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Until yesterday, I had believed that the only former East-bloc country with coin-op video games was East Germany with its ill-famous "Poly Play" machine. How wrong I was!
Last night, I stumbled upon a Youtube video displaying some old Russian arcade games. Most of them were clearly mechanical in their design, but there was at least one which looked like a genuine video game. Of course, a discovery like this meant that I had to sacrifice some sleep for the sake of some extremely important research.
The Russian website www.15kop.ru belongs to "Museum of soviet game automatons" and shows pictures of many arcade game machines, both mechanical and electronic. Most of the machines look really amusing - if not due to their apparent technical clumsiness, then at least due to their strange soviet esthetics.
Some of the museum pages include excerpts from the original documentation, stating for example that a single round used to cost 15 kopecks (hence the domain name, I presume) and that there indeed are computer components inside the video games. The rationale for the existence of such machines was documented as well:
"2.1. Play automaton "interceptor" is intended for the entertainment and the productive leisure of population, for the development in the playing eye, accuracy and the rapidity of reaction." (Babelfish translation)
No moneymaking rationale, just the noble idea of enhancing the lives and abilities of the working masses!
According to the Russian Wikipedia page, mechanical arcade games started to appear in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. In the mid-1980s there were already some computerized video game coin-ops, but they seemed to be rather primitive, with monochrome screens or maybe four simultaneous colors.
"Extreme", an Ukrainian company founded in 1986, seems to have been a pioneer of the more advanced soviet video game hardware. Their TIA-MC-1 platform had a soviet 8080-clone as CPU and supported a whopping 16 colors out of a palette of 256, a resolution of 256x256 pixels and even hardware sprites. The soviet homecomputer Vektor-06C released in 1987 seems to have had somewhat similar capabilities - however, with more RAM and without sprites nor dedicated soundchip. Some TIA-MC-1 games can be played with MAME nowadays.
By the way, this was my first blog entry ever. And I'm even planning to write some more on various topics every now and them, so beware.
[Mirrored from my website]
March 30 2007, 16:05:55 UTC 5 years ago
Anyway now I will READ the article.
Plus, friended. And stuff.
March 30 2007, 16:08:10 UTC 5 years ago
ok so
you WERE already friended.
I had thought that was in 'vintage computing' for some reason. I don't know why. I'm all hopped up on Breakpoint/BASS/must get invite done fever.
March 30 2007, 18:44:05 UTC 5 years ago
Here's a bad quality picture of and emulator of "Mysteries of the Ocean" I quickly found in Yandex, the real device is almost exactly the same.
March 30 2007, 20:49:17 UTC 5 years ago
As far as I know, most of these games were more-or-less direct copies of similar western games such as the Nintendo Game&Watch series. The first Game&Watch games came in the late 1970s, so I assume that the Soviet versions came some years later.
March 30 2007, 22:43:31 UTC 5 years ago
March 31 2007, 07:07:33 UTC 5 years ago
The Setun trinary computers were really unique. I once tried to look for deeper tech documents for them (like instruction set etc.) but didn't succeed. I've read that interested people even came from abroad to look at those computers. It's a pity that the government stopped the project - I think the Soviets wouldn't have fallen so much behind in electronics if the authorities hadn't been so conservative about new innovations.
March 31 2007, 17:16:36 UTC 5 years ago
I would also add that many great minds fleed from USSR in late 1910-th to other countries (to US mostly, I think). And the ones that didn't run from revolutionary Russia — were often repressed. That must've made an impact too.
April 4 2007, 07:58:21 UTC 5 years ago
Well they have killed electronics/computer industry which had a great potential, but developed microelectronics layer scanning technology (to scan western chips and simply reproduce them - that's why all electronic components since late 70s were just copies of western elements with russian nomenclature).
April 4 2007, 08:24:50 UTC 5 years ago
http://hghltd.yandex.com/yandbtm?url=ht
He says the machine had only 24 instructions, no inverted code for signed integers (as sign operation has 3 values you can determine and store it in one "trit"), he compares it with 8bit PDP-8 (while Setun had 30 bit processor). Second generation ("Setun-70") had 2 stacks (for commands and operands) before it appeared in PDP-11.
March 31 2007, 19:59:34 UTC 5 years ago
April 1 2007, 10:37:59 UTC 5 years ago
Wario Ware's '3 seconds or less' is enough that it fits perfectly.
And yes, they tend to use the same graphical manner - including the lcd shadows indicating the shape that will be there when triggered.
April 4 2007, 07:52:39 UTC 5 years ago
http://www.15kop.ru/avtomats/repka/avto
BTW This rally arcade on the first screen had a resolution of something like 20x10, each car was represented by something like 3x5 sprite. I think one of the best games was "Jungle Hunt" (which surely was some clone of Western game), afterwards there were "game clubs" (usually a corner in some shop or whatever) with ZX-spectrums all over around and outdated arcades were not popular any more.