Sunday, July 19, 2020

The "obscure" SKB Kontur Kpoxa

Hi again folks,

I recently discovered a very obscure Soviet game console called the "SKB Kontur Krokha" (translated in English) that i didn't knew existed (Hey, better late than never) which came out in Russia in 1990. This game console as only 200 consoles ever released and were given to employees of the manufacture.

If you poke around the net, you can find a lot of information but mostly in Russian.

(picture from: http://alemorf.ru/comps/kroha/index.html)

One of the best place to find many pictures of the console, inside it and screenshots of games, just go to the upper URL mentioned under the picture.

You can also find schematics of this unique game console and also an emulator (err...multi-emulator actually) done by the same author of the web site: Aleksey Morozov (aka alemorf).

So after finding his emulator, i've spent a few hours translating the bios (game1.rom) in English the best i could as sometimes you don't have much space to hack names and here's some screenshots:









This all been done with Google translation and a hex editor, simple as that...oh and a few hours to spare. ;P

As i have uploaded the translated bios, i have noticed that it was already added to the MAME as version 0.210 (May 2019), so i have tried out MAME:


And replaced the translated bios in the zip file, and...



Works like a charm! :)

So if anyone wants to play the "Kpoxa" in English, you can download the file HERE.

This was a nice change of pace from my OdySim project, been quite a time i haven't used an Hex editor. So have fun folks! :)





The New Atari VCS ...

Hi folks, after the "Coleco Devolved" post (see last post), now it's the turn of the new Atari VCS. I won't make a super long rant or list of the "cons" that this new Atari console has, there is plenty of people doing it right now (check some forums and Youtube). So i'll simply post an image that tell how i fell about this new VCS console:



Like Stan Lee would have said: 'Nuff Said true believers!

Man...2020 is such a $%$%?$%?$% year (Corona-19 Virus, Coleco Evolved, Atari VCS, etc) and the year isn't finished yet. * SIGH! *