The 1983 NABU Personal Computer Experience

hey everybody this 40 year old Naboo personal computer allowed people in Canada to connect to their cable network and download software and applications that they could run at home well I don't live in Canada I don't subscribe to cable and this network disappeared decades ago so what can you do with it well thanks to the community I'm going to show you how you can get the Naboo experience in all its Glory that's coming up today on the Retro hack Shack foreign [Music] everybody well today's the day I've been holding off on talking about the Naboo this has been sitting in my garage for a few weeks now I've been excited to get it out and then look at it there have been a ton of unboxing videos on YouTube about this computer because a bunch of them showed up for auction on eBay or first for sale on eBay from someone who had come across I guess a few pallets of them or whatever and so I like a lot of other people bought one because it's interesting and unique and something that I had never heard of before so today what I'm going to do instead of an unboxing I'll do a quick overview just for those people who may not have uh may not know about it or have have not seen the other videos but it'll be really quick and then what I want to do is I want to see if we can hook this up and get it running the way it was back in the day there's been quite a few developments in the community around this PC and uh just recently in fact yesterday there was uh some software made available that that should bring this back to life and I'm going to show you exactly what you need to do to experience this for yourself or perhaps if you're just interested in computers and the technology this will be super interesting for you as well so the first thing we need to do is get this out of the box so this system again is new in box these were extra units and this is what came with them you get this nice keyboard you get a the computer itself which is here kind of looks like a radio dial of some sort with a power and a reset switch on it got a really nice Naboo personal computer users guide [Music] and I haven't seen this mentioned on other channels when they've done their unboxing but this really is a very for 1983 this was a very well put together users guide and I love the controller over here it looks a lot like a Fairchild channel f controller that came with that game system and I have some of these so maybe I'll look and see if this is compatible and I can hook one of these up and use it with the Naboo and as you can see here this was meant to be hooked up to a TV and there was actually another unit that looks very similar to this called the adapter that would have gone or sat either underneath or on top of the main computer and this would attach to the cable network where it would connect to the Naboo Network and pull down programs and then serve those up to the main unit down below that's how this operated and of course as you can imagine that network is no longer here although there was an attempt to resurrect that Network by York University up in Ottawa so with all of these new Naboo units now out in the public domain there's been a lot of interest in the community in seeing if number one can run programs you know standard programs on this hook up a floppy Drive controller and use floppies because that was certainly available to some people at least to be able to run programs on the Naboo but also but maybe perhaps to emulate that Network and replace both this box and the cable network of course to be able to serve programs up to the Naboo directly instead of having to use that adapter and the cable network to do so and luckily there has been some really good progress so DJ sures has a YouTube channel and he has some personal connection to the Naboo as well I'm going to go into that in a little bit when I talk to DJ and ask him about his personal connection and some of the trivia and background about this unit so the first thing I need to do since I haven't done it yet is actually test out this unit so we've got this ridiculously long cable that connects the keyboard to the Naboo because this was meant to be used like in the living room this would probably be under the TV or in a console you know maybe 20 feet away the keyboard would be your main interface so you would have this maybe on your lap or on your table next to you you'd be able to pull it over and use it so you really needed a long cable like this similar to the way the Atari was set up it had a very long cable to go from the Atari unit itself the 2600 or VCS to the TV that coaxed cable that they used I think was about about 20 feet long so for the same reason so let me go ahead and connect this and connect some power connect a suitable display and we'll turn this on for the first time and see if it's actually working okay well I've decided that the most period appropriate monitor that I have in the hack Shack here is this Commodore 1084 s because this does have composite input on it and the Naboo puts out a composite signal as well as a video signal on RCA jacks and time period this is a pretty accurate probably a few years later than the Naboo but probably during its lifetime the Naboo lasted I think three or four years so yeah this is the closest I think I could come to if I've turned off the lights so that the reflection isn't too bad if it does become a problem I may switch over to an LCD screen that accepts a composite input but for now let's go ahead and turn on the Naboo for the first time and see if it actually works here we go foreign I hope this is on the right input oh there we go so several beeps coming out of the Naboo when you turn it on [Music] okay adapter failure and this is kind of