allowing it to Switch to the C64 Mini or the original SX 64.
A nice addition would be a tape adaptor, or even a disk drive if someone wants to go so far as to design one. A tape adaptor though I imagine could be very simple, one input bit, one output, and do the timing in software on the CPU. In fact maybe the printer port would suffice, you'd just need an adaptor that alters the voltage levels. Cassette would be fine for 64K, you could get loading time down to maybe 3 minutes, like a lot of UK machines used. In fact a ZX Spectrum game could often load faster from tape than the Commodore 64 could from disk! At least until people started using fast loaders. Stupid design really, Commodore's disk drives had their own CPU, own RAM all sorts of big heavy expensive chips, to do a job that could be done with a WD1772 connected to the CPU's bus. Maybe through the cartridge port, since Commodore put so many more expensive chips behind their ports that it cripped their speed, Sinclair did it all by connecting hardware to the bus and doing everything in software. But Commodore, and other American companies, tended to design their computers like mainframes, or else they went through a parts catalogue and ticked off everything that said it did a certain job. They _are_ designed a lot like mainframes though, lots of separate chips doing their own work in parallel, leaving the CPU alone. Where Sinclair realised the CPU wasn't doing much when you were loading or printing or whatever, so why not let the very capable CPU handle it? Anyway, pardon me... point is this this could do the same. It could also likely take an ESP32 module and do Wifi, as well as an SD card adaptor. You might even be able to hack up a Laplink-type cable between it's printer port and a PC's printer port, or else USB on an Arduino. Amend NABU's EPROM to support all this, it would make it a usable computer... assuming you can find the software... If there's enough people who loved it as a kid, there might end up being a lot of homebrew, once development is sorted out. There's already a C compiler for popular Z80 computers of the '80s, that'd be easy to adapt.
The printer port is unforunately output-only, according to schematics, apart from a single BUSY pin that could be polled as very slow input path. The "adapter" DIN5 meant for its cable modem, being semi-standard RS422 may be a better option, though it's locked at the weird bit rate of 111.8kbps (3.574595 colorburst / 32). Is the Raspberry Pi's UART (ttyAMA0) capable of running at this odd rate? If not, 115.2k (3% error per bit; off phase by 30% at the final 8N1 stop bit) might be close enough, depending on character spacing.
There's already a custom MSX-BIOS ROM for the Nabu that enables you to play many MSX1 games (especially the Konami ones) out of the box on your Nabu. It's still Work-in-Progress, but that opens up a ton of quality games for the hardware platform !
I only ever knew about this due to the sponsorship notice in the credits of the “bits and bytes” show with Billy Van and Luba Goy - never actually saw one before!
Someone already has a CP/M running on it (!) but it's only with a serial terminal, not using the built-in output. Which according to the tech manual is only good for 38 columns anyway (38 usable out of 40 supported by the hardware), which would be painful for CP/M.
Astonishing, I had a pinned comment on this video and UA-cam deleted my OWN pinned comment! So let me do it again...
Ideas that this copied the MSX can't be right. The MSX came out in 1983 while this came out in 1982. It must have just been coincidence and I suppose the Z80, AY sound chip and TMS9918 VDP were extremely common chips and found in all sorts, like the Coleco Vision and what not.
Video from DJ Sures who has a ton of old NABU stuff htat belonged to his father:
ua-cam.com/video/FFaWJu3hDP4/v-deo.html
Some videos from Leo Binkowski, a software developer for NABU back when the company was operating. News report:
ua-cam.com/video/yKV-nH3rLHE/v-deo.html
Inside a NABU development machine:
ua-cam.com/video/QlpZFAX4MZo/v-deo.html
There is a comment from James Ware, the seller of the NABU systems on eBay:
James Ware
Holy Schnikes! Adrian, I really don't know where to start. But first let me just say thank you so very much for your presentation of the NABU Personal Computer. Because of your review I am selling a lot of computers today. (I will give you a total of today's sales at the end of the night.) I need to keep this short (right now) because I have to go downstairs, test NABU Computers, and get them ready for shipping. It's a time-consuming process and I average only 3 computers per hour. Yikes! Yes, I am the guy, back in 1989, who bought all those NABU Computers (and Adaptors). And you hit the nail on the head; with my MAC 512K Computer I put together the manual and the schematic using MacWrite and MacPaint. That's why the schematic looks so odd. I had to draw every part to create a library of components. Fortunately, I had a rough schematic as a guide and did not have to reverse engineer the system. I am an embedded systems software engineer of 40+ years and over the years I have designed a lot of circuits. I bought these computers for a project that never got off the ground and they have been in storage ever since. (More to come.)
There is a SBC CPM port for the NABU already, along with a CF card schematic (For slot 0.) It's super early stages and just runs CPM over the serial port, but it's a start!
github.com/randomvariations/nabu.cpm
It would be easy to know. dump the ROM.
Looks like the stock is sold out already.
As someone involved in the development of this system I can verify that the hardware design was indeed derived from the MSX design. The MSX was DESIGNED before the NABU PC (although the MSX "came out" later).
Looks like YT has a lot of glitches with the comment section management. Many comments I recently wrote have also disappeared. Maybe the IA moderation system is a bit too zealous.
Is anyone working on a PCB for the compact flash adapter?
Holy Schnikes! Adrian, I really don't know where to start. But first let me just say thank you so very much for your presentation of the NABU Personal Computer. Because of your review I am selling a lot of computers today. (I will give you a total of today's sales at the end of the night.) I need to keep this short (right now) because I have to go downstairs, test NABU Computers, and get them ready for shipping. It's a time-consuming process and I average only 3 computers per hour. Yikes! Yes, I am the guy, back in 1989, who bought all those NABU Computers (and Adaptors). And you hit the nail on the head; with my MAC 512K Computer I put together the manual and the schematic using MacWrite and MacPaint. That's why the schematic looks so odd. I had to draw every part to create a library of components. Fortunately, I had a rough schematic as a guide and did not have to reverse engineer the system. I am an embedded systems software engineer of 40+ years and over the years I have designed a lot of circuits. I bought these computers for a project that never got off the ground and they have been in storage ever since. (More to come.)
Hey @Adriansdigitalbasement don't miss James' comment above!
Adrian! Look here!
Do you have the teletext television adapters still available? Did they use the NAPLPS Line 19 teletext VITS protocol and data?
