Open evening event at Hackafe, Plovdiv

I have had the fortune of meeting, through Steem, one of the founders of this hacker space in Plovdiv, the people in this excellent little community of tech-innovators and tinkerers. It was on the basis of his recommendation, as well as my own contact with folk from this area, that I decided to come here, and so far, as you may have read, my impression has been overwhelmingly positive.

Last night they had a special event, related to a city council program during this holiday period to encourage visitors to visit art and community group venues for some kind of showcase. This event was about computer games. They had a whole row of mostly 8 bit computers, all set up to run computer games, and the only two prominent platforms missing were Apple and Commodore. But more about that after some pictures.

Here is a shot down the row of machines that were set up (yes, I helped with setting some of them up).

On the left is an Atari 2600, and on the right is a ZX Spectrum. The Atari was running Pac Man Jr and I'm not sure what the ZX spectrum was running, some kind of platform-shooter. The ZX spectrum's tape recorder had been replaced with a smartphone running a special app to play the modulated digital recordings from these tapes.

Next is an Atari ST 520. Sadly, its joystick control was not working, I am not sure if it was the aging computer or the Atari joystick that it had plugged into it. It was running a demo of a game called Xenon

Next was an awesome example of one of the earliest home gaming systems, a Vectrex. This device had a vector-based display, basically the CRT gun does not just draw a grid of pixels, it draws lines, like the plotters used by architects to draw up really big blueprints.

Next to it was a Sony Playstation One.

This is a Pravets 8, I think it is. It's basically a clone of the apple computer, that was designed and assembled in a town near Sofia called, funny enough, Pravets. It even has a total copy of apple basic built on it. This one was not set up to play any games.

The keyboard was a bit funny, some of the keys triggered multiple presses and I wrote a little basic program to print a line of text over and over again on the screen, but even then, I ended up making line 20 (usually in basic you use 10s) of the code 200.

This one is another Pravets, the 8D. The D is because it actually has two processors inside it, but you can only use one at a time. It has the 6502, like the Apple and Commodore 64, but also a Zilog Z80. Zilog licensed the Z80 to multiple chip fabs, but the motorola was not.

However, this one's chip is a MOS manufactured chip, a product of industrial espionage, although they never tried to sell this outside of the Eastern Bloc. As a consequence, it can also run CP/M and early versions of DOS.

Its floppy drive was dead but the Hackafe people had built a floppy-to-SD card adapter, found the proper wiring diagram, in order to be able to operate it. It was playing a clone of the game, I forget the name now, but you pilot a helicopter, and your task is to rescue people while tanks and planes try to shoot you down, and bring them back to base.

This is an old video game cabinet, with the dedicated giant motherboard removed and replaced with a Raspberry Pi, running MAME. The cabinet is awesome, it even has an ashtray, and several of the buttons were scarred by cigarette burns.

Some more photos of the visitors and members milling around.

This is a cute little picture that is on the front door of the main room of the hack space. In plovdiv, cats are everywhere, far more than I saw in Sofia anywhere. All the parks are full of these little kitties, mooching around and scrounging up discarded food or sometimes being fed by people who live or work nearby.

This is the Pravets 8M. I think it basically was the same kind of apple clone as the 8 and 8D, but with a much smaller case. Beside it are a selection of old games that were produced by the Bulgarian Ministry of Education. They also say on them 'Do not copy' in Bulgarian, but ironically, most of them were pirated versions of games released in the West. They were mostly produced from a factory in Pazardzhik, the next town up the train line towards Sofia, west of Plovdiv.

The night ended with a lecture from a member of the associated Library of Economics group who have a room downstairs from the Hackafe. He discussed the subject of economic philosophies of super heroes, mainly John Stark, Captain America and Spiderman. I couldn't understand about half of what he said but I gathered well enough that this guy was basically a libertarian, but with socialist leanings.

I asked one of my new friends to explain a bit of his final section on Socialism, and indeed I had surmised correctly what he had been talking about. Interestingly he brought up the topic of centralisation, and why this feature of socialism was so problematic, and in common with the problems of the mercenary free marketeers.

Well, I hope you enjoyed seeing a bit of and reading about some of the technical details of the things that went on and what I learned last night at this event. I will be working with this group a lot in the future, probably. I intend to advocate for Steem there, and get as many members as possible involved, organise an event to introduce more people from Plovdiv in the hack-scene to it and explain to them how it works.

Edit: I have already started introducing members of the group to this, and I will be escalating my efforts in time. I am sure before long almost everyone involved will be joining up.

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We can't stop here! This is Whale country!