what I expected um the since we don't have the adapter sitting up here and obviously we don't have the cable network this is what you get if you boot up the Naboo we've got the woman on Abu so let's see if we can Rectify this and bring this Naboo back to life okay so before we get started and talk about the software that makes this all possible I just want to let you know what you're going to need in order to get this up and running you're going to need some sort of PC and for that I am using this Raspberry Pi zero two and it just seems like if I wanted to I could actually tuck this into the computer on the inside and you hide this all together if I wanted to now Raspberry Pi's are in short supply right now so I probably won't be doing that because I'm sure I'll be needing this for something else but you certainly could do that and then it would always be ready you know when you want to turn on the computer and use it the other thing you're going to need is a five pin DIN cable and this just happens to be one that I was using for something else I cut it off I always save these cables and connectors for because you never know when you're going to need them if I've pinned in they're pretty easy to find you can find them on Amazon or Ebay I cut the end of that off and uh I'll talk more about this in a minute the other thing you're going to need is an rs-422 to USB adapter like this one this is the one that was recommended by DJ sures on his channel and indeed it looks like it's going to do the job and it's pretty easy and it comes with this little adapter that we're going to talk about next so what you need to do is you need to connect the uh the five pinned in make sure it's on the on the correct pin out for what the Naboo expects to see and since it uses rs422 that has not only a transmit and a receive but it has a positive transmit positive receive and then a negative transmit and a negative receive and so you need to map all of those together now there's also a ground connection on this particular adapter um it's unclear to me I found various resources that said you do need ground or you don't need ground or it's good just to have it just in case so you have a ground reference but I think strictly speaking you don't necessarily need ground to get RS 422 working because it does have that positive and minus level so it'll figure those out so if you watch my channel before you know I like to make these cable diagrams because it gets a little confusing when you're trying to make these and make sure you get all of the right cables on the right pins and especially since the diagrams that you find online usually either have a male reference or a female reference with the pins or without the pins and so it makes it really difficult sometimes you get these backwards so in this case I just put both of them down to make sure that I understood no matter which way I was looking at this connector I would know which way it went and then what I did was I put down the cable numbers here one through five put down what the Naboo expects to see on those cables on those connectors which is you know R plus receive plus transmit minus receive minus and transmit Plus unlike a generic serial connection where you've just got transmit going to receive and receive going to transmit here you also have to pay attention to polarity so receive plus needs to go to transmit plus and so on so I mapped that out and then what I did was I went through the actual cable and I toned out what each one of these pins what color each cable that went to each of these pins on the uh five pin DIN went to because you know these things can vary you never know which of these colors are going to are going to map out to which of these pins it could vary by cable manufacturer so always tone those out so after I tone those out with my multimeter then I had a really nice way to see okay the white wire for example needs to go needs to be attached to transmit Plus on the RS 244 have I been saying rs-422 I may be mildly dyslexic a little bit I may be mildly dyslexic because I wrote down rs244 on this cable diagram I knew what I meant I knew I meant 422 but I wrote down 244 that's hilarious okay so yeah I knew that the you know take the white wire connected to transmit Plus on the rs-422 connector and so forth and so on so once I had these toned out to the right pins it was very easy to look across and make the right connection so hopefully I did that correctly we'll find out in a minute when we test out this software well hey everybody it's Aaron from the future and this methodology does work however there is a problem on this diagram so pause the video now and see if you can figure out what the problem is it's going to come back to haunt me in just a minute and by the way if you're enjoying this video please hit the like button I would really appreciate it all right so what do we do with all these components well we just basically connect them all together so the um rs-422 the USB side of this adapter is going to go to the USB on your computer or in this case the Raspberry Pi so that just goes in there like that and that's connected to the USB port here one issue with running a Raspberry Pi zero or Raspberry Pi zero two like this is you're only without a powered Hub you're only going to get one USB connector I'll tell you how I overcame that when we take a look at the software the rs-422 adapter the nine pin side just goes into the adapter or module that they provided in the when I bought the rs-422 adapter on Amazon it comes with one of these so that's nice you don't have to buy one separately and then of course the last thing is that the DB5 connector is going to go in the back of the Naboo where it says adapter on the back so this