I use to have four of the original 1980s Sony decoders, and an EEG line 19 data encoder. Sadly, not anymore.
Adrian needs to pin this comment
Hey, I just ordered one! Hopefully this thing grows some legs.
I was one of the original games developers for NABU. I worked on Roulette, Pac-Man, Q*Bert, Miner 2049er and most other games for updates and bug fixing. Later I became the director of Content Development. I can demonstrate it running the network menu, most of the games and software, and CP/M 3.0.
As a matter of fact the demo systems used two NABU PCs wire together using an RS-422 crossover cable. One system had a hard drive (10 MB!) and made the NABU PC think it was connected to the NABU ADAPTER, which is what actually downloaded the data from Cable systems.
Though the hard drive of the demo system hasn't survived the decades, the floppy backups and floppy drives still worked, and some of the cable games and applications survived.
It wasn't an MSX machine. MSX came around the same time, and was VERY compatible, so man.y NABU games made it into the MSX ecosystem and some MSX games were easily ported to NABU, boosting our catalog of over 150 titles.
@@leo.binkowski Internet Archive would be the most sensible place for this stuff I'd say
There was a tank game for the Nabu, in a 3D maze with magnets. I've been trying to track that one down for literally decades. Are you familiar with it?
Woah, crazy to think people who worked on such a niche product would find a video all these years later. Seems like a lot of people worked on it and it wasn't a side project.
@@stuthelotusguy Did you find out?
@@EikottXD Nope, not yet.
The son of the original CEO / owner of Nabu is currently working on an ESP32-based adapter and is in conversation the folks at York University to set up / host a Nabu service.
How cool would that be if the new owners of these computers could have this network to be be able to chat and game online etc. Awesome machine.
And he just happens to have grown up here in Thunder Bay and visits every summer. He brought a bunch of interesting NABU stuff to our Retro Computer Club meet-up a couple months ago.
@@8_Bit It seems John Kelly, one of the main devs, has always held a candle for the NABU computer and network system, and was involved with the YU preservation project. If he's the CEO you're talking about then his enthusiasm must have rubbed off on his son.
I SO hope this happens! I will totally donate real money to that project.
Correction: DJ's uncle was CEO, and his father was an engineer: ua-cam.com/video/FFaWJu3hDP4/v-deo.html
I live in Ottawa and had one of these for a while. I first used it at a computer camp as a kid and then my parents rented one for a while through the cable company (Ottawa Cablevision at the time I believe.) These things were so many light years ahead of their time, it was incredible. On-demand, two way, streamed content and channel-based subscriptions. So many things we'd see in wide use all these years later. I used this so much and was heartbroken and actually cried when my parents told me we had to return it because the company was bankrupt.
Even though you can't do much with them now, I think I'm going to have to get a hold of one of these.
EDIT: After shipping and fees, I just spent $165CAD on a computer I can do literally nothing with but look at. I regret nothing.
We gotta get this thing up and running with new software if only to help some Ca-nerd-ians hit some warm fuzzy nostalgia on their early computing life! An menuing system simulating the original seems like an obvious must-have.
@@carpespasm I couldn't agree more. I have zero programming knowledge and wouldn't even know where to begin. I want to see the Toronto Science Center at one point had a NABU exhibit where they actually had back-end gear up and running and a system you could play with. I wonder if any of the NABU founders are still about to talk to.
Good on your parents for getting you one till they went bankrupt.
The total price is still dirt cheap for a brand new working unit. You'll pay way more for a vintage machine in any condition on eBay shipped domestically. You can try and arrange your own shipping or contact someone you know to pick it up for you. Depending on your location, you could even drive down. Massachusetts isn't that far from Canada's border. Regardless, it's an incredible deal and the keyboard poachers will surely snap them up even at that price.
It's sad in a way that these ended up in the US and people who used them back in the day have to spend quite a bit more just to get one again!
Thanks to patron Nick R for sharing this link to a rudimentary port of CP/M that was just created:
github.com/randomvariations/nabu.cpm
Also David (of the TRS-80 Diag ROM fame) disassembled the ROMs. It turns out the ROM on our systems is the 4K version -- which is very simple, but the ROM on BitSavers is the 8K ROM which has floppy disk booting capability, with a boot menu. The use the 8K ROM on the system, some minor modifications need to be made (cut a trace and jumper two pins) to change the chip select logic to 8K.
Comment from viewer Daniel Hansen: The son of the original CEO / owner of Nabu is currently working on an ESP32-based adapter and is in conversation the folks at York University to set up / host a Nabu service.
Hmmm, a potential z80 powerhouse, pretty awesome
Hey Adrian, this comment isn’t pinned FYI. I’ve seen a lot of pins not “take” lately.
You'd better make another video to help get all this new work really get going. I just pulled the trigger on one of these from the listing you linked. Hopefully I'll see something useful from it in my little retro museum corner here at home. Worst case, it's another random box of crap my kids have to get rid of when I die.
It sounds to me like the CEO's own family were pretty enthusiastic about the service, and were probably as sad to see it go as to see the income go. It doesn't sound like it would be that hard to trick one of these into going to a website over a WiFi emulator for the Adaptor module, so this may prove to be rather presentable without being a huge ongoing expense.
@@kaitlyn__L yeah sadly this comment got unpinned and disappeared entirely for me. It's back for me now but I had already made a new pinned comment. Grrt
I bought one of these a little while ago. I'm not too far from the eBay seller so I picked it up in person. Gotta say I was pleasantly surprised to see the seller is someone who appreciates these lovely machines and is keeping up with what the retro computing community is doing with them. Sounds like he's put at least some thought into working on a disk controller, too. I have a feeling the NABU PC will finally be getting a chance to shine!
This computer was part of my childhood, with lots of great memories. I worked as a delivery boy for the local Ottawa Penny Saver (a free publication) and one of the perks was a Nabu system offered for free. This was in late 1984 or so when they were trying very hard to increase the popularity. The games were lots of fun, and I've been wanted to find copies of them for years with no success. One of the weaknesses of the system was the unidirectional implementation for the data. What this meant was that *all* the programs were transmitted over the cable, repeatedly, over and over. Depending on the timing of when you selected a title and where the stream was it could be almost instantaneous, or several minutes, before your program started. I still own a couple of Nabu systems in my collection.
Still cooler than Stadia
Which lasted longer? Not sure!
