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Child of NABU Founders Working on Network Emulation

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

 
misterblack said:
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.)
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I keep checking for the relisting and every time I see it's not there yet, I think of this:

Nabu Bhat.jpg
 
Plasma said:
maybe the guy planned to build the world's worst beowulf cluster :poop:
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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 333 :)
 
misterblack said:
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.
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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 .

Alternatively, I was thinking I could just skip the Z80 emulation and just run C code on 800Mhz Teensy and access the NABU hardware resources through the MCLZ8 local bus interface. It would sort of turn the NABU into a Teensy "shield" where you would have the ability to code in C using the Arduino IDE to develop new and interesting programs for this vintage 8-bit machine. I implemented a project like this using the MCL65+ in an Apple II. Here's a link: MCL65-Fast.
 
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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.
 
seat safety switch said:
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.
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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.

Should yield some fun results in a NABU.
 
seat safety switch said:
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.
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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.

Does anyone know what specifically the Nabu Network Adaptor does??
For years I've had just the board and the shielded demodulation box in storage and I've had a hard time telling how it relates to the rest of the system since both the adaptor AND the main unit has cable in/out and I've just assumed that you are just skimming the sideband for a data channel you don't need TWO cable equipped boxes to do it.
 
I was fortunate enough to find a fully functional ZAX Z80 ICE about 10-15 years back. It's really an invaluable tool for debugging systems at both software and hardware levels. They occasionally come up on eBay, although all-too-often without the pod or cabling.
 
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