nabu

Back in Novemeber of 2022, I started seeing things online about the NABU, a z80 based computer from a defunct Canadian company. Apparently a warehouse full of these things was being sold on ebay for $60 a piece, so I figured I’d get one to play with.

Unfortunately, I procrastinated a bit too long and they were quickly sold out.

I saw on a few forums, that apparently they sold so quickly that the seller took down the listing so he could keep up with shipping them out. I set up an ebay notification so I could jump right on it when they were relisted.

That notification came on February 10th, and I jumped right on it and ordered one which came in about six days later.

Before I could do much with it, I needed a usb to RS422 adapter which I picked up off of amazon. Pretty much every thing I know so far about the NABU has come from https://nabu.ca and DJ Sures’ Youtube Channel.

The NABU was designed to pull it’s programming over a cable network that is no longer active, so DJ Sures created the NABU Internet Adapter software that fulfills the same role. It has a number of programs that have been developed/ported to the NABU, including Cloud CP/M, a chat client, and a number of games and demos.

I haven’t had much time to explore this unit yet, but I look forward to playing around with it.

There is an emulator for the NABU using MAME which is available on https://nabu.ca. There is also C library to interface with the hardware that can be used with the z88dk compiler. Hopefully, I’ll get my first hello world compiled and running today.

Update:

I got the hello world program compiled. I loaded the pak file into the NABU Internet Adapter and pointed the MAME emulator at it and it worked!

The next step is to try it out on the actual hardware.