This is one of those channels that I just barely understand most of what is going on, but it's just so comfy...like watching MASH as a kid. I can put this on and work on my own stuff, check in and out on what you're doing and feel like I'm kind of just hanging out with my brother or friends from college doing projects. Keep doing what you're doing, you inspire others, even in unrelated fields, to continue working on our projects :)
WOW! What a trip down memory lane... I bought one of these systems from an electronics surplus store (Addison) back in the early '90s, and as you found out, it doesn't do much. Mine came with both the computer and the cable interface adaptor. The cable interface adaptor had one of the most complex RF circuits I'd ever seen. Having done much work on Z80 based systems, I disassembled the ROM and worked out the memory map, and reverse engineered parts of it. However, without a way of accessing any local storage, it was mainly just a curiosity, requiring burning eproms to try anything.
Do you still have any of what you learned documented?
@@gklinger I dug up some old test code I had thrown together. I had written some basic i/o routines in assembly and some test code in C using Archimedes CZ80. I forgot that I had used it as proof of concept for a project that needed video and keyboard. Sadly the project never got off the ground. I think what the Internet has thrown together in the milli-seconds since Adrian's video came out immediately surpassed anything that I scrounged up back in the day. Truly wonderful when people are all working toward a common goal!
The Joystick looks to be an OEM of the Zircon VIDEO COMMAND, which itself was a re-packaging of the Fairchild Channel F's controllers.
I used these for years for video gaming, excellent to hold, once you understand the grip, very responsive, and you could hold them for a very long time (unlike e.g. Atari's joysticks)
The layout is rather phallic
Nice controller on the Channel F but very 70's looking, does not suit the modern 80s look this system was going for
After seeing the picture of the controller I knew it looked familiar, but couldn't place it. Thanks for posting that!
I knew there was a reason it reminded me of the Fairchild Channel F controller. I hear using it to its fullest leads to a busy and intense version of Pong (I think the system calls it "Hockey," which makes sense).
Based on the pinout shown at 29:10, those DE-9 joystick ports on the keyboard should also be compatible with standard Atari or Commodore joysticks, with only the +5V and analog paddle inputs missing. A thoughtful touch from the original designers...
I bought one last week just because I loved the look of the keyboard and opening the box it totally had that 80's computer smell :) I've been searching youtube and twitter looking to see if anyone else is tinkering with these so you can guess I clicked on this video immediately! Really excited for the potential homebrew for this machine, it's really nicely built.
I have to imagine a flood of videos will appear, but who knows. Maybe this flew under the radar, at least it has been flying under the radar.
@@adriansdigitalbasement For collectors of course great. But even if sacrilege 🤣 is the PC not good spare parts donor for other 80 years computer? I like the design I would put in the Case current hardware
Dang it's crazy how Nabu had features that would later be widely available for WebTV in the Late 1990's and Cable Internet in the 2000's under the marketing name "Broadband Internet" that Cable and Phone providers like Comcast and AT&T would do in the 2000's.
The seller is actually selling empty cases for peopel who want to use them for that purpose. Even though the machine has a bunch of good parts, it would be so sad to take it apart to scavenge. It's one thing with a computer like the C64 with tens millions made. but something like this may have had 10k or less machines ever made.
@@cabalenproductions6480 I know right! 6Mbps! I didn’t have that until 2008!
I'm so glad you picked up one of these; I was going to but realized I didn't have any means to get anything from owning one.
at 60 bucks it looks like a steal, if (and this is a big if) other people develop this thing into something more useful, it could be a valuable very rare museum quality 8 bit machine. Right now I am very tempted to grab one, even when the shipping costs more than double the price for me.
@@Blackadder75 Seems to be happening. I know of several projects that people have begun to get stuff running on the machine.
That keyboard and keycap combo looks killer. I love that tall Alps ping ontop of the baritone thock of the keycaps.
As an industrial design, that looks amazing for the time (and even now)
its awesome. Thats why Im here
I'll pass your comments on to Scott Gibson, who did the industrial design.
As a Canadian who grew up in the era where this was sold, I am ashamed to say that I knew absolutely NOTHING about this machine! It reminds me of the Telidon/Minitel network that was trialed around the same time, but not available to retail customers the way this machine was. I junkied out on the Telidon machine at our local library for as long as it was available, and still have vivid memories of the graphical text adventure games that were available on it, downloaded over the Bell Canada Vista network at the time. I honestly might buy me one of these in anticipation of people smarter then me developing Coleco, TI/99 or MSX ports of software to run on it over a network emulator or standard floppy disc drive emulator. Very glad you bought this and highlighted it Adrian! Thank you!
That is an amazing machine for pre-85. I'm actually stunned by how well thought out, clean and robustly made it is, compared to what most of my crowd used (C64s, TRS-80 Color Computers and some TI-99's and stuff thrown in). It obviously was designed for a more high-end market than just basic home computing. The whole concept was exceptionally forward thinking, if a bit too high ended for anything like the market was in the early 80s. I'm glad you shared this, I would have never known it existed otherwise.
Also I strongly disagree with the disclaimer that "you can't do anything with it out of the box". It's a little like suggesting a blank canvas has no possibilities.
I really appreciate that you inspect the thing before plugging it into mains. I'm always nervous when other popular channels acquire unknown hardware, and the first thing they do is test if it just runs or burns up to dust.
sounds like the ebay seller already just plugged them in blindly though
Really tempted to buy one, although it would sit on a shelf looking pretty until some other folks brighter than me develop and publish some software and a way to run it.
That's ... the first "you've never heard of" headline on youtube, that turns out not to be clickbait.
Awsome.
See, this kind of discovery is one of the main reasons I like retro channels. This thing is great and I'd definitely be interested in followups if and as people get these things up and running again.
Wow, I used one as a kid. I was one of the lucky kids that would deliver the Ottawa Pennysaver (a free classified-ads newletter that come bundled with store flyers as well). I was paid 5cents/paper. :P Anyway...
Near the end of the NABU company's life, the "Ottawa Pennysaver" had a deal with Nabu to get free system rentals for their carriers and the penny saver would "post" their newletter that they used to print for their carriers. The network sent a combination of text pages and software.
