arcade-mini / bk-emulator

BK-0010/0011/Terak 8510a emulator

BK emulator

DISCLAIMER

I ([email protected]) am not the author of this software. The original code for the PDP11 emulator was written by Eric A. Edwards in 1994. It was then modified by Leonid A. Broukhis to support the Soviet BK-0010, BK-0010.01 and BK-0011(M).

The original license statement in Eric A. Edwards' source code is as follows:

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies. Eric A. Edwards makes no representations about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without expressed or implied warranty.

Leonid A. Broukhis preserved this license in his source code, and therefore this is free software.

My hat is off before these two gentlemen.

What is this?

This software is a Linux/SDL emulator for Soviet (russian) Electronica BK series:

• БК-0010
• БК-0010.01
• БК-0011(М)

You may read more about the series at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK

The author's (Leonid A. Broukhis) page can be found at http://www.mailcom.com/bk0010/index_en.shtml . Unfortunately the website appears abandoned and the link to source code for this project is broken.

Additionally, it supports emulation of Terak 8510/a, which is a 1976 american PDP-11/03 platform and of which the Electronica BK series are indeed clones.

The Electronica BK computers were the first mass produced, affordable personal computers in Russia in the eighties of 20th century, and have had tremendous effect on the development of Russian-speaking software community. Every russian computer, hardware or ham radio geek born in seventies or eighties probably had one of those machines during their formational years. They are the C64s, ZX Spectrums and Atari 2600s of the now defunct USSR.

I have discovered this software by accident, and I am publishing it to github in order to preserve it.

All of the BK machines accept console commands in English, but respond mostly in Russian. Most of the software written for these machines would also interact in Russian. Unless you are a native Russian speaker, or very curious about this technology, this software is probably of very little use to you

The version of the emulator published in this repository is derived from "BK-Terak-Emu 2005.08.26".tar.gz file. I do not know if a more up to date version was ever made, or has been preserved. The original file is included unmodified in this repository. The only alteration I made to the repository is a change to the Makefile to point the linker to libSDL as it appears on modern x64 machines.

Virtually all of BK schematics, documentation, hardware hacks and software has been preserved and is available on the internet. Unfortunately, most if not all of these things are in Russian.

Compilation and use

This is very old software, but as all good C code, it works ten and twenty years thereafter. I have successfully compiled it, booted a BK-0010.01 machine and played a game under Ubuntu 13.05, Linux 3.8.5 and libSDL 1.2.

• Make sure libsdl1.2 and its -dev packages are installed
• Edit the Makefile to correct the path to your libSDL.so
• Run make
• Run ./bk -? for overview of emulation modes

For instance, to run BK-0010.01 emulation, execute

./bk -1 -c

When the emulation is running, you can issue a Ctrl-C in the emulator's console. This will stop the emulation and drop you into the emulator's debugger. To load a game from a binary file (assuming you have one, none are distributed here), do:

l <filename> (the emulator will look for the file in /usr/share/bk)

g 1000

Please feel free to contact me if you are curious about this. I will do my best to try and answer your questions.