6 ms·

Museum of Soviet arcade machines

90 points by tosseraccount 10y ago

pdkl95 10y ago
The hotel I was staying at in Moscow in '92 had "Snaiper-2". I really liked it. Sure, it's a basic target-shooting game, but it's entirely electromechanical and it had a lens in the sight that made the target seem like it was further away.
santaclaus 10y ago
The pixelated face on 'Magistral' kind of looks like a hipster. Red beanie, big glasses, beard.
- xufi 10y ago
  Imagine Pacman except with KGB Putin or Stalin chasing nukes
scrumper 10y ago
Look at the disassembly photos for Morskoi Boi! It's lovely oily electromechanical stuff. I'd love to have a go.
- varjag 10y ago
  It's a clone of a U.S. product, Sea Hunter. Same for most of the other Soviet arcades.
  - jgw 10y ago
    Do you know if they run on 6502s and other Western chips of the time? Were they cloned, or imported? Or were there Soviet ISA's? I remember reading years ago about how Russian computer scientists in the cold war were more honed in algorithm design, because they basically had to squeeze as much as they could out of their processors to compete with faster Western hardware.
    - varjag 10y ago
      Morskoi Boi/Sea Hunter has no computer, or chips for that matter. It's 1960s tech. Some computer based arcades started to appear in late 1980s, but more like Pong clones and similarly simple "racing" games with 2600-like sprites. At this point the "coops" started popping up, offering pay per minute experience on Atari 800 and ZX Spectrum. There was no Soviet 6502 or Z80 clone; there were however 8080A clones and DEC LSI-11 inspired designs. There were a bunch of creative programmers sure, although there hardly was a real "school" and CS remained largely backwaters to the West.
      - LionessLover 10y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U880 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U880 > The U880 is an almost identical copy of Zilog's 8-bit Z80 microprocessor. I wrote my first machine-level programs on that chip (I didn't have an assembler, only a dis-assembler, so I hand-translated the code and then used the dis-assembler to check if I had made typos).
      - pvg 10y ago
        There were Soviet and East German Z80s, Bulgarian 6502s, etc.
        varjag 10y ago
        If you mean the T34 one, yeah it was in USSR in the sense there was tenderloin in the shops. I.e. we knew the name but I never met anyone who could get hold of it. Even then not sure it was even heard of until 1990s. Bulgarian 6502s were probably shipped with their Apple II clones. Those were hard to come by.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
sandworm101 10y ago
There appears to be an app that recreates the Morski Boi! game. http://www.148apps.com/app/541402297/ http://www.148apps.com/app/541402297/ This reminds me of the Tetris story: Who exactly would own the various rights to this games?
- cmg 10y ago
  Why link through 148apps rather than directly to the App Store? https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/morskoi-boi-sea-battle/id541402297 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/morskoi-boi-sea-battle/id541...
  - sandworm101 10y ago
    Because I googled the term and that's the first result I came across.
centizen 10y ago
Super interesting stuff.
DanBC 10y ago
A long time ago there was a similar thread. It only got 11 comments, but maybe people are interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668085
steveklabnik 10y ago
I've been to the one in Moscow, it was a great time. It reminded me a lot of the Musée Mécanique on the Embarcadero.
soundoflight 10y ago
They just talked about this on the latest episode of the Idle Thumbs podcast! The podcaster's favorite was one with a mechanical car that drove on top of a video. https://www.idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs/episodes/disable-enemies-to-reveal-enemies https://www.idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs/episodes/disable-enemi...
johansch 10y ago
Just rembember to shit in a corner if you do visit.
- dang 10y ago
  Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN.
  - johansch 10y ago
    Sorry about this. Russia just did what I referred to in my country so I'm a bit emotionally upset. Sweden is being attacked via the Internet by Russia; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11740587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11740587 for more detals. This is the substantiation.
rdtsc 10y ago
Oh I remember those! Nice. With the obligatory soda machine. They had a regular glass (made from glass, not disposable). Pushed it upside-down in this washer valve which sprayed water on the inside of it. So you "washed it". Then you put coin in, forgot how many kopeyks for regular fizzy water, it cost more to add syrup. Then the person behind you used that same glass, and so on. Today I'd think it is crazy unsanitary, and would never drink out of it. In the summer, throughout the city they also had large yellow barrels on two wheels with kvas (this fermented drink made from bread). Also with reusable glasses which the seller would quickly rinse with water before handing it to you. That was the best thing on a hot summer day.
- in_hindsight 10y ago
  Oh man those kvass canisters. So in our area there was an urban legend that once a truck transporting kvass (kind of like a fuel truck) crashed and fell on the side. Kvass poured out and along with it monstrous worms size of a human leg (nobody ever washes those canisters). I wonder if that was possible.
  - swolchok 10y ago
    Seems like this would be really bad business just from a transportation perspective. Giant worms take up transit space that could be filled with kvass instead. A quick Google for "giant worms" finds a few that are a couple centimeters in diameter around the world, but none in the vicinity of Russia.
    - rdtsc 10y ago
      However, there was a pretty well developed culture of urban legends and rumors like that. Then there was no internet, official channels were not trusted and so on. So that made it a nice fertile ground for urban legends. My uncle even made one up with his friends. They went fishing, got drunk and decided to tell everyone they saw aliens land. They had noticed an area by woods that was burnt by a lightning strike and some fire had started. So that became the landing site. And so on. He made us kids and a few women from the village believe him. There were national ones of course. My favorite was about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole. The rumor was that the scientists had reached hell (temperature increased dramatically, which it did in reality, see! every legends needs a tiny bit of truth there), and there was, of course, a red monster which crawled out from the whole. I really loved that story as a kid. There were countless others which I already forgot.
opticals 10y ago
Soda machine is the best !
ikonst 10y ago
I've been to the one in Saint-Petersburg. Probably worth a visit, but do expect most machines to be under-maintained, and keep you wondering if the game is even receiving your inputs... Though, I suppose, when those machines were placed in random "palaces of culture" across the USSR in the 70-80s, their state on average wasn't any better.
- mlvljr 10y ago
  It was, never played a broken one, I think. Look, they wouldn't be remembered so tenderly, if they were not working well :)
bitwize 10y ago
Magistral is so unfair. At any moment a blue car can come up from behind and rear-end you, including instantly after you respawn. Is this by design, a sort of Soviet nihilistic humor?
glwtta 10y ago
Морской бой was the shit!
mlvljr 10y ago
I know where they and actually will probably visit the next time I'm walking past that street ad on the river bank :)
rodionos 10y ago
Морской бой! My favorite as a kid while waiting for connecting flights at airports.

