Soviet Videogaming
... or computer gaming more accurately. I recently bought one of these:
It's a Russian home computer called the BK-0010. They were made in the Soviet Union from the mid-1980's until the early 90's. It's based on a Soviet clone of the 16 bit PDP-11 CPU, and it's got 32k of RAM. Graphics are very CGA-ish. Maybe a little behind the times for 1986, but still not bad. Really smooth vertical scrolling. It loads programs via cassette, although I understand there are disk drives available for it as well. Here's a picture of the joystick, which doesn't really work very well.
Most Soviet home computers are just clones of the British Sinclair Spectrum, so this is the closest thing to an "original" Russian home computer. It's not a bad little computer, just not very well engineered. For instance, every connector on the thing is a DIN-5, meaning it'll happily let you plug the power cable into the monitor port and burn itself up if you aren't paying attention. It came with the original power supply, but even I'm not dumb enough to plug a 25 year old piece of Soviet electronics into my voltage converter. It only needs 5 volts to run off of, so It's not that difficult to replace.
It came with a lot of manuals and thankfully my fiancee can read Russian, so I was able to get it somewhat working. I've got it connected to a NEC Multisync II monitor, although the picture is still really jittery. I've also connected the cassette to the soundcard on my PC, so I can download BK-0010 games from the internet and load them on the actual unit. Suprisingly, most games only take between 30 and 60 seconds to load, much faster than your average Spectrum or Amstrad game.
I've only played 20 or 30 games so far, but my impression is the library consists of 25% PC game clones, 25% Spectrum game clones, 25% arcade ports and 25% original titles. Lots of Lode Runner and Boulderdash style games in particular. Overall, I'm impressed with how high quality most of the games are, they're quite playable. More or less equal to what you'd expect from PC Shareware games from the pre-EGA era. Since the thing was only released in Communist countries, all the games are homebrew efforts. There were no companies developing software or hardware for it.
Considering the anti-Soviet tone of many American games from the 80's, I was expecting to find the reverse in a lot of these games. So far I haven't read anything explicitly anti-American, the closest I found was a war game where the good guy was "Red" and the badguys were "Green".
Anyways, after I play around with the library some more I'll post more thoughts on it. If you're looking for screenshots, start here: http://roman-dushkin.narod.ru/bk_games_all.html
Wikipedia has a pretty good description along with links, too. It'll point you towards some emulators if you want to play around with it on your PC.
Here are some screenshots I stole from the internet. Once I get the screen on mine stable, I'll take some myself.
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