This was the only Pong system that was produced and sold in the GDR (East Germany). Though only one model was produced, it was sold with slight colour modifications: knobs could be either orange, red, yellow or black. The housing was light grey or black. The system was sold under the RFT or VEB (Halbleiterwerk Frankfurt-Oder) "brand".
VEB stands for "Volkseigener Betrieb" which could be translated as "People's own production plant" - remember GDR was a communist ruled country! The system is not too rare but it is almost impossible to find a boxed speciment. Another interesting detail is, that old sales slips that were found along with few of these systems clearly state that these systems were sold from 1982-85 which is very late for a common GI AY 8500 chip based system. That means that West Germans started to enjoy the Commodore C-64 while East Germans started to explore Pong systems...
The pictured system is a homebrew, modificated system with a built in pistol extension. The original owner bought a russian child's pistol in a shop in Moscow and modificated it so that it could be used as a "light-pistol". check out our pictures for details.
The system and the solid pistol with spiralcord - very fancy!
The gun plug and the two push buttoms on top of the consoles to access the two shooting games.
Inside of the system: the gun Din plug and the inserted push button part.
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The pcb: good soldering job around the GI AY-3-8500
Look what is inside the pistol.
The serial number could be found on the bottom of the right joypaddle chamber.
Jens Brinkmann sent us these fantastic scans taken from several old GDR magazines - A great find!
Radio Fernsehen Elektronik 08/1980 (Pages 511 & 512)
Radio Fernsehen Elektronik 08/1982 (Page 523)
Funkamateur 01/1986 (Page 38)
The "Stromlaufplan" which means schematic.
The warranty folder - please note date of sale and the small glued on paper showing the serial number of this unit.
The folder for VEB Service addresses.
Here we added our scans of the Bildschirmspiel BSS-01 manual for download (Please click on thumbnail to start download):
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