TECH NEWS – Let’s just make sure we don’t end up with something like the Dendy three decades ago… and with China involved this time, it’s unlikely to be a big hit.

Before we get into what this is all about, what the hell is the Dendy? Well, in the 1990s, Famicoms could be counterfeited in China, and Xiaobawang (Subor) became a huge success there, and then in Russia, under the Dendy brand, copies of the NES/Famicom were released for a fraction of the price of the original hardware, and the cartridges could be bought much cheaper.

Russia tried to become independent from western technology. On December 25, Anton Gorelkin, deputy chairman of the Duma’s Committee on Information Policy, revealed some information about the domestic video game console being developed by the Ministry of Industry and Trade, according to TechSpot. The theoretical console will have an Elbrus processor and will run either Aurora or Alt Linux operating systems. Both are forks of Linux.

According to TechSpot, the Elbrus processor is being developed by the Moscow-based SPARC Technologies center, primarily for defense, critical infrastructure and other applications. This processor is not up to what Intel, AMD and Arm currently produce, and thus will absolutely not be able to reach the level of PlayStation 5 or Xbox series. Despite the inferior chipset, Gorelkin stressed that the console is not designed to play ports of older games, but will run “domestic video game products”, but that it will also require in-house developers…

Another console, called Fog Play, is also in development, but it will be more of a cloud-based game. Users with high-end PCs will be able to rent them to Fog Play owners, who will play on those PCs via the cloud. These potential consoles are just one aspect of Russia’s broader plans for technological sovereignty. The introduction of Astra Linux into government, intelligence, military, and even educational computers is another Russian effort to develop its own technology. To this end, Russia is also attempting to replace the Google-owned VirusTotal file and website scanner with its own Multiscanner platform, fearing U.S. government infiltration.

Despite this progress, Russia is still heavily dependent on Chinese technology. Chinese smartphones are popular there, and Chinese electronics and dual-use technology continue to enter Russia, even though China no longer exports them to the US. Russia is unlikely to be able to achieve true technological independence in video games or other key areas because it is too dependent on China or lacks the capacity to produce the same level of technology as the chip in the Kurrens-gen consoles. The two Russian consoles illustrate the challenges the country faces given its poor relations with many of the world’s superpowers.

The only question is what will come of it.

Source: Engadget