Russian VIC 20 with Cyrillic keyboard found

Post by **Jeff-20** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 12:57 am

A collector just found a VIC 20- prototype for the Russian market. The cyrillic keyboard is really cool. Here are some pics.

Mikam73 · Post by **Mikam73** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 5:08 am

That evil moderator got me again..

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 5:50 am

I think it is more likely to find a Russian clone, although most clone manufacturers seem to have focused on ZX Spectrum clones - maybe fewer special chips, cheaper to manufacture.

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 6:27 am

aneurysm · Post by **aneurysm** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 1:41 pm

carlsson thwarts april fools!

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 2:17 pm

With a set of stickers, some custom EPROMs (both character set and Kernal - perhaps Basic if you want keywords in Russian), it could be realized. I do have a Russian keymap installed on my PC, but I very rarely use it and it is a lot of trouble to find where each letter is located without a picture of the keyboard.

saundby · Post by **saundby** » Sun Apr 02, 2006 12:11 am

carlsson wrote:With a set of stickers, some custom EPROMs (both character set and Kernal - perhaps Basic if you want keywords in Russian), it could be realized. I do have a Russian keymap installed on my PC, but I very rarely use it and it is a lot of trouble to find where each letter is located without a picture of the keyboard.

I made up a set of stickers of the Cyrillic characters to put on the fronts of the keycaps for my multilingual PC. Gee, I wonder where I got that idea?

-Mark G.

saundby · Post by **saundby** » Sun Apr 02, 2006 12:35 am

Nice looking Vic Pic by the way. My Cyrillic Vic must be a later model. The top bar says "COBETCMAWNHA = BNKCNN-20" and the color bars are all red. The C= is replaced by a little profile of Lenin. The "Power" light lights up in the shape of a star.

The Russian Vics were more advanced than the others I've seen. They've must have some advanced audio capabilities since they've got a little microphone inside, and what appears to be a wireless networking device. At least it's some sort of transmitter, but I haven't found a receiving element yet.

-Mark G.

(Dangit, the board doesn't accept Cyrillic, at least not that I could figure out, so I had to kinda "transletterate" it.)

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Sun Apr 02, 2006 11:47 am

Советсмашина Виксии 20? If you hadn't mentioned the Lenin picture and the power on light shaped as a star, I may have believed you a bit.

Besides, I find the Russian keymap installed on my PC has a completely different mappning than the one I found a picture of on Google. I suppose there are a bunch of different mappings, and the one I used more resembles Latin QWERTY than the other.

saundby · Post by **saundby** » Mon Apr 03, 2006 6:18 pm

carlsson wrote:???????????? ?????? 20? If you hadn't mentioned the Lenin picture and the power on light shaped as a star, I may have believed you a bit.

That's it. I typed in Cyrillic characters, and it showed them in the editing window, but when I submitted the post the Cyrillic characters all turned into question marks.

Given the nature of the topic, I wasn't seeking to be believed, just to add a bit of flavor.

carlsson wrote: Besides, I find the Russian keymap installed on my PC has a completely different mappning than the one I found a picture of on Google. I suppose there are a bunch of different mappings, and the one I used more resembles Latin QWERTY than the other.

Yes, I've seen several different mappings as well. The one you posted was a new one on me, though. Far closer to a QWERTY layout than I've seen before. The one I use myself starts ee-kratkoyeh, cheh, oo, kah, ye.

-Mark G.

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Tue Apr 04, 2006 8:07 am

I see Cyrillic characters, but I have some extra fonts and multi-language support installed. Yet I only use Win98SE, and I think W2K/XP has even better multi-lingual support.

I modelled the keyboard from this page:

http://engrusdict.sourceforge.net/keyboards-en.php

but maybe it is a non-standard mapping. However, the same mapping appears here:

http://www.fingertipsoft.com/cyrstart/brochure.html

The mapping I have on my PC starts Й Ц У К Е Н Г (JTsUKENG):

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/facilities/ ... ussian.gif

saundby · Post by **saundby** » Tue Apr 04, 2006 7:53 pm

I've got multi-language support, fonts, etc. I'm on Mac, which has excellent multi-language support. I can enter Cyrillic, and it looks fine, until I click Submit at which point the board (apparently) turns it all into question marks. It even did it to the Cyrillic where I quoted you, though your original message appeared with Cyrillic chars just fine.

I don't think it's at my end...*shrug*

-Mark G.

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Wed Apr 05, 2006 3:26 am

Maybe the Mac (or browser) uses a different encoding, and somewhere along the line when you're posting the message back to the server, it gets stored as weird codes. Frankly, I don't quite understand how it is encoded in the message database - maybe UTF-8?

Anyway, I asked some Russian speaking about the keymaps, but I haven't got an answer yet. At one point, I drew my own Cyrillic font (on the C64, but it is compatible) but it may need to be updated or at least reshuffled to match whatever encoding or alphabet order they use. I have never played around with the keyboard mapping in Kernal, but perhaps it could be fun. By next April 1st, perhaps there will exist a genuinely modded CyrillVIC-20.

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Thu Jul 27, 2006 3:07 pm

The keyboard mapping I was looking for (and the one I made on the VIC-20 picture) is a homophonic mapping. No, not homophobic although it only differs one letter.