90 points by tosseraccount 10y ago

The hotel I was staying at in Moscow in '92 had "Snaiper-2". I really liked it. Sure, it's a basic target-shooting game, but it's entirely electromechanical and it had a lens in the sight that made the target seem like it was further away.

santaclaus 10y ago

The pixelated face on 'Magistral' kind of looks like a hipster. Red beanie, big glasses, beard.

xufi 10y ago
Imagine Pacman except with KGB Putin or Stalin chasing nukes

scrumper 10y ago

Look at the disassembly photos for Morskoi Boi! It's lovely oily electromechanical stuff. I'd love to have a go.

varjag 10y ago
It's a clone of a U.S. product, Sea Hunter. Same for most of the other Soviet arcades.
- jgw 10y ago
  Do you know if they run on 6502s and other Western chips of the time? Were they cloned, or imported? Or were there Soviet ISA's? I remember reading years ago about how Russian computer scientists in the cold war were more honed in algorithm design, because they basically had to squeeze as much as they could out of their processors to compete with faster Western hardware.
  - varjag 10y ago
    Morskoi Boi/Sea Hunter has no computer, or chips for that matter. It's 1960s tech. Some computer based arcades started to appear in late 1980s, but more like Pong clones and similarly simple "racing" games with 2600-like sprites. At this point the "coops" started popping up, offering pay per minute experience on Atari 800 and ZX Spectrum. There was no Soviet 6502 or Z80 clone; there were however 8080A clones and DEC LSI-11 inspired designs. There were a bunch of creative programmers sure, although there hardly was a real "school" and CS remained largely backwaters to the West.
    - LionessLover 10y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U880 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U880 > The U880 is an almost identical copy of Zilog's 8-bit Z80 microprocessor. I wrote my first machine-level programs on that chip (I didn't have an assembler, only a dis-assembler, so I hand-translated the code and then used the dis-assembler to check if I had made typos).
    - pvg 10y ago
      There were Soviet and East German Z80s, Bulgarian 6502s, etc.
      - varjag 10y ago
        If you mean the T34 one, yeah it was in USSR in the sense there was tenderloin in the shops. I.e. we knew the name but I never met anyone who could get hold of it. Even then not sure it was even heard of until 1990s. Bulgarian 6502s were probably shipped with their Apple II clones. Those were hard to come by.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

sandworm101 10y ago

There appears to be an app that recreates the Morski Boi! game. http://www.148apps.com/app/541402297/ http://www.148apps.com/app/541402297/ This reminds me of the Tetris story: Who exactly would own the various rights to this games?

