Recently I was happy to be among those who purchased a Nabu computer listed by the seller PellMill Inc on eBay. I'd missed out on the first round after the video from Adrian's Digital Basement, telling myself that it would be a long time till anyone would be able to reverse engineer the product enough to load code on it. How wrong I was! Within a couple of weeks of the video coming out, DJ Sures and the team at The Nabu RetroNET had code up on their website that would allow a modern computer to emulate the network adapter and feed software to the Nabu PC. Once I found out about this I regretted not purchasing a machine at first and I took the opportunity when the next batch of machines was released.
While I was waiting for my Nabu to arrive I watched videos and did some reading up on this computer. I was able to buy the USB to RS422 adapter and solder up an adapter cable using 9 Pin D-Sub connectors I had on hand, and 5 Pin DIN connectors (DigiKey Part Number CP-1050-ND) that I'd purchased for another project. I purchased the Dtech adapter recommended on nabu.ca, but I don't like the look of the screw terminal connector so I soldered both ends of the cable and got a nicer looking cable.
Getting the software going was a bit more of a challenge. I used the PC based version of the application to get started. This was actually quite simple and it worked out of the box the first time...
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What I really wanted too have is a Raspberry Pi based solution so that I could permanently pair with the Nabu and have a functioning stand alone solution, just like the Nabu would have had back in the day. Aaron at the Retro Hack Shack has a video showing how he did this which was inspiring. It turns out that the software team has made some significant improvements in the Linux version and Mono is no longer a dependency, meaning that this can run from the "lite" version of a Raspberry Pi, and so it's easier to run this on a lower power Pi. This is quite helpful because of how hard it has been to get Pis. I was fortunate to find an RPi 3A+ unit from Microcenter back in December 2022. This model doesn't have alot of RAM, so it's a good match for the lite version of Raspbian, and ends up being a good match for the proeject with a the compact size but also a full sized usb port for the Serial Dongle to plug into...
It's great been alot of fun playing DigDug and other 8-bit classics on the flat panel TV. The Nabu fits in quite well with the "mostly" black look of my entertainment center, it truly was a product ahead of its time both in both form and function.
