Happy Birthday Oric

[Carlos]

Alas poor Oric, I never knew you that well 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/28 ... years_old/




Feature The Oric-1, which was formally launched 30 years ago this week, was produced with one thing in mind: to take on Sir Clive Sinclair at his own game. "The Oric is a competitor for the Spectrum," one of Oric developer Tangerine Computer Systems' software team, Paul Kaufman, emphatically told members of the press. "We are convinced that it is a better machine."

read more here

[TL]

It was very popular in France I believe.

Very similar to the 48k Spectrum except it used a 6502 instead of a Z80 and the colour clash wasn't as bad.

[dougtitchmarsh]

I vaguely remember the Oric being announced. I always used to get it confused with ORAc from Blake's Seven

[TL]

There were also several revisions of the Oric:


Oric Atmos


Oric Telestrat

And a Bulgarian and Yugoslavian version of the machine made under licence.


Pravetz 8D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oric_Atmos#Oric_Atmos

[AmigaJay]

Remember mucking around with the keys in Dixons! Very thin and hard if I remember! About as close to using one personally.

[onthinice]

Once again! Feel like I missed out on a neat little computer.

[DreamcastRIP]

I'm leafing through the pages of the new RG magazine looking to find some coverage of this 30th anniversary of a retro gaming computer. I've noticed four and a half pages of current-gen game reviews and two pages on an Xbox 360 game but haven't seen anything about the Oric yet...

[TL]

There have been a few cool homebrews for the Oric over the last few years.

First there was a port of the classic Stormlord that originally came out on the C64, Spectrum, Amstrad, Amiga, ST and Mega Drive:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSDy-BC580M

Then more recently there was a port of the classic Spectrum game Skooldaze:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRrqAhyJ_uA

[zapiy]

Great stuff. Would like to know more about this.

[TL]

There is an excellent homebrew Elite clone too called 1337

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlVW4r2w8y0

And this is another cool looking homebrew game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDkaimbO4FU

[Katzkatz]

My uncle has one.  I keep nagging him for it.  He has it around some where. 

It was like the Laird said, very similar to an early Spectrum, on the technical side. 

I think there was a problem with the first version's BASIC.  I think it couldn't save or something like that. 

[TL]

My uncle has one.  I keep nagging him for it.  He has it around some where. 

It was like the Laird said, very similar to an early Spectrum, on the technical side. 

I think there was a problem with the first version's BASIC.  I think it could save or something like that.

Taken from the Wikipedia page:

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.

[davyk]

I had one and loved it - despite the small catalogue of games released for it. It never really stood a chance against the Spectrum which it was priced to compete with.

I wrote loads of BASIC programs for it and got great value out of it as I played the simple games I created (Video Poker, Poker Squares, Hangman, Reaction Tester) with my brother and cousins for hours.

Ocean did a decent port of Hunchback for it and I also remember playing The Ultra and Centipede on it - two decent shmups - but it was all abut the programming for me.

It was a 6502 machine which I believe is a really nice instruction set to start with if you want to get into assembler. I dipped into a bit of that with the Oric - bought a copy of "Oric Mon" and a 6502 book and was soon messing about moving things around the screen at super fast pace...

Never had any issues with saving and loading - though I always saved 2 copies - just to be sure - never needed it though.

Dropped it one day and it just stopped working - was probably a simple fix back then but I'm afraid it ended up in the bin. Will always remember it fondly though.

The only noticeable bug its BASIC interpreter had was that if you converted an integer to a string it added the display attribute for green onto the start of the string - so you had to strip that off using MID$ or RIGHT$ if you wanted to display it in any other colour than green!! Was no big deal once you knew how to work around it. It had some great sound commands that let you create custom sound envelopes etc. - good times.

[TL]

Great story! And welcome to the forum! 

[Carlos]

Great post, welcome aboard daveyk.