desertrout
Member
DJ et al are making some remarkable progress... we found the Ebay (and Craigslist) listing three weeks ago, he ordered one right away, and now they'll have a publicly available Nabu server live shortly at nabu.ca
The seller mention to me the eBay froze the listings because he was too far behind shipping stuff out. Once he gets caught up, the listings should work again.
(A viewer visited in person and told me there were an estimated 2200 units although it's unknown how many of those actually work. The seller tests them first before shipping.)
That’s honestly what kept me from keeping many of my old computers from back in the day. I had just heard about Beowulf clusters and I remember reading a post asking if you could use 10 386 to build one, and a person said sure if you wanted it to be slower than one celeron 333maybe the guy planned to build the world's worst beowulf cluster
I wonder if it wouldn't be difficult to use my MCLZ8 (Z-80 emulator) to act as an interposer which converts the MSX hardware calls to the NABU motherboard resources. The MCLZ8 uses a Teensy 4.1 to emulate a Z80 and supports the local bus interface so it can used as a drop-in replacement for the Z80. The Teensy could easily emulate all of the system RAM and ROM so would hold the MSX BIOS and RAM so there would be no need to access the motherboard RAM/ROM. It could also possibly convert MSX peripheral mappings to those on the NABU. If the video and sound IC's are the same then remapping them using the MCLZ8 would be trivial. And, in theory, converting the keyboard routines and interrupt scheme may also be do-able. Would allow us to run MSX cartridge games on the NABU, but probably no disk drive support unless some hardware was developed .I did a quick look at the schematics, and it would easy to give the system 32K of ROM. Just a simple mod and running the extra address linse to the ROM socket.
Of course, that won't make it MSX compatible because of the different IO ports. At first glance the interrupts are handled differently too. And of course the keyboard works completely differently as well... So yeah loads of differences.
I would say would not be hard to port something designed for the MSX if one had the source -- fixing the IO ports and changing the keyboard routines should theoretically do the trick, and wouldn't be that hard.
Yup. I recently used the MCLZ8 to isolate a bad DRAM in an Osborne-1 - wrote a little C code and found the bad chip in a few minutes. Was also fun to use it in a TRS-80 Model III to gain some serious acceleration.MCLZ8 sounds like it could make a good replacement for an old-school Fluke 9010A.
That was a device for diagnosing and testing computers, you’d pull out the z80 and be able to control the bus - make writes and reads to memory consistently so you could e.g. test if a buffer or DRAM had packed it in, checksum a soldered ROM, or explore the memory map.
9010A's are still around years after they stopped being produced but they are still in very high demand in the arcade repair industry. It's uncommon to see one in working condition sell for less than $1000.MCLZ8 sounds like it could make a good replacement for an old-school Fluke 9010A.
That was a device for diagnosing and testing computers, you’d pull out the z80 and be able to control the bus - make writes and reads to memory consistently so you could e.g. test if a buffer or DRAM had packed it in, checksum a soldered ROM, or explore the memory map.