You could rend or buy the system itself and I seem to remember that there were also floppy drives available but I never got one. (BASIC, Logo was available on the network so you should be able to save your programs). I don't quite remember if there were any wordprocessers or spreadsheets available. :P
We just paid for the games package and I remember it to be pretty good at the time. (I had a vic-20 at the time, but it was similar to the early C64 games.) The game catalogue might have changed every now and again.
The bidirectional com wasn't implemented locally, but what they did was just continously stream the software on a loop... SO it might take several minutes to fetch your software from the stream depending on when you started to load.
I was wondering how they got it to behave as if it had bidirectional input without actually having that, but it makes sense with the bandwidth being so high they could just yeet all the programs out all the time and let you pluck out the one you wanted as it went by.
Considering it could take tape based games several minutes to load that's really not too bad for the time.
That's really neat. The user manual has a diagram explaining how it might take longer to get a program because it's like a big wheel, and you have to wait for the wheel to come around again to the program you wanted. It's kind of amazing that used ones of these hadn't appeared before.
I suppose when the network died, people just threw them away (in anger) LOL
It would be very helpful to get info on the floppy controller so it could be reverse engineered. I only saw one grainy and low res photo of it ...
Continuously streaming data is how Dish Network offered games on their boxes.
@@adriansdigitalbasement I don't know how many people bought the systems instead of renting them here in Ottawa. I do know that when the network shutdown we had to return our rental.
Thanks for posting about the auction! I grabbed one for myself. I've been looking for them off and on since I heard about the YorkU reconconstruction project in the early 2000's. I'm wondering if this is from the US test site...?
I honestly don't know anyone else that had one, nor if anyone got the floppy drives or bought them out right. I guess I always thought the that non-rental units were useable as a stand alone systems... But that's the vague memories of a 12-13 year old and we were only ever in the Nabu "shop" once to pick ours up.
@@sdesros the other comment here from someone who used it was rented and had to return it too. I imagine that’s the main experience.
This is why I love this channel. A lot of what you do may be old hat to you, but to me it's like a whole other world. I certainly hope that you are able to do something with this thing. Who knows, it could start a retro-trend.
Ahhhh....the good old 9900 series chips, I remember those fondly from back in the day doing inhouse repair of the TI-99/4a in Lubbock TX
Astonishing there are still classic machines I had never heard of!😀
The plethora of 8 bit systems throughout the 80s was just completely crazy. Like the cryptocurrency boom that nobody will remember all the variants of 30-40 years down the line :)
Ebay relisting says 200 sold, I guess there is a pretty sizeable batch of these things somewhere and they really are shifting.
A really neat device! Would be amazing if/when someone creates an ethernet interface for it to recreate the network functionality on the internet. There you could upload software to make it accessible to all the users.
40 years later, and a new platform just appears :) What a time to be alive!
I was thinking the same, surely this is an appealing reverse engineering project for someone... giving it life again would be really cool and really, how complicated can it be? :)
Fascinating video on this old and obscure computer Adrian! Great job! And the C64 got Quantum Link in 1985, which would have made the NABU an even harder sell then.
14:23 That joystick was great! It was very precise, fast, responsive and very comfortable to use. It took a bit of time to get used to, but compared to what was standard back then it was very comfortable. Not the worlds most robust construction though as the retention for the trigger switch tended to break. But for anyone who suffered from joystick thumb or carpal tunnel problems from using a normal joystick it was fantastic. It replaced my Tac-II and the other joysticks I tested at the time. Loved the Tac-II for the feeling, speed, build quality and dependability, but it was finnicky when it came to diagonal movement and the feeling of the trigger button was pretty bad. my thumb suffered quite a bit from mashing that button.
This makes me miss my MSX.... I have had so much fun with that thing when I was a kid. 😞 memory lane :D
Adrian, do you think you could dump the ROM and post it somewhere? I would assume it would fall into the category of abandonware at this point. Given the small size it should be relatively easy for someone with a bit of RE skills to feed it to Ghidra and work out enough of the protocol for talking to the adapter box so that a RPi adaptor simulator could be created (as you suggested).
Someone probably already figured this out, but: if you assume N-8-1, 6992 baud is 7866 raw bits per second, which is almost exactly half the NTSC horizontal scan rate. Doesn't seem like a coincidence given that it's meant to be a cable TV connected device.
Hi Adrian, nice video.
Sorry if I go off topic but I would ask you if you plan to show in your channels an Acorn Archimedes or an Acorn RiscPC. These are relatively unknown computers but they represent an important step in Computer Science, since ARM cpus were developed for them. (ARM once meant Acorn Risc Machine).
I had been trying for several years to remember the cable PC "thing" that was being developed in the Ottawa region back in the early 80s - I was living in Toronto at the time - just graduate from Waterloo in 79 .. was awaiting the release in the Toronto area - but it never came and memories faded... I just could not remember the name. Then I saw this video -- and bingo - it all came flooding back ...
I wish I was a programmer to help in situations like this. I hope the retro community will solve the possibility to use locally this beautiful retro device and be (sort of) useful again. The value will surely rise when projects arise and we may see this beautiful boxes be used for retro sessions for now on. Thank you very much Adrian for all your work!
There already seem to be projects springing out of the woodwork. It's exciting.
Excellent video! This is a great warning about cloud computing. Once the network goes down, all you get is a device that displays a logo.
It should be trivial to create a ROM with some Z80 debugger/assembler and at least get some kind of basic interaction with the machine. Eventually some OS/ROM could be ported maybe from MSX and give the machine a second chance! Thank you for the great video Adrian!
Maybe the weird-looking arrow keys are left and right fire buttons so you can play games without a joystick? (Which, BTW, look identical to those used by the Channel F.) And to me it seems like NABU stood for something more comprehensible in another language (French?) and then was mangled to make an English translation fit the same letters.
Wow. this video has been up < 1 hour and that ebay link has sold 20+ already!!! With this many hobbyists getting that, there is going to be some nice development for this forgotten system
Now at over 50 sold...
@@joecan Currently showing sales of 25 per hour. I hope people are patient with him as I'm sure he didn't expect them to sell all at once. He replied to this video, and apparently he tests them all and can do about 3 per hour. I just hope he doesn't get buried in this.
Fabulous, as always, Adrian! Thank you.
ahaha, nice! I have seen these for sale recently, and wondered what was up with this computer I've never heard of! glad you grabbed one!
aaaaand, I decided to pick one up. Excited to see what might come of it!