cable plus the software that's going to run on the Raspberry Pi here or your computer whatever you have Windows or otherwise is going to take a take the place of that adapter that used to sit over here on top of the the Naboo computer itself a speediest way to the Naboo okay so now let's talk about the software and to do that I have to start by pointing to DJ sure's Channel over here and he's been doing a lot of work on the Naboo computer um partly because he has a personal connection and you can see right here he actually just officially released his video on the Naboo internet Network or whatever it's called which is what the software that I'm using to make this all possible so thanks to DJ and thanks to a lot of other folks um he actually got a software dump from a guy named Leo down here who was one of the developers that worked on software for the Naboo and he sent his dump of what the Naboo Network the software looked like and that's how DJ was able to get this up and running uh for everybody to take advantage of and really this has progressed quickly I didn't think there was going to be any software available to run on this thing for months and he was able to get this up and running basically in a matter of weeks definitely subscribe to this Channel on YouTube if you want to learn more about the Naboo and follow along with the developments now to find the software you're going to have to go to this website naboo.ca and he's putting a lot of his videos DJ is up on this site here along with the software so really good to go take a look at this and and read some articles and and watch some more videos here from him and from other people as well but you need to download the software so to do that you go over here to downloads there will be disk images up here as well but what we're concerned with is the Naboo internet adapter and so you just click read more and here's that latest video that just came out an hour ago as I'm recording this and uh here we go so there's the Naboo internet adapter if you scroll down you'll find versions for Windows Mac and Linux now I'm going to be using Linux because I'm using that Raspberry Pi zero two and he's got some really simple instructions here how to install mono because mono is what this is written in so it'll run on Linux and basically install mono download the zip file from the website here and extract that and then just run the file mono space and the file name and it'll actually run so that's what we're going to do we can download this here he also has some instructions for making cables and such and we'll see in a minute when we go to install the software you can even install and run this locally instead of having the internet adapter software go out on the internet and download whatever the latest and greatest selection of software is you can actually download this and point to it in the software to run it locally and I'll show you that in just a second all right so this is my Raspberry Pi zero two and I went ahead and installed the Raspberry Pi image on this currently you do have to run the GUI version so that you can run this is a this is a GUI application and it runs in mono so you do need to install Windows the windows version or have the windows version running and then yeah you can I've got the software here it's uncompressed so I can just go ahead and run the command here mono space and then the file name and I have this set to connect automatically or to start automatically when it comes up but this is what the software looks like and there are a couple of things that you need to go in and set in the software so if we go to settings here you can see you can set the rs422 port which I have here you can set the bot right and you can set this thing called the transmit delay and these two work together we'll be testing this out in a minute but you can basically speed up or slow down the delay in the commands there's also a place to run Homebrew so if you want to develop an app for the Naboo you can actually just click this little box here and select the folder where your application lives and it will it will run that on Startup instead of of connecting to the collection of files on the internet and then here's where you can set start the server when loaded this is really helpful in my case since I'm running this on a Raspberry Pi zero two I don't have access to the GUI so let me show you how I have this running out of the box so that when the Raspberry Pi t0 Powers up everything just starts automatically and I don't have to log in to start it manually so the first thing I did in the Raspberry Pi was I went in and set this to boot to desktop which is the default and then I set it to Auto login so that it didn't halt at the password prompt it's just going to automatically log in for me and then in the interfaces section of the configuration I turned on SSH and VNC this allows me to connect both over a terminal session or to transfer files via SSH and it allows me to connect with this window that you're seeing here which is a VNC viewer window this lets me connect remotely and this is also how I'm able to have a keyboard and mouse working even though I don't have one physically connected to the USB port because remember there's only one USB port on the Raspberry Pi zero and I need that for the rs422 adapter I was showing before so this emulates VNC emulates a mouse and a and a keyboard as part of the program so now I have access to mouse and keyboard and still have the adapter connected so once you've done all these the only thing you need to do is start this program automatically because I can start it here but again I don't want to have to log in and start this manually every time so the way that you do this on the Raspberry Pi is