Russia is going to develop its own game console!

[thewayne]

To hell with those decadent Westerners and their XBoxes and PlayStations and their LGBTQ propaganda! We're going to go with solid Russian craftsmanship and story-telling!

Now, I have absolutely no doubt that Russian game developers could create some truly compelling stories. Every nation has great story-tellers. And there's no doubt that they have great programmers, though far too many are involved in cybercrime. I think their goal of producing such a console by a '26-'27 deadline is perhaps overly ambitious, but hey, what do I know?

https://gamerant.com/russia-gaming-consoles/

The Slashdot comments are amusing:
https://games.slashdot.org/story/24/03/29/2244215/russia-is-making-its-own-gaming-consoles


Oh! I know what I know! Russian chip foundries are foundering with a chip packaging defect rate of 50%! And that's PACKAGING the chips, not MAKING them. The Chinese are making the chips, sending them to Russia for PACKAGING. So the Russians are receiving discs (I assume) that contain hundreds of chips that have to be precisely cut up, then packaged into housings with leads attached for later integration into circuit boards and such for use in various electronic devices.

Except they can't reliably, in large batches. Apparently they can do small batches okay, but large batches are beyond their ability.

The problem seems to be quality control, calibration of the devices, and workforce skill set.

Clearly first-world problems.

Oh, I forgot. Russia isn't a first-world nation. Except they have nukes, and a seemingly nutso war-monger leader. There are lots of brilliant scientists and engineers in Russia, and I feel sorry for them living in such constraints. We've had several Russian astronomers who've worked at the observatory, and I've worked with Russian programmers before. Brilliant people, once you figure out how to work with the language barriers.

This is why I mourned the turn they took when the nutjob former KGB station chief became the leader. I knew he'd never let go. They had a chance of turning around Russia when the USSR fell apart, they had a chance of becoming a free nation and elevating themselves, but then the criminal class took over and it became a kleptocracy, and it's now a mess.

I really can't see things improving until there's another October Revolution and the people literally seize the state again, which will be a massive bloodbath. Maybe they can start over, maybe the criminal class will simply seize power again.

It's a little unclear as to whether these chips are strictly consumer-grade or intended possibly for military use. A lot of military applications don't need anything much more sophisticated than an 8088, but when you're talking drones or night vision goggles, you're needing much later chips and packaging.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/half-of-russian-made-chips-are-defective-baikal-struggles-to-meet-russias-demand

Comments

[garote]

Well, Pakistan has nukes, and 2/5 more people in it than Russia (250 million), and we’ve been in a proxy war with them…. but Pakistan is considered “third world”, and has more religious oppression than even Russia. So are we holding Russia to a different standard?

[thewayne]

Interestingly, according to ChatGPT, First/Second/Third-World classification was pretty much exclusively based on NATO vs Warsaw Pact alignment, and is considered as a 'somewhat outdated and simplistic' classification system, supposedly the preferred classification system now is to use the terms "developed," "developing," and "underdeveloped" instead.

I think by the latter scale, both Russia and Pakistan would be in Underdeveloped. I'm not sure about Pakistan, but I think Russia's GDP is not growing with its current war problem. They've certainly driven-out and/or killed an awful lot of their young people of late.

[garote]

Oh hell yes, and not just of late. The brain drain in Russia has been a thing for... Probably a century now, since Stalin took the reins in 1924. I don't have numbers, and I'm not sure how one might compare brains to bodies in terms of historical emigration, but I reckon it's been speeding up each year, as technology has improved mobility.

[thewayne]

I read a comment about the IC chip packaging problem that a third of their smartest youth have fled, a third have been conscripted for the Ukraine war and are in the process of being killed, and the remainder are being ground under the heel of the machine of state.

[armiphlage]

The factory I work in has a cleanroom that packages bare dies straight from the wafer. It's far less complicated than the processing required for the wafer itself, but it does require a lot of attention to detail.

