What were soviet computers like? There isn't a huge amount of information. Looks like a lot of it was ZX Spectrum clones, a few Apple 2 clones, etc.
Any games you'd recommend?
 Tip Your Landlord Shirt $21.68 |
 UFOs Are A Psyop Shirt $21.68 |
Tip Your Landlord Shirt $21.68 |
Posting random soviet games I found on YouTube
Its a strange rabbit hole
Why is it in the capitalist language, English?
not him but only the "cool" words are in English and as you might have noticed, it says 1991 in the video, so it's not really soviet as the USSR collapsed in 1991, but I know you're a Zoomer so it's ok. Also, Eastern Bloc propaganda didn't really use "Capitalist" that much really, try "Imperialist" next time
>Eastern Bloc propaganda didn't really use "Capitalist" that much
Wait, who did then? China?
No, we did both. Even imperial-capitalist when you wanted to sound super serious.
America did.
They were Z80 based home computers that had decent keyboards. Very capable systems when the alternative was usually nothing at all.
Most were clones like
They usually were still compatible with their western originals and played all the same games/software, but sometimes also had a few enhancements and were better than the original
Of course the clones came out years after their western originals so of course they should have been better
Used to own a few Z80 / ZX Spectrum and 8080 and 8088 compatibles myself
Were there any homegrown systems that weren't clones?
Sure, like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juku_E5101
But they still used western CPU design and just cloned it, it wasn't home-grown CPU like Elbrus is today.
There were a bunch, but unless we're talking home based homebrew, it was a lot of uni/mil developments as usual. For instance I know a dude who worked with the Setun in university. That shit used ternary logic instead of binary.
I had to google that. That sounds cool as frick.
>used ternary logic instead of binary.
For what purpose?
Hey there's probably a reason you never heard of it.
Back in the vacuum tube era, ternary compuers were 1.5 times faster than binary computers using the same amount of components. Solid state components getting cheaper and smaller made such advantages less relevant.
>ternary logic
On, Off and ???(high impedance)?
off, on, even more on
Negative On, Off, positive On.
Pardon my being a dumbass . Why is it better than binary?
You could theoretically make more complex computations with less steps.
Is quantum computing going to be using this stuff?
Quantum computing is four states, tertiary is three, and binary is two.
Quantum computing states
>failed, going to fail, failing and fake
It’s not real.
Zoomer posting is four states
1. Selecting something to shitpost about
2. Preparing to shitpost about it
3. Currently shitposting about it
4. Just finished shitposting about it
watched some video where a dude said the half adder wouldnt need to do a ripple carry, but at the same time they would need to have 2bits per binary bit so its double the gate density unless you figure out how to implement a proper level step for the 3rd state.
It kinda does make sense since carry rippling takes a lot of time relative to ALU operation.
Pretty sure the examples of machines worked like
and not negative voltages. Like 0V/GND, 1V and 2V.
Yeah but you interpret them as negative so its
00 for -1
01 for 0
10 for 1
11 for -0 IE the wrap case
>you interpret them as negative
That depends if it's balanced or unbalanced.
Why the many arrow keys?
Lots of different directions in Russian
If you want a rabbit hole, soviet arcade games is where it really is at.
https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/332297-top-10-must-play-soviet-arcade-games
Yes, aggregator and shit, but it has a nice video for Konyok Gorbunok and Snezhnaya Koroleva, and Kot-Rybolov (Mame emulates them nicely)
As for computers: Lots of Z80 and ZX spectrum clones. A few early IBM PC clones. Oddly enough the Agat computer that's claimed to be an Apple 2 clone is usually NOT an apple 2 clone. It has some compatability with Apple2 software, but lacks a lot of the WOZ-izms that made the Apple what it was.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/agatemulator/ There's a fairly good emulator for it.
Not OP but this is why I love /vr/. There is always someone with niche interests who can answer the most obscure vidya questions.
A popular series of personal computers were the DVK (ДBК) machines. Those were shrunk down clones of PDP-11 minicomputers. It can run the very first version of Tetris.
