Oric 1 typewriter cartridge anyone?

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Dbug
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Oric 1 typewriter cartridge anyone?

Post by Dbug »

When I was at the Solskogen party (near Oslo, Norway), I had an interesting discussion with a guy who had a Oric 1 in the past. This Oric 1 was sold by a local company along with apparently a ROM cartridge to plug on the expansion port, with a built-in type writer software (basically a basic word processor with commands like / /, * * and _ _ respectively used to indicate that the text should be printed in italics, bold or underlined.

I call it "typewriter" because apparently there was no functionalities for saving or loading a text.

This cartridge apparently also had a build-in serial interface allowing you to connect any standard printer.

Has anyone heard of such a thing? My theory is that getting a working ROM cartridge probably required a lot of hardware due to the wiggly bus of the Oric, also they had to handle the MAP and ROMDIS control lines, so I guess at this point adding the serial interface was probably not much more complex to do :)

I contacted the founder of one of the Norwegian Oric Clubs back in the day and asked him if he knew about it, he answered that he never heard of but would take a look in their older magazines.

On a related note, does anyone else know of cartridge based software on the Oric (not including Telestrat of course) ?