[thewayne]

Yeah, the packaging is definitely much simpler than the IC manufacture.  Still somewhat complex and exacting work though.  Amongst the many different things my dad built-out or remodeled during his career as a plumber, an IC plant was amongst them, I think it was either Motorola or Intel - both have plants in Phoenix, at least at the time.  I remember it specifically as he talked about flushing out the pipes after installation with a solvent whose name eludes me at the moment which he recaptured and the stuff has the interesting property of melting gun powder!

[thewayne]

Acetone was the solvent I was trying to remember. You can sort of dissolve/melt gunpowder and reform it into other shapes. It will still burn energetically, I don't know if it will explode if you hit it with a hammer or blunt object or if you put a fuse in it, I didn't experiment with it beyond melting and reforming it.

[armiphlage]

If it's just dissolving it and not chemically reacting with it, and if there aren't any constituents that don't dissolve, I expect it'd still go boom the same way.

[thewayne]

I am not inclined to put it to the test!  I never took chemistry, and I try to be very mindful of my limitations.

[lovelyangel]

Maybe Russia should go back to those Apple II knockoffs they used to make.

[thewayne]

I was going to look for a GIF of Pong being played.

[disneydream06]

We, the LGBT community, is always right there to shoulder the blame for everything.
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

Yes indeed!  You, Jon, are directly responsible for trying to turn Russia gay!  ROFLMAO!

[disneydream06]

LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[gingeriana]

and don't forget Ru_net Cheburashka!
developed to replace Internet with its endless homo threats :)

[thewayne]

There is nothing Russians can't do without endless amounts of vodka and guns pointed at their heads!  Not that it will work well or anyone will want it or use it. ;)

[garote]

“Never underestimate the capacity of the Russian people to suffer.”

[thewayne]

Very true.

[devilc]

About Russian quality control ... I am not surprised.

As the Cold War (pt 1) wound down, my Uncle Rich (3 Star General) got to talk with one of his Russian counterparts, who had some questions about American logistics. USAF was not Uncle Rich's specialty, but he talked that yeah, the USAF transport aircraft have very reliable engines, made to high standards.

Not so much for Mother Russia. A four engine plane was actually a 12 engine plane. 1 engine in the plane, 1 engine going to/coming from the factory, 1 engine in the factory undergoing a rebuild.

[thewayne]

One reason why Russian planes had such powerful engines was they couldn't manufacture aluminum and alloys to our thinness and tolerances, a lot of their planes were thin steel!  There was an occasion where two new Russian military jets - models that we knew very little about - made an incredible speed run across Russia.  Turned out they had been stripped out of everything removeable and were basically just fuel tanks, and their engines were complete slag when they landed.  They did it, ruining both jets, just to spook the Americans and NATO.

[silveradept]

An interesting decision to sink resources into. If they're worried about queer content coming in on video games, they can choose to hang out in as many of the toxic spaces of shooters and fighting games as they like and be completely assured that there's more than enough queerphobia to go all around the world and then some.

I didn't find the Slashdot comments particularly insightful or funny, and many of them seemed to want to wage war about whether or not queer content is propaganda, or whether we're being fed propaganda about how well the invasion and/or defense of Ukraine is going. I'm sure, given time, the comment section will find their way to making fun of the venture in more tech-snarky ways, but when I looked, it wasn't a great crop of good things.

Of course, that whole chip packaging problem will also make it difficult to develop a decent console and proper games for it as well.

[thewayne]

Sounds like the /. comments changed a lot since I saw them.  It's hard to say whether Putin really cares or not about LGTBQ things, or if he's using them to suck up to the Russian Orthodox church.  They are decidedly against non-hetero things, and he likes having their imprimatur as it adds legitimacy to his reign.

[silveradept]

Could be either, and I suspect he sees it as a lever of power to wield, rather than anything that might be a specific actual belief of his. Given that he's gone to some depths to portray himself as virile and strong, I wouldn't wholly discount it as a personal belief, but I suspect it's more about image than anything else.