Reports from the Field
Emulating Soviet and Bulgarian Apple II clones

In the former Soviet Union was produced, among others, an Apple II Plus clone named Агат-9 and in Bulgaria, among others, an Apple IIe clone called Правец 8А. Bulgaria also produced CM630, its own 6502 CPU clone, but that’s beyond the scope of this presentation. These clones were released with a flavour of the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system. With a tiny patch, they run also under ProDOS 2.4.2 and, most probably, ProDOS 2.5 alpha 8. We haven’t tested yet, if they can also run under Apple ProDOS 1.0.2 and 2.0.3.

Рапира (short for Расширенный Адаптированный Поплан-Интерпретатор, Редактор, Архив; the acronym means rapier) is a procedural programming language from the former Soviet Union, which was strongly influenced by ALGOL.

What and how

A short presentation by Reto Kromer on both a Правец 8А and a niche possibility that the Spoiled Apples emulation offers on most modern computers, followed by an informal Q&A session. Sadly, the traditional light refreshments cannot be served this time …

We will delve into Рапира running on Агат-9 and Правец 8А, including a little of the historic “Cyrillic Art” of the time. The presentation will be given in English, but a basic reading knowledge of the Russian and/or Bulgarian language – or at least of the Cyrillic alphabet – would be a plus, because the majority of the historic documentation has not been translated. And, of course, most of the screens use the Cyrillic alphabet.

When and where

Online on Friday the 11^th of September 2020, starting at 11 o’clock sharp (09:00 UTC). We will use a Jitsi-based platform and the link will be provided in proper time.

As usual, the admission to our Reports from the Field is free, but a registration is required, as the seats are limited to a dozen, in order to allow technical discussion and information exchange. The attendees should be familiar with Apple II computers and/or the DOS operating system.

Notes

• This is the first of three presentations about old Apple computers.
• We are very unhappy that our generosity is often betrayed, as many of our materials are distributed without naming their origin. Increasingly, others are even shamelessly claiming authorship of our work, which is just disgusting behaviour. And that’s the very reason why some resources are no longer freely available, but have been moved to password-protected parts of our website.

2023-02-17