you actually create a folder in your home directory called uh auto start and that's under dot config so you use this make directory command here and you'd have to change out your name for this if you're using like the default Pi user you would use Pi here or whatever your whatever your username is and once you've done that you can create this file in that folder called naboo.destop or you can name it whatever you want it just has to be dot desktop at the end and you can see mine here so you've got this configuration you can take a picture of this and type it in on your own later on but you just do this desktop entry type application call it whatever you want and give it that same command that we used on the command line mono space and then you do need to make sure you use the full path to this particular file and to be extra safe you could also use the full path to Mono but this is working for me and once you have this set up in that directory you just save it and then when you reboot the computer it will automatically load the application for you so let's go ahead and start the application now because I want to go up to the garage and test this thing out and there we go up and running all right I am back in the garage to test this thing out I've still got the lights off which is why the screen is dim because I want you to be able to see the what's coming up on the screen got the adapter connected so let's just turn this on and hopefully the Naboo Network all the software will just come to life let's see what happens Naboo that comes up oh that's was it doing that before I'm getting beeping is that a good sign three beeps no uh no lights here oh no it's not working what's going on so at this point I started troubleshooting I tested the wires I looked at all of the connections I looked at the pin out which matched the diagram that I had pulled off the internet and I also took a look at even inside the Naboo to make sure that the i o chip which runs all of the i o back and forth to the adapter was working and when I looked at the software I noticed that I kept getting these messages 3en00 sometimes three F and so I put this on hold and I went to record my interview with DJ after the interview was over DJ was nice enough to stick around for actually what ended up being a couple of hours helping me troubleshoot this problem now remember this image that I showed you before and I said there was something wrong with it well it turns out that the image that I downloaded from the internet for the five pin DIN pin out was actually an inverse image and so I had all of my connections flipped left to right and it took us forever to figure this out but once we did I was able to reverse those pins get the correct pin out hook everything up and now I'm finally ready to try again okay now that I've got my wires uncrossed let's try this again so far everything looks the same oh this is different please wait let's see what happens oh [Music] it's loading the software so I'm getting those tones as it loads the various segments of the software it increases the tones [Music] this is cool star field we're in like Flynn folks Naboo July candies here we go the main menu this is awesome so this is exactly what the Naboo would have looked like uh if you were running this at home back in the day you would get uh booted up it would load up that screen and then you would get to the main menu and you could do all of these things now I don't know if I'm gonna have time to go through all of these but let's just go through some of that now I'm just using a Atari joystick here this isn't a legit Atari joystick this is a Spectra video knockoff joystick but it actually works really well so this is just the first one I grabbed so I'm going to be using this to go through some of these so we have Network Services Network guide the Informer classified ads so that was like a Craigslist of you know the the early 80s we have cubert here oh and Minesweeper why is that in Network Services that's weird um and there's Amway what they sell Amway on this okay education channel of course this is a wonderful education education platform that's what all the computer companies said back in the day buy this for your kids so that they can learn things yes don't worry about those pesky games so yeah language arts art computer languages nice can I go into that menu oh yeah Naboo basic basic tutor so we could actually load basic here in just a minute uh I just want to take a look at the menus in general first but okay let's take a look at Family Fun so we've got information Mysteries Mysteries Zork one Zork one and a tutorial that's so awesome man this this system was awesome uh world of games I'll get into a minute let's just go into home management first uh home management also has basic in here so they doubled up on some of the entries and Abu writer I mean we should take a brief look at that as well wow there's a lot in here whiz type tutor so it's like a typing tutor I assume okay well I want to look at some of these in a minute but here's what I want to do because there's so much here to look at and I also want to get to DJ's interview that I did with him because it's so fantastic and if I did both of those together it would take about an hour if I did them back to back so let me do this instead instead of making this video so long what I'll do is I'll play around with some of these programs on the side here and I'll put the interview I did with DJ up in the corner here so you can see that you can listen to the interview and then we'll have some fun with the Naboo Network awesome so DJ how's it going very good thanks for having me awesome awesome I was just showing everybody kind of how to hook things up to the Naboo with the