The Elektronika BK — "BK" standing for bytovoy kompyuter, the household computer — is the first Soviet microcomputer genuinely available to private buyers. The original model, the BK-0010, came out in 1984 under the Elektronika brand, the shared label of the electronics plants of the Soviet ministry of the electronic industry.
Its distinguishing feature is its processor: the K1801VM1 is a Soviet microprocessor compatible with Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-11 instruction set. In practice the machine is therefore a desktop DEC minicomputer, which puts it a long way from the Western 8-bit architectures of the same period. The original BK-0010 made do with a membrane keyboard; the BK-0010-01 replaced it with a proper mechanical one, and the BK-0011M, which appeared at the end of the 1980s, brought more memory and a BASIC in ROM.
Distributed to schools as part of the KUVT computer classrooms and sold to the public, the machine gathered a very active local programming scene. Its library consists almost entirely of Soviet productions and homebrew ports, and remains one of the main surviving records of home computing in the USSR.
| Manufacturer | Elektronika |
| Year | 1984 |
| Type | Computer |
| Keyboard | Mandatory |
| Controller | Optional |
📷 Screenshot coming soon:
system-bk.png
The Elektronika BK is emulated by a single core, available on every board:
Netplay is not available on this system and RetroAchievements are not supported. CRT output is handled.
A keyboard is mandatory on this system: the BK boots into its system monitor and expects commands typed on the keyboard to load a program. A controller can help alongside it in the few games that support one.
All seven system ROMs are mandatory and expected in /recalbox/share/bios/bk/.
| File name | Description | MD5 |
|---|---|---|
bk/MONIT10.ROM |
BK-0010 system monitor | 95f8c41c6abf7640e35a6a03cecebd01 |
bk/FOCAL10.ROM |
BK-0010 FOCAL interpreter | 5737f972e8638831ab71e9139abae052 |
bk/B11M_BOS.ROM |
BK-0011M system ROM | fe4627d1e3a1535874085050733263e7 |
bk/B11M_EXT.ROM |
BK-0011M extension ROM | dc52f365d56fa1951f5d35b1101b9e3f |
bk/BAS11M_0.ROM |
BK-0011M BASIC (1) | 946f6f23ded03c0e26187f0b3ca75993 |
bk/BAS11M_1.ROM |
BK-0011M BASIC (2) | 1e6637f32aa7d1de03510030cac40bcf |
bk/DISK_327.ROM |
Floppy controller ROM | 5015228eeeb238e65da8edcd1b6dfac7 |
The BIOS checker lets you verify that they are present and that their hashes match.
Put your games in:
/recalbox/share/roms/bk/
Accepted extensions: .bin .bkd .dsk .img .zip .7z
A few pointers on these formats:
.bin is a cartridge image or a program loaded straight into memory;.bkd, .dsk and .img are floppy images;.zip and .7z archives run without being uncompressed.