Jeg var heldig og fikk tak i en Oric Atmos fra Frankrike.
Det er en meget velholt maskin som virker som den skal.
Historie og spesifikasjoner.
Oric Atmos (1983) er etterfølgerne as Oric-1 (1982) som med et skikkelig 57 tasters keyboard og en oppdatert rom (V1.1) som blandt annet hånterte 3.5″ diskettstation.
Eller samme hovedkort som nyere Oric-1. Oric-1 hadde sitt beste slags år i 1983 med 160.000 solgt i England og 50.000 i Frankrike.
Hardware:
6502A 1MHz CPU
48 KByte RAM, 64KByte var montert og kunne utnyttes ved hjelp av eksternt kontroll signal
16KByte ROM med OS og Microsoft Basic
General Instrument 8912 lydkrets med 3 lydkanaler til en intern høytaler eller eksternt forsterker.
Karakterbasert video (Teletext) 40×28 linjer samt grafic modus 240×200
Kassetinterface for standard kassetspiller
Ekspansjons port med full data og adresse buss. Man kunne bruke ROM cart
Printer port type Centronic
RGB interface med TTL level signaler, 8 farger, krever litt elektronikk for å koble til SCART inngang på TV
Copy for TOSEC:
With the success of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Tangerine’s backers had suggested a home computer and Tangerine formed Oric Products International Ltd to develop and release the Oric-1 in 1983. Further computers in the Oric range were released through to 1987 with Eastern European clones being produced into the 1990s.
Based on a 1 MHz 6502A CPU, the Oric-1 came in 16 KB or 48 KB RAM variants for £129 and £169 respectively, matching the models available for the popular ZX Spectrum and undercutting the price of the 48K Spectrum by a few pounds. Both Oric-1 versions had a 16 KB ROM containing the operating system and a modified BASIC interpreter.
During 1983, around 160,000 Oric-1s were sold in the UK, plus another 50,000 in France (where it was the year’s top-selling machine). Although not quite the 350,000 predicted, this was enough for Oric International to be bought out and given sufficient funding for a successor model, the Atmos.
The Oric-1 improved somewhat over the Spectrum with a different keyboard design replacing the Spectrum’s unusual Chiclet keyboard. In addition the Oric had a true sound chip, the programmable GI 8912, and two graphical modes handled by a semi-custom ASIC (ULA) which also managed the interface between the processor and memory. The two modes were a LORES text only mode (though the character set could be redefined to produce graphics) with 28 rows of 40 characters and a HIRES mode with 200 rows of 240 pixels above three lines of text. Like the Spectrum, the Oric-1 suffered from attribute clash—albeit to a lesser degree in HIRES mode, when a single row of pixels could be coloured differently from the one below in contrast to the Spectrum, which applied foreground and background color in 8 x 8 pixel blocks. As it was meant for the home market, it had a built in television RF modulator as well as RGB output and was meant to work with a basic audio tape recorder to save and load data. Error-checking of recorded programs was bugged, frequently causing user-created programs to fail when loaded back in. A nice feature was an almost standard (except for the connector) Centronics printer interface.
The Edenspring money enabled Oric International to release the Oric Atmos, which added a true keyboard and an updated V1.1 ROM to the Oric-1. The faulty tape error checking routine was still there. Soon after the Atmos was released, the modem, printer and 3.5 -inch floppy disk drive originally promised for the Oric-1 were announced and released by the end of 1984. A short time after the release of the Atmos machine, a modification for the Oric-1 was issued and advertised in magazines and bulletin boards. This modification enabled the Oric-1 user to add a second rom (containing the Oric Atmos system) to a spare rom socket on the Oric-1 circuit board. Then, using a basic DPST (double pole single toggle) switch, the users could then switch between the new Oric Atmos rom and the original Oric-1 rom at their leisure.
Longshot
The comments in this article are wrong regarding the cassette loading system.
The cassette routines were not buggy on Oric 1.
On Oric it was possible to save a file with 2 speeds: 300 or 2400 bauds.
In comparison, zx spectrum speed is 1500 bauds, and amstrad cpc default speed is 1000 bauds
2400 baud is 2.4 times faster than the speed calibrated on Amstrad Cpc with a built-in tape player/recorder.
It needed cassettes and a good quality tape player / recorder.
For economic reasons, some publishers preferred to save their games at 2400 bauds on poor quality tape, with a low level to prevent duplication.
Sometimes, the games were also saved in 300 baud, but it took 8 times more “magnetic tape”.
We can probably say that it would have had an intermediate speed on the oric, but in no way tell nonsense.
I did an experiment in the 80s with a local radio by broadcasting the contents of an oric software at 300 bauds.
The program was recorded on a tape (10 km far from the station) and the program was replayed without problems on the oric. The press at the time criticized the problem of reliability (related to 2400 bauds).
The rom of the atmos thus integrated a possibility of verification and they then integrated a real bug which prevented the automatic start of certain kind of programs (basic but i don’t remember well about that point)
This flaw allowed the piracy of many softwares since it was enough to load software oric 1 on an atmos to prevent it from starting. Publishers quickly answered by creating a countermeasure to work around this bug.
Stig Rune
Trenger ingen elektronikk for å kjøre RGB til Scart på mine Oric-1 og Atmos maskiner, kabel laget jeg selv 🙂