I came across some soviet MSX clones. Would have to dig up the links but they're on msx.org wiki
MSXes would be hard to clone
There were actual Japanese MSX computers in USSR. They had bilingual keyboards with a nightmarish Cyrillic layout where they just assigned Cyrillic letters to similar Latin characters.
>nightmarish Cyrillic
*Latin, they are switched the other way around. Screw QWERTY, enjoy JCUKEN.
>B/W Ж/V
>not B/V Ж/W
A puzzling place that land of the rising
B/W makes sense for people who know German instead of English. That language was more relevant to the Soviets due to East Germany being a thing.
I remember having them in school back in 92-94, but I never understood they were MSX until maybe 2015. Teachers never let us play them either, except maybe 2 or 3 times during all those years under REALLY strict supervision.
I would pay a lot of gold to get my hands on those orange/red screens that were in the Chernobyl show
I don't know what they used for that show, but the Compaq Portable III had a red plasma display that looks kind of neat.
Red letters on black background is actually a color monitor mode on BK-0010 (БК-0010) computers.
The show had some DVK-2's as props, but those have green or white phosphors. The red text is definitely an artistic choice by the show makers, i doubt any institutions used BK's and even if they did, the font didn't look like that. It was like
's pic and letters were wider due to the way the color mode worked.
There were definitely gas plasma screens that were deep amber, almost redish in the USSR. Same with the west.
I know there were just a couple redish phosphor CRTs in existence in the west but those were more super dark orange than actual red.
Depends what more super dark orange than actual red you identify as
if you do actually use a terminal, try cool-retro-term
Most were indeed spectrum clones. Some were rather true to the original, so even such things like ZXHD works with them. Quality was ranging from tolerable to horrible (as with EVERYTHING made in ussr/russia), especially with keyboards and joysticks.
Here is my Delta-S from 1991.
>Any games
Robotron seems like an obvious choice
And here are some of the games (mainly for the east german KC85 line)
https://lanale.de/kc85_emu/KC85_Emu.html
But also:
https://archive.org/details/arcade_polyplay
AFAIK was that Z80 CPU clone that many of the east german and russian computers used indeed made in east germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U880
I know since my earliest experiences in gaming and computing was using those east german KC85 computers in school (those soft rubber keyboards were the worst that I ever used) and playing the only east german arcade machine "Polyplay" in some east german youth hostels mid to late 80's and during the last "Young Pioneers convention" in '88 in Karl-Marx-Town (now Chemnitz).
Pretty cool, anon. Were computers not distributed throughout the whole USSR?
Czechoslovakia was pretty ahead with electronics manufacturing too, I wonder if there did processors too?
>Pretty cool, anon. Were computers not distributed throughout the whole USSR?
I'm not sure. I was only using these east german "home" computers (that pretty much nobody used at home) in school, but I don't have a deeper insight into their distribution (or the other GDR computers for productive usage). But some programming teacher later told me, that most of the productive applications were pirated version from the west with the original copyright and developer strings patched out via a hex editor and that if you knew how to access it you could still trigger the output for some of the original copyright texts, since apparently those version were rather pirated in a rather shoddy way.
dBASE --> Redabas
CP/M --> SCP
MS-DOS --> DCP
But apparently the mentioned east german Z80 clone U880 was the only Z80 clone behind the iron curtain, since the other countries including russia rather used Intel 8080 clones (K1810WM86 manufactured in the USSR) for their machines. East germany was rather late with their 286 clone U80601 that was used in various Robotron machines. I still remember visiting one of the Robotron service centers with my parents in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz) for some reason back in the day. Maybe the reason was to obtain the mandatory official school calculator SR1, but I'm not quite sure anymore.
USSR was producing several Z80 clones (T34BM1, КM1858BM1, etc) but they curiously had "U880" written on the die. So it looks like East Germans were faster in creating a copy of Z80 and the Soviets just used their design instead of making their own.
I've just learned that Bulgraia used to manufacture their own clones of 6502 CPU. I thought that only CCCP and DDR were capable of microprocessor manufacturing inside the Eastern Bloc.