cmg 10y ago
Why link through 148apps rather than directly to the App Store? https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/morskoi-boi-sea-battle/id541402297 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/morskoi-boi-sea-battle/id541...
- sandworm101 10y ago
  Because I googled the term and that's the first result I came across.

centizen 10y ago

Super interesting stuff.

DanBC 10y ago

A long time ago there was a similar thread. It only got 11 comments, but maybe people are interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668085

steveklabnik 10y ago

I've been to the one in Moscow, it was a great time. It reminded me a lot of the Musée Mécanique on the Embarcadero.

soundoflight 10y ago

They just talked about this on the latest episode of the Idle Thumbs podcast! The podcaster's favorite was one with a mechanical car that drove on top of a video. https://www.idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs/episodes/disable-enemies-to-reveal-enemies https://www.idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs/episodes/disable-enemi...

johansch 10y ago

Just rembember to shit in a corner if you do visit.

dang 10y ago
Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN.
- johansch 10y ago
  Sorry about this. Russia just did what I referred to in my country so I'm a bit emotionally upset. Sweden is being attacked via the Internet by Russia; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11740587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11740587 for more detals. This is the substantiation.

rdtsc 10y ago

Oh I remember those! Nice. With the obligatory soda machine. They had a regular glass (made from glass, not disposable). Pushed it upside-down in this washer valve which sprayed water on the inside of it. So you "washed it". Then you put coin in, forgot how many kopeyks for regular fizzy water, it cost more to add syrup. Then the person behind you used that same glass, and so on. Today I'd think it is crazy unsanitary, and would never drink out of it. In the summer, throughout the city they also had large yellow barrels on two wheels with kvas (this fermented drink made from bread). Also with reusable glasses which the seller would quickly rinse with water before handing it to you. That was the best thing on a hot summer day.

in_hindsight 10y ago
Oh man those kvass canisters. So in our area there was an urban legend that once a truck transporting kvass (kind of like a fuel truck) crashed and fell on the side. Kvass poured out and along with it monstrous worms size of a human leg (nobody ever washes those canisters). I wonder if that was possible.
- swolchok 10y ago
  Seems like this would be really bad business just from a transportation perspective. Giant worms take up transit space that could be filled with kvass instead. A quick Google for "giant worms" finds a few that are a couple centimeters in diameter around the world, but none in the vicinity of Russia.
  - rdtsc 10y ago
    However, there was a pretty well developed culture of urban legends and rumors like that. Then there was no internet, official channels were not trusted and so on. So that made it a nice fertile ground for urban legends. My uncle even made one up with his friends. They went fishing, got drunk and decided to tell everyone they saw aliens land. They had noticed an area by woods that was burnt by a lightning strike and some fire had started. So that became the landing site. And so on. He made us kids and a few women from the village believe him. There were national ones of course. My favorite was about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole. The rumor was that the scientists had reached hell (temperature increased dramatically, which it did in reality, see! every legends needs a tiny bit of truth there), and there was, of course, a red monster which crawled out from the whole. I really loved that story as a kid. There were countless others which I already forgot.

opticals 10y ago

Soda machine is the best !

ikonst 10y ago

I've been to the one in Saint-Petersburg. Probably worth a visit, but do expect most machines to be under-maintained, and keep you wondering if the game is even receiving your inputs... Though, I suppose, when those machines were placed in random "palaces of culture" across the USSR in the 70-80s, their state on average wasn't any better.

mlvljr 10y ago
It was, never played a broken one, I think. Look, they wouldn't be remembered so tenderly, if they were not working well :)

bitwize 10y ago

Magistral is so unfair. At any moment a blue car can come up from behind and rear-end you, including instantly after you respawn. Is this by design, a sort of Soviet nihilistic humor?

glwtta 10y ago

Морской бой was the shit!

mlvljr 10y ago

I know where they and actually will probably visit the next time I'm walking past that street ad on the river bank :)

rodionos 10y ago

Морской бой! My favorite as a kid while waiting for connecting flights at airports.