wonderful job you've done on the internet adapter I I expected it would take um you know uh six months or something for people to get anything up and running on the Naboo and here we are you know I don't know maybe uh what has it been like three weeks or two weeks or three weeks since people started getting their nabus from this guy who was selling them on eBay and we have basically a working system so congrats on all of the hardware put into this and the results yeah I think we're at 12 days is that is that about right since I started publishing videos I think so I think so yeah so this is crazy this is crazy uh first of all what's your what's your background how do you know how to do all this stuff well that's that's interesting actually I think it connects itself to Naboo because my family is very technical so even at a young age I was soldering before I can write I was I when I was in grade two too I went to school and I had to tell everybody what a Christmas break what we did for Christmas break and in grade two what I did is I told her what I made an Apple computer I made a computer and the teacher didn't believe me and I talked about it and I was pretty upset so I went home crying and my dad was like what's wrong I said no teacher didn't believe me I made the computer over Christmas break so he called a teacher no my son made the computer and in grade two so what what I got for Christmas was under the tree was all of these chips inside of their long sleeves and a Apple II uh knockoff board and which is ironic about the Naboo is I put it together inside of a Naboo case that was the case that my dad so he he uh drilled holes in for the fitting for the feet for the to keep the circuit board off the metal and everything and that's that's what I built and I used that computer for years and years and years so that's hilarious yeah so that was that was important for my dad to make sure that I understood a lot of electronics I was soldering I was doing everything and he owned a bunch of different companies to do with electronics so including video games my whole life this has been my whole life since I was a kid oh it's fantastic now what was your dad's connection to Naboo so my dad my uncle which is a brother Howard and uh my uncle John who is my grandfather's brother and also a few other people that were just like uh within marriage that were also working for now but um John Kelly and my uncle John were very good friends so my dad was one of the engineers electrical engineers and he worked on the the adapter he worked on the actual Naboo design there's other Naval computers that people don't know about there's the 1100 and the 1600 those were originally supposed to be professional machines that they were going to sell into the workplace to compete with um I guess like the ibms that were slowly starting to come out Etc right and the uh but they were being used for for development so Leo you know was who's very popular now on YouTube because of uh his connection as a next developer he would have used a lot of those old 11 and 1600 development machines all right so those actually came out before that's right so Naboo is a a combination of I believe now this is good because people could do some Google searches and and verify everything they're not going to say but I think it was four companies a company from Calgary Montreal Ottawa and I think two from Ottawa and one of them was actually a Volker Craig who made uh terminals at the time so Booker Craig was a Canadian company doing VT terminals that would connect to mainframes and all these Technologies came together to create what we know now as John Kelly's Vision as the Naboo Network so I mean so you kind of grew up with the Naboo then I sure did it was interesting because I was a love and hate for my family because um and it's an emotional conversation too I think for on my dad's side of the family because there was so much excitement you know Christmas was very great for a number of years when they went public in the stock market and and everything was going well but when things started going down it was a little bit more hard on the family so uh to some people it's a store spot for the conversation and to others it's the uh the dream that could have been and growing up in the Naboo world at such a young age I was exposed to the concept of internet I was exposed to the concept of connected computers and connected ways and we had bi-directional communication in our family with the Naboo which is not something you can get um for the networks that you can buy today because we had more of the experimental stuff in Ottawa we had kojico allowing the uh the upload download we also had modems that were allowing that would allow us to download Over the cable and upload over the phone line it was so forward thinking you know and to grow up with that when I when now they went away there were no options for online except for the odd PBS here and there and growing up with the concept of online and then it disappearing you didn't take it away from me I'm like what should computers all be connected so for the longest time until I got access to the internet in probably 1992 um I didn't uh I didn't think that computers were being used with their fullest potential wow wow it is kind of a revolutionary service I mean I'm thinking of of things like the um it seems like growing up I remember something like the Sega Network or there's some sort of gaming Network that you could attach your your Sega to at least and maybe Nintendo Atari had one Nintendo had one I'm not sure if Nintendo was just in Japan on the famicon but they had one um I think and I don't know if this if this was true you might have to Google it to see but I think in television had one for