Besta-88

The Besta-88 is a Soviet graphics workstation which was a clone of a Force-3 (German) which itself is a clone of Sun-3. The firmware of a Besta-88 is essentially the same, and the printed circuit board layout is almost exactly the same. Reverse engineering at its finest.

The Force-2 is a clone of the Sun-2, and while the Force-3 was intended as a clone of the Sun-3 the engineering was difficult to reverse the custom Memory Management Unit of the Sun-2. The Besta-88 VME earliest CPU boards were like the Force-2 with a 68010R10 processor, and like Force, Besta skipped over the Sun-3's use of a MC68020 and custom MMU, and refocused on cloning the MC68030 based members of the Sun-3 family, since the MMU was built into the CPU, it could be cloned much more easily.

The MAME developers, in dumping the ROMs for the Force-3 workstations noticed that the Besta-88 ROMs were nearly indentical, making the emulation of a Besta-88 trivial once a Force-3 workstation can be emulated.

There are pictures of the case, various pictures of CPU VME boards, and a single picture of a booting (or non-booting as the case may be) system.

Images

• The case
• An early CPU VME board, with a 68010R10 (10Mhz 68010)
• A presumably working CPU VME board, with a MC68030R33 (33Mhz 68030)
• A boot screen, which lists 'Stollmann' as the company who ported ATT SYS Vr3 to the Besta

External Links

• The documentation - Russian
• Besta-88 ROM Dumps
• The Stollmann Data Flow Machine - Stollmann is still listed in Berlin; hey authored a paper on Data flow archicture