NABU Unboxing and Setup
When DJ came back to Calgary he brought a surprise with him. It's a new-in-box NABU from the 80s just for me! I'm a lucky man!
I am going to unbox it, set it up, and start running it. It's gonna to be fun! Cross your fingers that it still works after being in a box for 40 years And let's hope there aren't any cockroaches inside
If you're not familiar with NABU computers, it's a really cool story, here's the description from https://nabu.ca/
(Natural Access to Bi-directional Utilities)
A personal home computer was released to consumers in 1982 to connect families and businesses on a worldwide network. Founded in Ottawa, Canada, in 1982, families and schools used cable TV modems to connect NABU PCs to a country-wide network. In addition to standard PC capabilities, the NABU computer could download software and information content through the cable feed. Applications included games, programming languages, and news.
It'll be exciting to now be an official part of the NABU community! There have been so many cool things going on with the NABU recently, check out DJ's playlist to get the whole story: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNT_tjSHIQ3lGJR_zOqh9gGeHzykR0spq
NABU computers run in DJ's blood!
Join the live chat and add your comments, ideas, and suggestions!
.................Edit...Noticed that one DJ video showing Pac Man and that looked so good, much better than the Atari 2600 version and so much like the original arcade game, Impressive for 1982!
Been keeping up with your YouTube channel.
I'm going to start looking into @DJ's project here. Sounds fun and very interesting to learn about.
I'm off to watch your unboxing to start things off! Thanks for sharing.
I still have it although not sure I have a tv that supports it anymore and I don’t want to do a composite hack.
that’s a bit different than the one I have. But it’ll work just fine
Do you think the difference with the Australian zx80 is PAL?
Assembly I dreamed of having an assembler. All I could do was peek and poke a bunch of hex code into memory to do anything in 1K. I got to know that little z80 chip (same one in the NABU) quite well.
The RF box I purchased supports PAL NTSC SECAM etc but it looks like the modern day RF converters are looking for a bunch of signals the ZX80 just doesn’t provide including back porch and colour burst as the old black and white TVs didn’t look for it but the new TVs do. All the zx80! Provide was sync tip because that’s all the old TVs needed or looked for. So the new TVs and my RF converter won’t work. There is a hack for it but I don’t want to mod my zx80. It appears to be working fine as you can see key presses flash the screen.
Excited to hear about ARC progress and code optimization. Is there a fully browser based version on the horizon :-).
The story about the NABU being resurrected is because the units were discovered in the USA at some guy's farm. He's the one selling them. Until November 2022, there were only a few dozen NABU's in the world. I had a few, and others had one or two - that was it. They may have been from Ottawa, but the company went bankrupt in 1986. Read more here: https://nabu.ca
Your only option is to get it from the seller on eBay
it’s generating a video output. I haven’t connected it to a crt yet. Maybe this weekend!