a very brief period of time as well yes yeah I just remember the commercials because the commercials come on and be like ask your parents to sign up for the Sega Channel you know and I thought wow that sounds like the coolest thing in the world and yet here's the Naboo doing something similar uh what like uh probably four years five years earlier than that right almost um yeah actually like closer to probably 12 years it started in 79 was the idea and um I think by the time it was actually in people's homes and being used I think would have been around 82 or 83. wow and yeah and it lasted for two years until 84 and then at 84 is when the investors pull the plug main investors and John Kelly so the company was split into two and uh John Kelly purchased the assets of Naboo Corp and renamed it to napro network and brought and kept on a few employees and one of those employees was Leo and uh we let it run for another two years I believe until 1985 could have been 86 around there I don't know if you know the backstory to the guy on eBay that had like a thousand of these things and put them up for sale but I don't do you have any information on the guy that found all these who bought these or something I do I do so there's uh there's some speculation that is quite pretty accurate based upon Leo's observation about the area where the the Naboo computers are being sold from and uh how many of the quantity that he has as well and the reason for that is because Naboo actually had made a deal in the United States to Branch off during the time of the end of its demise and that a number of units thousands of minutes ended up and I can't remember the area where the he's the seller is but that is the area that uh the computers ended up so he would have ended up in a warehouse now this buyer or the person who bought it who's now the seller on eBay he actually would have held onto these things I believe until from 1998 is when he got hold of them because some place on his website mentioned a 1998 for me okay this first came to be and uh it you also look at some of his links the seller's links in the website he was selling the Naboo computer early in the early 2000s on his on this uh computer magazine computer website as the z80 project boxes and I'm gathering that wasn't uh incredibly successful because he has a bunch left over and I think he's more given the price that he's selling them at I think he's very surprised to find how many people suddenly have ordered now I have none of that here I have it all in Ontario at my place in Ontario so that's 2400 kilometers away way so I'm like oh crap bye bye bye bye so I buy the uh the Naboo it shows up a couple weeks later and uh yeah I guess the rest is history but um boy was I ever excited to see it show up but you're not just like powering it up and being like Oh isn't this cool you're actually developing software to actually bring these things back to life I mean so the internet adapter uh is actually pulling down the files from the internet right where is that coming from on the back end so it's coming from one of my servers I have a bunch of cloud servers that we use in uh in my world of Robotics so um it's it's on there when I started writing the internet adapter I approached Young Museum I approached everyone on the internet uh Dave dunfield everyone I just sent mass emails to all these people saying can you help me I want to do this thing and everyone kept saying no no no it's not possible it's not possible we don't have enough information we don't have enough information so I said well give me what you got so I collected enough pieces from different sources different parties I was able to start piecing it together and then if you watch my videos I was banging data at the machine and just looking at responses to find out what was going on and I was following the ROM and trying to find out okay what actually should be happening once I realized I was getting code in there I was able to get some data files from Young Museum for the University and then I was able to try to run those but those were broken because they modified them for their own environment right so anyway so fast forward a little bit um what ended up happening was I got Leo was watching me and he had all the data but he didn't want to release the data unless it was going to go to somebody who can actually do something with it so when I got to the point where I was able to run my own programs Leo said I am going to give you something that's going to make you excited so I woke up in the morning and I had LinkedIn had a message um his message said I'll make all your Naboo dreams come true to two different ways especially when I just woke up and I'm all groggy I'm like who is this guy so I checked his message and he says look I have everything let me give you a program so it gives me the main menu and now I put all this effort into it and and and Leo says well I don't want all this to get out because I don't know if it's complete and he's very particular about making sure that this is good so he says don't let it out I said okay so here's what I did I put it on a server I wrote the program and now what we're doing is we're allowing people to go through with what I've done and reverse engineer what I've done to find out how to make their own so because people gave me the little bits of information a little bit of carrots here and there I'm I'm doing that to the community as well if you watch my videos I publish the community protocol I have published Header information he piece it all together there's enough there to actually recreate what I've done that's what I'm really excited for is uh is to see when somebody reverse Engineers what I've done and builds off that so I'm really looking