Awesome.. I think I will be getting one. It will be interesting to see if anyone, including myself, can make a rom to get it to boot and run some code. You are right, the architecture is much like that of the MSX. So porting those games over, shouldn't be too hard. It would be an interesting project to take on. Very nice that it has all that documentation for it, makes for a great start in getting this computer running by its self, with a custom Rom. Thanks for showing this, I had no idea this computer even existed until now. 👍👍
What a fascinating bit of computer history, thanks for making this video.
Interesting part of computer history. I especially like the similarities with the MSX standard.
Your channel is probably the one I watch the most. There have been many updates to the NABU in terms of making it a functional and a usable system since this video was posted. I facing only one problem; the PSU is 110v and in my country it's a 220v forcing me to use a step-down transformer. However, in the NABU's technical manual something interesting was mentioned and I quote: "The transformer primary has two 110V windings. They are connected in parallel for use with 110V supply, and in series for use with 220V supply". Would you please help in showing how such modification could be achieved? There are many NABU owners that would love to make such modification and keep using the original PSU that came with the NABU. Thanks
I wouldn't be surprised if Adrian's soon gonna get a packet with an EPROM saying "plug this into your NABU instead of its ROM" and he plugs it in and turns it on and it plays a version of the 8-bit dance party demo he has on the C64.
Very cool! Had absolutely no idea this machine and service existed! Very much ahead of its time!
We didn't have a disk drive for ours when I was growing up, but I do believe they were available to buy or rent. The NABU Network had a word processor available and I think you could use it to save documents. I imagine they'll be brutal to find though.
Chances are they didn't reinvent the wheel for something they didn't expect the end user to have, so maybe it'll be not horrendous to emulate.
Fascinating video. I have ordered one and can't wait to get some code into it - at least via rom to start with. Look forward to another video on this computer in the future.
hey Adrian! another great video and fun-filled stroll down memory lane. I really miss the wide diversity of ideas and approaches in the first decade (or so) of the personal computer revolution. z80 and 6502 (c.f., Apple /// and IIGS) systems were still popular, and the IBM PC hadn't completely established itself as the de facto standard. At the time, there was still uncertainty about how compatible "PC compatible" just had to be. I confess I miss the displays of creativity and ingenuity that were in the marketplace, as systems builders were trying to carve out their particular niche.
call me crazy, as I haven't done any systems hw/sw work in over 15 years, and yet I just bought one. the clean design and interest and enthusiasm by Adrian's crew persuaded me to take the plunge, poke around a bit, and maybe contribute something useful!
and no bodge wires?!?!?
That computer tinks its so smarty. It tinks its processor so big.
You’re right, I’ve heard of this computer, now I have heard of the planet.
I had one of these also as a monthly rental back when I was a teenager. Thanks for showing this! It really was just a games machine for me.
Just ordered one. I'm curious to see how a potential scene for this shakes up since there's so many of them suddenly available, and it's got a decent design that's a cousin of other existing 8bit machines that could serve as a good kickstart toward a software library. Maybe with a disk emulator or RF loader of some kind and bigger rom it'd be an approachably priced machine for tinkering with. The existing way it expects things to be loaded in also sounds like a fun reverse-engineering project for those interested in such a thing.
@@peterboon8280 it's kinda worth it though. I would have much prefered to snag one for $20 if i had known about it, but the guy selling them has kept them for 30+ years and documented as much about it as he could, and is still keeping the price kinda reasonable. Granted you could pick up a working c64 for about the same, but not a new old stock one, and the nabu seems primed for tinkering. If a vintage computer is for sale in the woods and no one is around to see it's good price, does it make a hobbyist scene? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, it's still a steep discount from their 1990 price of $89 with ads in the back of magazines. :P
@@peterboon8280 tbh , $60 is still very cheap for a 40 year old new in stock 8 bit computer. Especially one that has very low production numbers, because it was a flop.
Sounds like a perfect addition would be a “Cloudberry”, i.e. a Raspberry Pi or similar configured to talk RS422 and essentially be the second box, serving up an OS and other software, potentially while being connected to the internet and a tentative software library. Ideally it could be put on one of the expansion ports inside if that would work (if it is configured to be able to boot from a peripheral connected there), especially as there are already power headers available inside as well. Otherwise it could also reside in a miniature version of the case and connect to the actual port on the rear.
Sounds like it could be a fun toy for the small community that ends up having one of these machines.
i was just looking at these, and was wondering who would tackle it first. glad to see it was you!
Raspberry Pi is overkill for the internal headend interface. I would think an ESP8266 or ESP32 would be way more than enough and much easier to deal with. The actual headend server being run on a Linux box (which could of course be an RPi).
I notice ebay is showing 40 units per hour being sold! I expect the price to ramp up a bit soon.
Sadly not for me, being in the UK it's got everything incompatible about it - NTSC vs PAL, 110V vs 240V, and of course huge delivery charges and our extortionate import fees, duty and VAT.
It seems you can connect to the Adaptor port with a USB-RS422 adaptor connected to a RasPi or any other computer and you wouldn't need a separate Adaptor, just the headend software. Less HW, not more. The serial rate on the port is 111kbps but apparently it's close enough to the standard 115200 to work in most cases. Not sure what the specified clock tolerance is on RS422 but on RS232 IIRC it's 4%, and 4% less than 115200 is 110592, so as long as the crystal oscillator on the NABU hasn't drifted too far down and the device you're talking to isn't clocked too high, it should work.
I once replaced the disk drives on a DECsystem-10 KA10 processor with a VAX 11/780. It wasn't overkill, it just makes it easier and more flexible.
@@drgiller The actual NABU-to-Adapter bit rate is 111.86kbps (3.574595MHz colorburst / 32), reducing the error vs. 115200 to 3% ... so, 30% out-of-phase by the final stop bit, assuming 8N1 framing. Likely to work if there's any dead time at all between characters... assuing the RasPi's ttyAMA0 UART is not capable of supporting this odd bitrate directly
@@jordanhazen7761 I've seen a number of people refer to dead time between characters as a determining factor. I think this is incorrect in theory, perhaps partly correct in practice. The receiver is supposed to synchronize on each start bit (the falling edge from the mark to space transition, plus half a bit, is the sample time). The stop bit, a 1 or mark (same as the idle bit), is in effect a single-bit enforced "dead time" between the last data bit and the synchronization bit (start bit) for the next byte. If it samples correctly as a mark, the byte should be accepted, and the receiver should prepare to immediately resynchronize to the next start bit, half a bit-time later. Certainly some UART implementations (especially bit-banged without oversampling) may not resynchronize properly (or at all), but that would be a flaw in their implementation: on RS-232 at least, a total error between send and receive baud clocks of less than 5% is supposed to be tolerated per the standard, even with no dead time between characters. I believe RS-422 is the same specification other than the physical layer (differential signaling).
