40 years of Oric - a British-French computer story

[Bodhi]

At https://digitalesleben.blog/2023/01/13/ ... eschichte/ a German Oric 1 and Atmos owner wrote a well researched article about the history of computers and Tangerine in his blog on the occasion of the release of the Oric 1 40 years ago.

The article is written in German, but can easily be translated e.g. with deepL.

[Dbug]

Thanks for sharing

There is an interesting channel on YouTube called Dbug's Stuff on Oric. A French guy living in Norway has posted a video series of 26 videos about this computer and its ecosystem. It is called Oriclopedia and is absolutely worth seeing.

Always nice to read this type of thing

[iss]

Very nice article, indeed! Thanks and Happy Oric anniversary!

[Bodhi]

Thanks for sharing

There is an interesting channel on YouTube called Dbug's Stuff on Oric. A French guy living in Norway has posted a video series of 26 videos about this computer and its ecosystem. It is called Oriclopedia and is absolutely worth seeing.

Always nice to read this type of thing

Hopefully you get some clicks now.

[Dbug]

Doubt I'll get many more clicks, the most successful Oriclopedia video has 1200 views, most have just around 200 or even less.

[Symoon]

"It turned out that the cassette routines in ROM version 1.0 of the Oric-1 were faulty. This was the reason why Oric users could not load their purchased software properly from cassette."

Mmmmh, quite wrong IMHO. What's concerning is that this story is so much copied all over the place that it will soon be the official history.

[Chema]

After all these years and I still have to see a technical explanation of the issues with the tape routines.

It is true that I could not use most of the tape players back then with the 1.0 rom. When I found one that worked I also converted my 1 to an Atmos. However, loading things was still a challenge. I remember the small routine that was loaded prior to nearly any program (this routine appeared also in the Oric manual) which simply cleared the error flag ever interrupt, basically rendering error check useless. Not the way to go at all!

But even worse is the second version of the 1.1 rom with the error flag cleared in the routine itself. Bad decision!

Checking for errors during the sync phase was blamed for it, but I am not convinced. Probably there was something in the circuitry itself. After all, they said the routines were those of the Microtan, which were quite reliable (?)

[Dbug]

We know there are at least two revisions of the circuitry part, with different resistors values, so there was definitely something there.

That would actually be an interesting mod for the Oric: Somebody coming up with the ultimate hardware version of the tape loading/saving circuit, and some ROM code to go with it, to make it the most reliable Oric in the known universe.

Is that doable?

[Symoon]

Checking for errors during the sync phase was blamed for it, but I am not convinced. Probably there was something in the circuitry itself. After all, they said the routines were those of the Microtan, which were quite reliable (?)

Early tapes duplication was probably a major issue.
IJK tapes could be used to test, as they were known for being really well recorded (providing the tape hasn't badly aged of course )