forward to seeing that happen yeah very cool very cool uh what has the response been from folks have you talked to people um yeah what do they say definitely overwhelming um you know I didn't think that people many people were gonna be buying it so when I got it and I put up my first video um and it was mostly inspired the first video was inspired it was I think it was titled something about clarifying some some Naboo misinformation because when I started watching some videos there's a lot of speculation which is easy to speculate when there's very little information on the internet about it so when I start providing that information people started coming to my channel and my channel has never been something I focused a lot of effort on um I do hack consoles I own a robot company I've sold a robot company I've done a lot of great things on robotics but not a lot that's gotten a lot of press or attention in the DIY retro Computing space right so this was the first closure I had to that world and I was nervous I mean it really was um I could talk confidently about robotics all day long but when it comes to the uh the Vintage retro world there's a complete community that I I follow I respect but I don't know if I'm in the same category it's a lot of Disguise myself I don't know I'm I'm seeing a lot of pretty cool retro systems back there on your shelf so you've got a little bit of cred going on there for sure yes a lot of those those consoles have been converted to Raspberry Pi as you know and I take the circuit boards out and I stash them away I tell you man when you see the smiles on like my families or my friends faces when I bring out the Atari or the intellivision and has every game ever and I don't have to say oh I don't have that cartridge we have access to it oh man the beers are flowing and everyone's playing games oh yeah it's great it's a great night all the time yeah yeah I understand it I mean I wrote a book on the Raspberry Pi so I love the Raspberry Pi I use it all the time um so I I think it's you know individual preference it's to eat to each their own and like you say sometimes you get stuff it just it's not worth fixing or or not able to be fixed without you know years of effort in that case why not you know Salvage the case and and turn it into something usable that still brings back that nostalgic feeling for people they're certainly hard to come by these days at a reasonable price so yeah chip shortage definitely is um is affected all of us obviously not everyone is going to be able to play with one of these systems because even though there was a thousand of them uh made available and you can still I think find them here and there right on eBay and things uh there's not very many of them but for those that do have them or those that want to get one and play around with it do you have any any tips or tricks or things that you would share for them to to know most definitely so we uh we do have a list of the database for the main file the main menu and on the main menu has all of the applications that are available now something that's really interesting a lot of people know of one of the secrets is if you go to shortcut you can type in the name of any application that's in the menu but there are some applications that are not in the menu for example one one of those is Pac-Man so if you type in QA space Pac-Man this is the quality uh Assurance like well this is the QA version of Pac-Man this was not actually published live this was not available to people and in Leo would sneak in these so that when he got home to be able to test them so you'd see one of my videos where I'm playing Pac-Man a lot of people are wondering how I got to there here's here's how and there is an Easter egg in this as well but um I can't show it to you because I'm not good enough with that playing Pac-Man but if you eat every single Dot except for the one in the top right and that's the last dot you eat if it's in the top right it'll actually turn um the the Maze and put Leo's name into it oh wow I have not played that yet on mine but I am definitely going to go back out and try that out I've tested out a lot of the other applications and games on there and uh they're running great so yeah thanks so much for all of your work and I guess I should thank really it's been a community effort do you have one or two favorite projects that are are happening right now I definitely do um so there's there's two projects that I think I'm I'm following very very well is one is the MX open FSX emulator for Naboo and I've given him some code to be able to try to run on it and if he can create an emulator then I'd like to be able to hook up a network uh the Naboo internet adapter so that the emulator can play some of that software and the other one is um uh Ken segler who is um he's made a floppy adapter uh that with an SD card and now that's for CPM but he's kind of being intrigued by being another project that I'm working on to uh to do actually a floppy to uh to SD in the navu itself for it to be named to happen so I think that's great and he's also running Cleco software on his Naboo yeah small Hardware modification because the VDP doesn't have an interrupt connected to the z80 so you have to actually connect that interrupt up and then the software from a uh from my colleague will run on it with a new e-pro oh wow that's so cool I'll have to check out those projects as well a collecting enough pieces from different sources different parties I was able to start piecing it together and then if you watch my videos I was banging data at the machine and just looking at responses to find out what was going on and I was following the ROM and trying to find out okay what actually should be happening once I