Man you think you've heard of everything and then this thing comes along. Always a surprise on your channel!
Hmmm, that enclosure looks right on brand for an idea for a custom system I have been planning to build for a while (morphing hardware platform)
In particular those 4 "slots" are right on the money for one of the main features of the system. Are these available empty? Or maybe with just the power supply on them?
Just buy the entire machine. It's cheaper than buying an enclosure of the same size. It's only $60 or so.
The vendor sells the empty enclosure for cheaper.
@@cass6409 Especially he also sells the smaller (in height) enclosures meant for the cable modem box. These come stripped of all electronics, and only have a simple linear power supply.
loll your intro is 2009 -- still love you!!!
I never heard of NABU, and I used to work in the computer industry in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I worked for a company that was called Micom and eventually transitioned to become Philips (yes, part of the gigantic Dutch Philips company). When I first started working there, we built dedicated word processors, as in they could only do word processing, but they did it very well. There were two basic systems, one was 8080/64K (1MHz) based, and the other was Z80/128K (4Mhz) based. I think what made those systems so desirable is that the terminals (display and keyboard) were specifically designed for the word processing functions. So you had specific keys for Disk (meaning you wanted to do something with the 8" floppy/floppies), Duplicate, Erase, Format, Save, Load, Print, Cancel, etc. The interface was text only, but when you pressed the Disk key, you would get Disk? on screen. Then you could Cancel, or press Copy, Save, Load, or if you Print, it would display Print? and then you could press Page or Document. Secretaries of the day just loved those systems, and when we transitioned away from the word processors to the PCs (our first PCs were purchased designs from a company called Corona in Westlake Village, California), there was a lot of resistance from the secretaries who had used the word processors. Eventually, the word processor line evolved into a smaller system that used 5 1/4" floppies, and that system (still a Z80 based machine, still 128K, but it now could run C/PM). That, too, eventually was discontinued. We even had a competitor down the road in Montreal that was sold as Lanier in the US.
Hey Kostas, I worked at Phillips in Ottawa from 1987-1995(Phillips service had been bought out by Fujitsu by around 1991). I remember that we were still repairing the MICOMs long after they stopped making them. In fact they had some on display at the museum of science and technology in Ottawa and we still had clients using them. I knew a few people who moved from the Montreal office to come work in Ottawa. Oddly enough I had never heard of this NABU system but then again, Ottawa was the Silicone valley of Canada at the time so there were so many tech companies at the time.
Andre, it's sort of amazing what those systems could do. On an 8 bit system, with 128K of RAM, you could be copying files in both directions, printing a document (on the Qume daisy wheel printer, which was bi-directional), and be re-paginating a document, all at the same time, and everything ran smoothly. PCs really couldn't do that until Windows NT at least, and they needed a 32 but CPU with 10 Million times the horsepower, and gobs of RAM.
I remember talking to some of the repair techs who came over from Europe, and they said that there were a lot of these units (under the Philips banner) at NATO's HQ in Brussels. I know DND had some in Ottawa, and we even had a Tempest project going at one time,so they may have been in the Pentagon or even the CIA.
I worked at the Micom/Philips factories (both Town of Mount Royal and Ville St. Laurent) from 1981-1991, in a variety of roles, from bench tech to ICT Specialist/Leader.
This was such a joy to watch. Thank you.
Picked one up with the converter box to make it a complete set. There is another YTber that is working with some interface to have a PC talk to it and is talking about hosting a server that holds games for everyone to be able to access. Going to wait to see what happens. If anything I will open the converter box and reverse engineer it for others to looks into.
I love your accent. You sound extremely clear for a non native speaker as me. Thanks!
That joystick was actually quite ok to use, with short movements and increased sensitivity over the "normal" brick with a stick type which I found had longevity issues if slammed around in the heat of excitement while playing.
The dot matrix printer looked very much like the Tandy DMP 100 I had connected to my TRS 80 with the "enormous" 8K of RAM when I first dabbled in BASIC, a skill required to do more than play a game or two at the time. Todays programmers would do well to have a try at the tight coding needed with only 8K of memory.
Eric
I understand it's extremely unlikely to happen, but I'd like to put in my vote for you to explore the MicroBee Z80 computer from Australia. Which was also saw some success in Scandinavia in the early 80s. Keep up the great work!
Reminds me of another early cable set top box. In Southampton UK in the early 90s there was Videotron Cable TV and they offered a "Videoway" set top box that could do basic interactive stuff and play a few games. The UK Videotron company just seemed to operate in Southampton & London but I believe it was related to the French Canadian Videotron company and I'm pretty sure it was the same Videoway box, but modified for the UK PAL TV system rather than NTSC.
I just tried to find some more info on that service/hardware, but all that comes up easily is videotron still being a company in Quebec and a video of what seems like the staff of the UK videotron office dancing to some disco for several minutes. Look for "Videotron UK Video". Nobody's speaking on camera that you can hear, but their mouth movements seem very British. Seems like it was probably their tech support office?
Yep the same Videotron that still exists here in Québec, are the ones who did Videoway! Never had it myself but I remember seeing the ads for it.
I worked a bit with Dave Dunfield in 1993 as a freshly minted engineer with the Ontario Telepresence Project. He built these serial protocol converter boxes for controlling VCRs that we affectionately called "DBoxes". At one point someone brought a Nabu 1100 system into the office, but I don't think it ever got turned on. At the time we were using SparcStations and 486 PCs running SCO UNIX.
I'm suddenly very glad I didn't win a recent auction for one that went for $400. Hopefully York U Museum is open when I'm in Ontario next week.
WOW -- the winner of that is probably pretty mad. At least it sold for $400 and not $4000? It would be awesome if the museum released the code they used to emulate the network protocol and the OS they had for the system.
@@adriansdigitalbasement My understanding is York have a good chunk of the original library, which was discovered on disk a while after the emulator project, but due to copyright it's unlikely to be released any time soon. I think there's a MAME port of one game for NABU out there but that's it.
