The Apogee BK-01c

I hate eBay. I hate that they show me things based on other, totally unrelated things, I’ve previously looked at. So on this particular day on eBay, up popped a picture of the most beautiful blue computer I’d ever seen. I have previous for falling in love with small blue computers with crap rubber keys – I have a Sord/CGL M5, and I love it. At least I’d actually seen a Sord in the flesh before shelling out for one though, and knew I could get a multi-cart for it.

So this new object of my affections? What exactly was it? No idea! It’s was listed as an Apogee (or Apogey) BK-01c. Never heard of it? Me neither. The description is of a Russian 8 bit computer; the previous version BK-01 (Апогей БК01) was a black and white machine, but the one on offer was a ‘c’ (Апогей БК-01Ц), so the colour model. There’s also a BK-01ts, which is a colour version, possibly the black and white version with a colour conversion kit? Looking at pictures online, it appears to come in red, yellow, pink, white, black and the blue I’d fallen in love with.

I wasn’t going to buy it, honestly, despite sending the listing to Tony and letting him know that if he needed any ideas for Christmas, this was a good place to start. He ignored it. Unfortunately, the seller then sent me an offer. Shit just got serious!

Looking on the web there are ROMS available for this thing. More on that later. It looks like it comes with all wires (I hope, the description has obviously been translated from Russian), and Tony confirmed we would be able to run it on UK power. So, in a fit of madness, I accepted the offer. And yeah, I know they’ll be import taxes and duty too as it’s actually in Russia as I type. Will just have to suck it up when HMRC and Royal Mail catch up with me.

Panic then sets in! The only ROMS I can find are in RKA format. Research leads me to believe this is a now defunct format. Apparently GOM player and WinAmp play this format. Except I can’t get these ROMS to play (my plan is that if I can get them to play, then we can try and convert to .wav and use an old car cassette converter play from PC to cassette player connected to this thing). There is an RKA example tune on the web. This DOES play in WinAmp. So right now we’re stuck here. Why won’t the ROMS play on it?

There’s a tool called Castool which is used with/part of MAME. This is supposed to convert RKA to WAV. All it does when I run it is flash up a box for half a second then vanish, so no chance to even try out the command line conversion ☹

I hope the thing comes with a cassette with some software on. If so, Plan B is to try and back this up to SD card … whilst praying that the cassette player doesn’t eat the tape! Arghhh!

Sometime later:

So, I spent a bit of time reading. Again. Downloaded MAME. No idea if I need it but using Castool alone hasn’t worked. Read some more. Command line? Mystery to me but, found another page that was slightly more helpful. So tried running Castool from cmd. It loaded. Then followed the conversion instructions. After a couple of misfires (basically due to me not knowing how to use a command prompt) it’s converted the file. I then went to play it – IT SOUNDS LIKE A FRICKING COMPUTER TAPE! Bloody hell! Don’t tell me it’s worked?! Now have a loooong wait to find out.

The downside was that it opened it in VLC media player, which crashed, leaving a screech from the bowels of hell itself coming out of my laptop, which almost made my ears bleed. Because everything had locked up, I had to remove the laptop battery to save my sanity. Next time I’ll be a little more cautious.

So I now, in effect, have a ‘cassette’. How the hell do you load it? The manual will be in Russian and the keyboard isn’t your usual QWERTY either. Another Google finds this site: https://emptyq.net/a?ID=0a1f6433-ce8f-4331-bb22-2c3db57737db

Load the game "Tetris", the first one on a cassette with games. To do this, enter the "I" command and start playing the cassette. recording with the program ends, the following appears on the screen [a picture showing three lines with numbers on]:

These numbers represent the starting address of the program, size and checksum. To start the program, enter the command G 0000. The game starts.

I really hope this works. Even if all I can play is Tetris. I’m also wondering if I should check out the MAME forums, as assume getting things running on MAME will be relatively similar to getting things running on the real thing, minus the tape player? Hell, maybe *I* should get the Apogee running on MAME?

Well, we like a challenge so now we wait. It’s due in October. A machine that looks divine, but that I have no idea whether or not I’ll be able to get it to work!

Download my .wav files

It’s the 10th August, and it’s here!!! Yes, I know it’s my Christmas present, but I really do need to check the contents are correct, don’t I?

The box looks a bit like something that could have come out of our Shed of Doom, has that aged musty look and smell. Well wrapped though. On opening there’s a large bag of rather thick looking cables, the cassettes (with listings printed on the inserts), power supply and a very large pile of documents, including schematics – all in Russian on very yellowed paper. It looks like a cold war museum piece. It also seems to have the ‘conversion kit’ (?) bit needed for colour, so this should be interesting!

The computer itself is lovely. The sky blue top is made from coloured plastic, not spray painted, and the keys are actually plastic too, not rubber as I’d imagined. The base, which is white, also shows signs of different colours mixed in (unclean mould?). Seems to be in good nick, just needed a quick wipe over with a baby wipe. Does feel a little like a 70s plastic toy though.

The Power Brick

The Manual

The tapes

Because all the electrics seem a bit scary, I’ve packaged it up again so that Tony can take a look at the cables and check the power supply with his multimeter before we plug it in to the mains or TV. I hope it works!

Plug in day is here. Rule 1, before panicking that it doesn’t work, make sure the power socket switch is on. Well, the good news is there are lights. IT WORKS! The bad news is it won’t tune in to the flat screen TV in our bedroom. We ended up using our 3 inch (yes, 3 inch, and that’s being generous!) portable which we did manage to get tuned in, and could just about, using a microscope, see the characters we typed appear on the screen. Not that we know what any of them mean. The keyboard beeps when typing. Pressing I and the return [BK] key seems to send it into loading mode, so hopefully this will work when we try to run a program.

