Great work! Its always very interesting to hear about the machines made behind the iron curtain, and that there is still indeed an enthusiastic scene keeping those machines alive.
My favourite machine of the 80's - the Oric-1/Atmos system - was cloned in the Eastern bloc countries by Pravetz, and became known as the Pravetz 8D. It was quite an interesting day when support for that clone dropped into the Oric emulator scene (Oricutron) and we could see how 'the other side' hacked on the architecture. Something about having Cyrillic where the lower-case character set should be, just tickles my hacker heart.
(I'd love to have a Pravetz 8D machine in my retro-collection, in case anyone sees one somewhere.. ;)
> Something about having Cyrillic where the lower-case character set should be, just tickles my hacker heart.
We did the same on the ZX Spectrum in Greece for our programs: replace the lowercase latin letters with the keyboard-matching greek letters.
I still remember the vulgar ΣΨΡΟΛΛ? when the screen filled up and the machine asked your permission to scroll!
Ah yes, that often amuses me too .. I've gotten the Orics "Ready" prompt burned into my eyeballs after all these years, to see the same thing in Cyrillic is kind of hilarious and triggers my inner hacker nerd every single time.