And yeah the auction would have sucked. Imagine paying $50k for a Lisa 1 and then someone turns up 1000 of them in an old warehouse and starts dumping them for $59. Not quite the same but still.. Lol
@@TechTimeTraveller Maybe someone can step out of the room for a few minutes to get a Timmies and someone else can....
It amazes me that the IBM standard for physical keyboard layout was not immediately adopted! I mean it was obvious that was going to be the future! What a cool find!
I'm not so sure it was immediately obvious. From my understanding there was a lot of grumbling when it first came out. And recall that what we call the IBM standard now was at least the third keyboard layout IBM released for desktop PCs.
Also: the 101/102 key layout we now think of as the quintessential IBM layout wasn't introduced until mid-1986. The NABU keyboard was designed some time in 1982 or 1983. Only the original awkward PC layout was out by then, and only PC clone manufacturers were copying that layout for compatibility reasons, as it was generally not very well reviewed. I don't know what date ANSI first adopted the IBM 101 layout as a standard but it was certainly after 1986 and probably into the 1990's.
First thing to do is compare this machine architecture to SVI328 and MSX to see if there are enough similarities. Maybe it's possible to convert one of these into a workable SVI328 and run software from there. Perhaps feeding the software through the cable connection using an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.
It seems like there are many similarities but one bad thing is this only has 8k of ROM while the MSX had 32k. That's probably a bit of a hinderance. On the other hand, someone already has a working CF card interface for this. (See my pinned comment.)
@@adriansdigitalbasement Perhaps it's only a matter of studying the expansion connectors and see if it's possible to add or replace the 8k ROM with a full 32k or something like... Just to add the MSX or SVI memory mapping.
@@adriansdigitalbasement There's a CF interface? This means that's possible to load software to this computer? There's somewhere a software repository for this computer?
@fcastellanos another person on UA-cam has a NABU running with the original software catalog being served to it from a PC through a USB to RS422 serial adapter. He wrote the server program and a NABU developer still had all the software.
So it won't be long before there will be a web service established so a NABU can be put online with a simple adapter to party like it's 1983. Or download everything and run your own server.
@@fcastellanos sorry, but the expansion connectors only support 16 addresses, and Z80 I/O instructions, there won't be any option to use them to add rom space, but then you could design a circuit that would give you the ability to read out ROM's of any size.
Thank you for scanning the manual. Kinda want one of these to play with.
It is cool I like to learn more. Way ahead of its time. Closest we ever had to that was on the SEGA Genesis called Sega Channel on our Cable. They might have gotten the idea for it from the NABU.
I know Japan did stuff with games downloading over the air (or CATV) but I'm not sure any other computer did it this way, downloading the entire OS.
Sega was always on the leading edge
I found a page with some system disks, called "Daves Old Computers - System / Install Disks" - it looks like it has the nabu imd files for developers
I SO want to get one of these and make an adapter to use RC2014's CF or SD cards with it, and code up the interfaces for the CP/M API, and turn it into a capable CP/M machine. :)
Getting the software over TV cable network instead of disks sounds convenient and since it was a subscription service I can imagine it was a cheap alternative to actually owning a computer and software. Guess as computers become more affordable the demand for something like this dropped or was not big to begin with if they were launching in regions where people could afford to buy their computers.
Someone will write a ROM and with a Pi have some sort of virtual drive and emulate an MSX - mark my words the RETRO scene is talented.
This is an awesome time for us younger microcomputer enthusiasts - who'd have thought a basically brand-new 8-bit machine would come out of the woodwork this many years later? Thanks for the heads-up, Adrian, you're always bringing us something interesting to gawk at!
Yeah, I bought one. Of course I'm waiting for the retro tech community to do their _thing_, and I'm super excited to see what wild things people are going to be able to do with this sytem. But I'd imagine even without too much effort we could get something like Collapse OS running on it. That's what I'm going to try when my NABU arrives ;)
Hello Adrian
Great video!! I saw another youtube guy called DJ Sures who actually got it working👍
Just ordered one... even though it'll cost more to ship and import it still seems to be a good deal for what you get.
Hello neighbour...... Same here....
Regarding the bidirectional cable network stuff, even in the early days of cable Internet there were a lot of smaller cable ISPs which only used cable for the download, and required you to dial in for the upload. The cable provider in the smaller city where I went to college was like that, and it wasn't until Comcast bought them out that they started to provide true bidirectional cable Internet.
What? Very interesting!
Yes, in older systems, every amplifier along the line (could be many dozens between you & headend in pre-HFC/fiber days - hundreds or thousands system-wide) would need to be replaced with a 2-way capable version capable of filtering out and returning low 4-42MHz frequencies upstream. TV channels in US/Canada began at 54MHz, but a dead band between the up/down paths was necessary to avoid cross-feedback. Early demand for two-way was only for pay-per-view ordering, more advanced scrambling schemes, and a few reverse video feeds from remote studios for public access channels, local government use, etc.
I worked for Shaw in the 90's and they had an offering where you could download Genesis games via a cart that plugged in and was attached to the coax cable. Took about 5 minutes per game to download.
Man, Canada had some weird computers. Our neighbors to the north also beat Compaq in shipping a PC compatible with the Hyperion. Christine McGlade (of You Can't Do That On Television fame) recalled driving to work with a Hyperion computer on the back of her motorcycle.
Wasn't the Hyperion one of those DOS/BIOS-compatible but not-quite-PC-compatible machines, like a Tandy 2000 or TI Professional? Back when it was thought MS-DOS would follow the CP/M model of apps being well-behaved and always going through the BIOS?
The Telidon (the technology behind NABU) is the father of multiple video communication systems like the Videoway that I spent so much time on as a kid. Great innovation for it's time.
MSX you say? It would be cool to have MSX games run locally without the network on these machines. I really like the design, it's so simple yet still has some style to it. Running Metal Gear on it maybe? That would be neat :)
Metal Gear is a MSX2 game, not MSX1. But there are tons of great Konami and Activision (among others) MSX1 games that would be fun to play. Or perhaps with the right ROM(s), you might be able to run MSX BASIC and games out of the box.
IMO It is the best way to use it ,if it is actually MSX compatible.making an sd adapter connected to one of expansion slots or connecting a programmed raspberry pi or similar to the adapter port will do the job.