Next step will be to connect to a slightly bigger TV (hopefully our portable CRT or lounge flat screen will work) so we can actually see what the hell we’re doing. We then plan to make up a cassette player cable using the one supplied (it’s has three huge plugs on it; we'll keep one for the back of the computer, and we’ll need to replace the other two with 3.5mm mono jacks). Once that’s done, we’ll try and run a game using the .wav files I created earlier. So again we wait.

The mini TV running Stampede from an Intellivision

Also not sure how to get it to appear in colour – maybe this has something to do with the weird attachments that came with it. Can’t find pictures of this anywhere. We’ll be using google translate a lot I fear! Did find this YouTube video though, of someone using an SD card with one. WTH?

Googling using the Russian name has brought some more information about the computer in this thread, in particular the strange adapters.

"On the left there are parts for connecting to a TV. On the right is a connector for checking the port, a connector for connecting your own equipment and a spare fuse at the bottom."

So maybe the bits on the left are what we need to use to connect to a colour TV? The thread also shows it using a ROM disk. I so need one of these, but chances of finding one are I imagine, nil! This thing is starting to make updating an XBox at Christmas look easy!

Sorry about the quality, can't get a decent picture due to the screen flicker. But it's Tetris ... running on an Apogee BK-01!

So today we tried to connect the Apogee to our portable CRT. Absolutely gutted that it just wouldn’t tune in. EVERYTHING works on this old TV. So close, but it just wouldn’t straighten up, despite all the fine tuning in the world, and Tony playing with the pots. So, last chance saloon. A small, tatty, 5/6 inch black and white TV which I’ve a feeling we picked up at a boot sale some time age. Took it into the garden, plugged it all in and …. BINGO! It works! We can actually read the prompt screen!

Now we can see the screen, we need a cassette cable. As I mentioned before, the one supplied has three large plugs on it. Tony removed two of them and replaced them with 3.5mm mono jacks. So now we have a cable with a connection to the back of the machine and two jacks for the cassette player (aka my phone). So, let’s see if we can load a game. Emailed a couple of games in wav format to my phone. Plug one of the jacks into my phone, press I and BK on the Apogee and play the file. Nothing. Try again with the other jack. Screen goes blank and then back to the Apogee prompt. Think to hell with it and press G (no numbers were displayed, so nothing to type in). By some miracle …. WE HAVE TETRIS!

It’s actually quite playable, once you get used to the keys. The only other games my craptop had let me email to my phone were Bad Road and Tennis (aka Pong!). Both loaded, Bad Road ran by just pressing the G when Loaded, Tennis needed G2000 typed, but both worked first time. Can’t wait to go thorough the rest, yes, of course they’re crap as crap can be, but that’s part of the charm. Over the moon we’ve managed to get it working though!

After seeing the flash card on a YouTube video, I did a search for them too. Nothing came up when searching in English, although searching in Russian brought up an eBay like site. Thank heavens for Google Translate. Have contacted the seller, it’s not going to be easy, but let’s see if we can get one?

Tony is also investigating using a TZXduino, and I’ve converted one of the RKA files to TZX (using good old Castool). Watch this space!

I also found a list of the games from the Russian site, which tells you if they're in colour or not. Names of games using color are highlighted in yellow , Apogee graphics mode is highlighted in green , and graphics games in color are highlighted in red.

Now need to see if we can source an RGB scart cable to access colour mode and use the machine on a slightly bigger and better TV. Have emailed a UK eBay seller who says they can make up most cables. I sent what I think is the schematic from the instructions, plus a listing from a Russian site which sells the cables, so we’ll see what they come back with.

And ... we have a cable! The eBay company is called york-av. They made the cable up with the (very limited) details I gave them, and it arrived in a couple of days - amazing service. Unfortunately it didn't work at first (I was warned of this). Cue more Googling, this time in Russian (I often found more information Googling using the Russian name). Eventually found a pin-out diagram which then allowed Tony to fix the two wires which were causing the issue.

The picture is now lovely and crisp, the sound through the TV amazing, and I can use the portable CRT. This also means we can see some games in glorious technicolour!

Listen to the music from Tetris (colour version)

This is the DIN end of the SCART cable. A lot of wires. A multimeter and the pinout diagram above enabled Tony to alter the two incorrect wires. I have sent the diagram to the seller, just in case anyone else asks for one!

This is the colour version of Tetris on our portable CRT. It's very err ... vivid! Music comes through brilliantly too.

Believe it or not, this is an ASCII version of Pac-Man. How ingenious is that? Runs a bit on the fast side, so it's very hard to keep up.

These are the Pac-Man characters. Yellow is Pac-Man himself, pink are the ghosts and green are the power pills. Got that?

The flash cart and booklet have arrived from Russia!

Amazingly the flash cart has arrived! After a bit of too-ing and fro-ing, and a lot of translating, I managed to purchase one from the Russian seller (link below). Under £20 all in. Bargain. Works perfectly, just plug into the user port, type the loading command (==> R, FF <BK> ==> G3 <BK>) and off you go. The accompanying booklet is of a really high quality, with great attention to detail, and Google Translate works fine with the text so it's all perfectly usable. The main menu onscreen matches the colour coding in the table above, so you can see which games are in colour from the menu itself. Now it's just a case of actually mastering the games, most of which are incredibly hard!