Tetris (Electronika BK)

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Tetris
Platform(s)Electronika BK
Releasec. 1986
Gameplay info
Next piecesNo
Playfield size10 × 20
Hold pieceNo
Hard dropYes

There was a fairly faithful adaptation of Tetris for Elektronika's BK 0010, BK 0010.01, and BK 0011M home computer series in the USSR. These seem fairly close to the pre-commercial Elektronika 60M and IBM PC clone versions of Tetris, and were released no later than 1990, though exact dates of authorship and release are not yet known.

Unlike the preserved e60m variants which appear to use DEC's RT-11 Pascal runtime, and also unlike the preserved early MS-DOS versions which appear to use Borland's Turbo Pascal runtime, the BK 0010/.01/0011M versions appear to have been written in native PDP-11 machine code or assembly language as they don't seem to have any kind of standard runtime library embedded.

The initial BK 0010 adaptation used the upper row of the membrane keyboard (including upper diagonal arrows) which was a very bad fit for .01 and later mechanical keyboards which lacked diagonal arrow keys. The alternate numeric keypad-inspired control set is also awkward on all of these computers as they lack a numeric keypad entirely. It may be a trace or relic of an earlier version on a related computer which did have a numpad, possibly a DVK. One of the later BK011M versions changes to arrow key controls, and the other does that while also adding support for a digital joystick.

These versions are built from BK KOI8-art and use the color video pixel patterns which display as red/green/blue/black on an attached RGB monitor. If a TV is used instead the pixel patterns will appear monochromatic instead. One of the BK0011M versions switches to an alternate color palette, which was not possible on the earlier BK0010 computers.

Unlike the Elektronika 60M versions, these have a help screen.

External links