Meanwhile, in Soviet Russia.....

[RARusk]

[omegadot]

That's a really interesting perspective on things.

[StopDrop&Retro]

"Pull The Turnip"

 

Well, the video lived up to expectations!

[Great Hierophant]

Electronic games could be turned from frivolous exercises into military training devices. The Soviets would use the tools of Capitalism to destroy the Capitalist system.

[CatPix]

This might be an overbiased view on things.

 

The video lack the presentation on the TIA MC-1 (ТИА-МЦ-1) arcade machines, that were an arcade machine of quite decent specs for the year, aside from the appallingly lacking sound chip (they use a timer akin to PC speaker sound).

Those machines had games on ROM boards, about a dozen games have been released, and about 4/5 have been salvaged and dumped :

 

 

Конёк-Горбунок (Konek-Gorbunok, The Humpbacked Horse,) based on a Russian tale :

 

SOS

 

Снежная королева (Snezhnaya koroleva, The Snow Queen, the famous Andersen tale)

 

A little overviex of the hardware :

• CPU : КР580ВМ80А (clone of Intel 8080), 1.78 MHz
• Video resolution: 256×256, 4 bits per pixel selectable from a palette of 256 colors
  • Background: two video pages composed of 32×32 tiles, each tile is 8×8 pixels. Tile RAM can store 256 separate tiles.
  • Sprites : up to 16 simultaneously displayed hardware-generated sprites; total of 256 sprites can be stored in sprite ROM. Sprites can be vertically and horizontally mirrored in hardware.
• Sound: two КР580ВИ53 interval timers (Intel 8253) driving a mono speaker.
• Display: 20” (51 cm) TV screen
• Main RAM — 8KO.
• Character RAM — 8KO.
• Video RAM — 2KO.
• Sprite ROM— 32KO.
• ROM with game code and background graphics — up to 56KO.

It's quite hard to compare to the videos offer a decent idea of what these machine can do - Looks like a beefied-up Amstrad CPC or an early VGA PC.

 

Most of those machines arrived in the 80's, an era that was the glasnost and perestroika, so by then, and since the early 80's, the Soviet Union had refocused their industry on producing more entertainment goods and bringing the Western level of life into the life of Soviet citizens - if only because despite the heavy censorship, most people in the SU couldn't ignore that what was the standard way of life in the US or in Western Europe was way more comfortable than their own.

 

And while contact between the Soviet Union and Western Europe was limited, contacts between Eastern Europe and Western Europe increased in the 70's and 80. Several people in Eastern Europe watched the Western TV, listened to the Western radios with little to no consequence. Some people had visas and were allowed (from an example I know) to cross the Yogoslavian/Austrian border everyday to work in Austria and go back in Yugoslavia.

And there were of course strong ties between Eastern satellite countries and the Soviet Union. Informations spreaded too much and too fast for anyone to stop them.

 

Copier machines were closely watched and it was illegal to own one at home? But tape recorders (both reel to reel and later audiocassettes) were common furniture and the sales of tapes was not controlled.

Early arcade machines were certainyl focused on "providing" skills and training and/or military mood, but this was certainly more an excuse to milk the money out of the young Soviet citizen and keep them in bars and to keep them entertained (and not preparing a rebellion) than to "train" them. Those aren't Polybius game machines.

 

Edited October 22, 2016 by CatPix

[StopDrop&Retro]

Serious question: Would it be more fitting of communist ideology to have all the machines set to freeplay? Or have the credits all cost the same?

[CatPix]

Welll if I recall right, the machines in the Museum of Soviet Machine we see in the video I posted (located in Moscow) all use the lower Soviet coin of the time, so they all cost the same. I dunno if they give you the same amount of credits.

 

The ideal Communist economy would have no money as the central point is to have all in common. If everybody have every ressource in common, why would there be money?

Tho on a country scale, I think Communisn can't really work.

And the Soviet Union was never Communist. If you look closely on their economy, they weren't merely Socialist. Many Western European countries had more "socialist" advantages than the Soviet union! A quick example : Hospitals were free, but drugs were not. They could be refunded/paid factory you were working for, but if you were in a small factory, then tough luck! Keep sick and smile, Tovaritch!

 

I guess for the most realistic communist-like society you could read the science-fiction trilogy of Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, the Martian Underground economy is probably the closest to what an "ideal" communist economy could be, with "co-ops" specialized in producing one ressource, and trading it with other coops for what they can't or don't produce themselves.

Edited October 23, 2016 by CatPix

[fiddlepaddle]

New projects for Mame!

[high voltage]

Wonder if they are on KLOV?

[BassGuitari]

Interesting how so many of the games are mechanical in nature, or have prominent mechanical components.

There is another "Soviet Arcade" like this (CatPix referenced it earlier) in Moscow. What blew me away about that was the soda machine they had, which just dispensed seltzer water into a glass--one, single glass, that I guess everyone was supposed to share and clean when they were done? --and you added the flavoring separately. Sort of like a soft drink dispenser at any fast food joint except the only option is seltzer (and then the three or four choices of flavors you add to it) and there's only one cup for everybody.

[CatPix]

Yep, confirmed by people who remember those machines from their childhood, they had one glass cup that you had to share. It seems that the Soviet Union didn't made disposable paper/plastic cups, or in too low quantities for those machines.