At least port map is different, keyboard interface is different and it lacks keys (select, F1-F5).
I'd imagine you would need some bodge wires, disk/tape interface, and obviously MSXBIOS (EP)ROM.
But it seems to be easier than assembling MSX from scratch (which is doable for MSX-1, not as much for MSX-2 without a bunch of custom chips).
Since the docs are available, I wonder if someone comes up with a conversion guide
@@jwhite5008 Yeah, much of that can potentially be addressed with a custom BIOS, like the key and possibly port-mapping. Wont be a 100% compatible, but good enough for many of the early MSX1 stuff I guess.
The 8251 is a serial uart, one of the 1977 offerings from Intel. Most parallel ports were supported by a data latch like an LS374 and an input buffer to read the status pins like an LS244 or 245. A one-shot was often used to trigger the strobe when the port was written.
A little less dumb compared to "Keyboard not found, Press F1 to continue"
LOL! I wonder which BIOS manufacturer came up with that?
I work for York and they do have the setup to be seen. I haven't been able to contact the curator since COVID started, but I do have it in with him as I owe him some ATI video cards for the museum.
Ottawa resident here. I never owned one of these, but I was around when they first came out. IIRC, price was around CAD$700 for the system, and then you needed to subscribe to the cable service. Both cable companies in Ottawa (Skyline, Ottawa) carried NABU service, probably another $10/month or so. The computer is useless without the cable service, as you have seen. Worse, the software was "cycled": the set of programs available changed over time, so the local TV guide had "NABU listings" alongside everything else.
And this explains why the system wasn't successful: its entry cost was much higher than Commodore machines (the most popular in the area at the time) and you were tied down to the cable service. Overall not great value.
Why I just bought one of these I don't know. But I got one one the way. Thanks for the impulse purchase dude! :P
Looking at the specs, it probably could have done well on the market if it had a disk drive or at least a cassette port. Streaming software is a dead end nowadays, much less in '82 when people expected to own their shit. I wonder if it's possible to rig up a Raspberry Pi to serve as the 'network' for one of these? Mine will probably just be on display only, but it'd be an interesting project.
Haha - it’s almost like what Xbone tried to be. I had the sega system that played games off of cable network here in Canada as a kid as well
So glad you got one. I have been eyeing them on eBay
So the sx-64 had a case that seemed to be from an oscilloscope... This definitely looks like it started life as a hifi component 8-track tape machine.
I often wonder about where cases come from, I'm sure not all of them are one off designs.
I love and still use my rock solid SX-64. It still works perfectly to this day.
@@DishNetworkDealerNEO if you Google 'some work on the sx64 lemon64' you can see mine. I don't have it any more, I sold it to a guy in Montreal. Cool little machine for sure!!
@@chrisyboy219 I’ll check it out. I’ve considered replacing the Sony Display with a high resolution 4:3 HDTV LCD display with NTSC to HDTV converter, and adding a second speaker underneath with a stereo SID Chip board that breaks up the voices and putting the C-64 Mini board into the empty space and adding the USB Port to the monitor side grill between the Top and bottom halves. The 4:3 HDTV Monitor would have extra inputs and a remote control to control it and direct it to use the other HDMI inputs, allowing it to Switch to the C64 Mini or the original SX 64.
Maybe a bit off-topic, but I love your videos 🤣🤣 Can't wait for more!
A nice addition would be a tape adaptor, or even a disk drive if someone wants to go so far as to design one. A tape adaptor though I imagine could be very simple, one input bit, one output, and do the timing in software on the CPU. In fact maybe the printer port would suffice, you'd just need an adaptor that alters the voltage levels.
Cassette would be fine for 64K, you could get loading time down to maybe 3 minutes, like a lot of UK machines used. In fact a ZX Spectrum game could often load faster from tape than the Commodore 64 could from disk! At least until people started using fast loaders. Stupid design really, Commodore's disk drives had their own CPU, own RAM all sorts of big heavy expensive chips, to do a job that could be done with a WD1772 connected to the CPU's bus. Maybe through the cartridge port, since Commodore put so many more expensive chips behind their ports that it cripped their speed, Sinclair did it all by connecting hardware to the bus and doing everything in software.
But Commodore, and other American companies, tended to design their computers like mainframes, or else they went through a parts catalogue and ticked off everything that said it did a certain job. They _are_ designed a lot like mainframes though, lots of separate chips doing their own work in parallel, leaving the CPU alone. Where Sinclair realised the CPU wasn't doing much when you were loading or printing or whatever, so why not let the very capable CPU handle it?
Anyway, pardon me... point is this this could do the same. It could also likely take an ESP32 module and do Wifi, as well as an SD card adaptor. You might even be able to hack up a Laplink-type cable between it's printer port and a PC's printer port, or else USB on an Arduino. Amend NABU's EPROM to support all this, it would make it a usable computer... assuming you can find the software... If there's enough people who loved it as a kid, there might end up being a lot of homebrew, once development is sorted out. There's already a C compiler for popular Z80 computers of the '80s, that'd be easy to adapt.
The printer port is unforunately output-only, according to schematics, apart from a single BUSY pin that could be polled as very slow input path. The "adapter" DIN5 meant for its cable modem, being semi-standard RS422 may be a better option, though it's locked at the weird bit rate of 111.8kbps (3.574595 colorburst / 32). Is the Raspberry Pi's UART (ttyAMA0) capable of running at this odd rate? If not, 115.2k (3% error per bit; off phase by 30% at the final 8N1 stop bit) might be close enough, depending on character spacing.
There's already a custom MSX-BIOS ROM for the Nabu that enables you to play many MSX1 games (especially the Konami ones) out of the box on your Nabu.
It's still Work-in-Progress, but that opens up a ton of quality games for the hardware platform !
PETSCII Roborts on it :) ??
No reason why this would be impossible!
I only ever knew about this due to the sponsorship notice in the credits of the “bits and bytes” show with Billy Van and Luba Goy - never actually saw one before!
Can't wait to see one of these booting a disk system and possibly running locally loaded software.
I would Love to see it with an LCARS display.
Someone already has a CP/M running on it (!) but it's only with a serial terminal, not using the built-in output. Which according to the tech manual is only good for 38 columns anyway (38 usable out of 40 supported by the hardware), which would be painful for CP/M.