realized I was getting code in there I was able to get some data files from Young Museum for the University and then I was able to try to run those but those were broken because they modified them for their own environment right so anyway so fast forward a little bit um what ended up happening was I got Leo was watching me and he had all the data like he didn't want to release the data unless it was going to go to somebody who can actually do something with it so when I got to the point where I was able to run my own programs Leo said I am going to give you something that's going to make you excited so I woke up in the morning and my I LinkedIn had a message and I'm because I have so many followers LinkedIn you can't just easily add me you have to message me and stuff so I got this message in the morning at Penn age just like when Robin sent me the text saying about um his message said I'll make all your Naboo dreams come true especially when I just woke up at about groggy I'm like who is this guy so I checked his message and he says look I have everything let me give you a program so it gives me the main menu and now I put all this effort into it and and and Leo says well I don't want all this to get out because I don't know if it's complete and he's very particular about making sure that this is good so he says don't let it out I said okay so here's what I did I put it on a server I wrote the program and now what we're doing is we're allowing people to go through with what I've done and reverse engineer what I've done to find out how to make their own so because people gave me the little bits of information a little bit of carrots here and there I'm I'm doing that to the community as well if you watch my videos I publish the community the protocol I have published Header information you piece it all together there's enough there to actually recreate what I've done and that's what I've actually yeah and um and that's what I'm really excited for is uh is to see when somebody reverse Engineers would have done and builds off that so I'm really looking forward to seeing that happen yeah very cool very cool uh well I again I really appreciate your work I highly encourage people to go out and look uh at your videos I already plugged the history one where you pulled up those videos uh everything with all the Naboo stuff on it uh the documents and stuff which was kind of crazy so I hope people go check that out because it's a great bit of History uh in and of itself uh but yeah thanks for all your work thanks for joining me on the show today and uh yeah we'll be talking online I'm sure yes most definitely okay thanks so much all right bye-bye foreign well there you have it the mighty Naboo uh let's get Pac-Man going here again uh from 1983 and it's amazing this thing plays games really well so I expect there's gonna be a lot of Homebrew coming for this machine and if you're at the end of the video and you say oh I didn't get a chance to find a Naboo you can still find some on eBay and you can also download eventually an emulator that they're working on to get the Naboo up and running so you can run that on your Windows PC or your Linux PC in an emulator and experience the Naboo for yourself my guess is since that it's since it's in the emulator and you don't have to mess around with downloading uh bad pictures from the internet bad diagrams uh it'll be a lot easier to get it up and running probably you just set some options turn it on and it'll it'll come up and running just like it was for me here today so yeah I'm super impressed with the level of games that can be played on this thing for 1983 it really does seem to me to stack up there with certainly a guess an MSX but also maybe even an Atari 800 level of gaming and the other thing that's really amazing about this is the fact that this was all available over a cable connection so you know a precursor to model modern day Broadband or something like that certainly way before the internet but the fact that you should you could just dial up you know rent one of these systems number one uh buy one of these games I guess online uh through through here or by calling up the company and ordering it and then being able to play that game just downloading it whenever you want new cartridges to worry about nothing just turn it on select your game wait a few seconds it's loaded up and ready to go really really ahead of its time I think and it's just great to see it actually up and running the way it would have been back in the early 80s so I hope you enjoyed that episode if you did please subscribe to my channel it would really help me bump those subscription numbers up I'm edging towards ten thousand I don't think it's going to be possible at this point but what a great holiday gift that would be to get to 10 000 before the end of the year so if you haven't subscribed yet hit the Subscribe button I would really appreciate it or consider becoming a patron their support really keeps the channel going and you'll see their names coming up listed in the credits so those guys get extra after the episode commentary and special things through the uh a patron Community as well as like I said their name in the credit so ah super excited I'm excited to go back and try some more of these programs but that's going to do it for today thanks for watching patrons receive ad-free and early access to content after the episode commentary and of course your name in the credits if you liked that episode here's a few more you might enjoy and I thank you for your support

Channel: Retro Hack Shack

Views: 16,661

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Id: _yhbQJ145mQ

Length: 48min 8sec (2888 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 12 2022