Hello from France : I confirm that the Oric Atmos was very popular here, and I considered buying one to replace my too weak ZX81. In the end I just borrowed a CPC 464 from a friend until school appointed me as the computer club manager, I kept my ZX81and had to run THOMSON T07-70 as part of the official French Education program. I was given an Oric Atmos 20 years ago, and I think it would work with replacing the Power regulator. I agree it's the best keyboard you could find on home computers. Even having a TRS-80 model III :D
My second computer, first I had a ZX81 which I bought second hand for £50. I saved up and bought the Atmos brand new. I didn’t like the keyboard on the Spectrum, and couldn’t afford a BBC Model B. I had all - absolutely all of the available games. When I wasn’t playing the games I spent hours typing in my own programs in BASIC. I loved it! As a testament to the keyboard on the Atmos it survived a house fire that gutted our living room, after the fire-brigade had finish the whole room was a black wet mess. I placed the dripping Atmos over the fins of the fridge (no central heating) and left it there for a fortnight while I redecorated the living room. The TV was replaced by the rental company. I plugged the Atmos and it worked! The space bar was a bit bent so I took it to bits and sanded the bend out of it. I continued to use the Atmos even after I’d saved up for an Amstrad CPC464. Sadly I don’t have it now. Don’t get divorced you’ll be surprised what ex-wives will take just to be spiteful!
remember getting magazines with endless games code to copy ? hours and hours wasted in most cases but you didn't know until you wasted the time !!! then had to put blu tack on your sisters bee gees tape to save it ???
I had an Atmos, never played a game on it! I did have word processor software for it called 'Author', I did some of my Open University assignments on it! And yes a nice keyboard.
Me too! I used the Oric Atmos to write my thesis. Printed on a Brother with thermal paper, what needed to be copied, otherwise it would fade away. But the Brother printer was silent, very nice when you worked at night!
I had the luck to work for the designer of the Oric machines, Paul Johnson, during the 2000s. He assembled the most brilliant group of people I have ever worked with.
That name rings a bell. I purchased the original Tangerine which was a single board with half a K of memory. I upgraded it with a print out of a cassette loading routing which needed typing in every time you wanted to save anything to tape. What this meant of course was that if I needed to save/load a few bytes of code I had to type in a hundred or so bytes of machine code!! I purchased a 6522 via for an astronomical price which I used with a Tandy keyboard. This 6522 was busted. "How do you know it's busted?! someone at Tangerine said. Because it doesn't work I replied. I managed to get a second one out of them. I then had to learn all about keyboard double bounce etc., etc. Space Invaders came on several sheets of A4 which of course needed to be typed in every time. Later I learnt the joy of eproms. Imistake
I'm a Canadian, my uncle married a British woman, and gave me his Oric 1 that he brought from London. It never worked correctly. That is, random keys stopped responding due to some fault in the chips. Alas, my dad disposed my vast collection of Atari 800XL and games, including the Oric, and a book with 100 BASIC games on it...
The Oric does have a reset switch, it's located in the square hole on the bottom of the machine. My guess is they really didn't want you to press it accidentally but it also retains its code in memory after use.
I remember going into WH Smiths, seeing an Oric 1 and entering:- 10 SHOOT : EXPLODE : ZAP : PING : GOTO 10 And it started making these noises in a loop rather louder than I was expecting. I hit the Esc key, but would it stop? No, nothing that obvious. An assistant came over and hit Ctrl-C...
The Oric did have an older sibling: the Microtan 65 from 1979. The Oric 1 itself was a great little computer for its time and the bugs in its ROM were wildly exaggerated. The only one which ever gave me any trouble was a badly handled interrupt which could throw out a garbage character on the printer port when generating hardcopy output. Easy to work around and it didn't stop me from using the little MCP-40 plotter to draw wireframe graphics for my 2nd year university project.
Nice review. Thanks!! The keyboard of Oric 1 was semi-mechanical, and I have an excellent memory of comfort. Especially in comparison with the spectrum. When I had the opportunity to put my fingers on the horrible unstable gums of a spectrum (not to mention the obligation to press several of these gums because each touch had 15 different functions :-)) The Atmos Rom did not correct a cassette bug, which is an urban legend. The reason is that the Oric-1 had at the time the "fastest" writing speed on cassette (2400 bauds). Much faster than all the other computer of the era (including the CPC). It had also a speed 8 times slower (300 bauds) but no intermediate speed. Also without rewriting the cassette routines, the publishers tended to use fast speed to spend less money with tape and do not make users crazy to load at 300 bauds. On the other hand, by thinking of correcting a bug, they added one in the Rom Atmos. The consequence, it is that all the commercial programs stop after loading (don't start automatically). It was a boon for the pirates. Publishers had to quickly hack a solution to avoid that. This had been deleted from the Rom Atmos, but from memory, there was a CALL which allow to display the names of the authors of the ROM of Oric 1 on the upper line of the screen.
I picked up one of these absolute beauties a couple of weeks ago and my Erebus arrived this morning. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. Good timing though. I'm really impressed with the Atmos design. The keyboard is one of the best feeling keyboards I've used
@@trevorboys9140 eBay. Funnily enough I bumped into the guy I bought it off at Crash live. I don't think he's got any more stock but it's worth watching his eBay shop for them
To be honest it's more nostalgia goggles than mandela effect. I used to to lust over the original Oric and the Mattel Aquarius. I clearly had a thing for chicklet keyboards and lack of success. It took me 40 years to get my hands on both :) Though I don't have an Atmos.. which I agree is probably the most beautiful 8-bit
To sell the Atmos as a 48K machine despite not helping much marketing-wise was surprisingly honest. Other brands would have called it a 64 on the basis that it does mount 64 K worth of memory chips.
Tangerine also did some rather nice early kit computers. But, yeah, I had a Jupiter Ace and my flat mate had an Oric Atmos and, okay, he didn't have FORTH, but his computer was still lovely compared to my rubber-keyed spectrum-a-like. `SHOOT` and `EXPLODE` could also be used for a very rudimentary drum machine. ;) If you've got a manual... I strongly recommend typing in the demo program called "The Androids"
Had an Oric-1, alas lost in a move. Still have the printer safely at my parents' stashed away. Got the Oric as it had a ZX81 and the 6502 seemed like more to learn having done the Z80 and pushed the ZX81 to its limits and beyond (managed 8 octaves audio via cassette port, spectrum level high res graphics after rewriting display code and had neat kinda audio system that took the cassette input and plotted it based on the input level and scrolled along). One thing that bugged me with the Oric was the lack of volume control and dam, it was loud.
A bunch of Oric peripherals did appear. Microdisc were late. I believe due to problems with Oric-1 ROMs coming in 2 forms. The EPROM version wouldn't be compatible. Microdisc appeared with Atmos livery and all Atmoses had the single ROM. Plotters came with both Oric-1 and Atmos. Oric modem, joystick and joystick interfaces. I think the Oric 80 column printer never arrived but you could connect other printers thanks to the centronics port.
It's funny, I was watching Chinnyvision's video on the Oric-1 earlier - and his speaker had a similar "splat" of glue all over it. I do like the Atmos keyboard, so much better than the original. Interesting to hear about the ROM upgrade too. Pulsoids is good fun on the Oric, and the Erebus looks like a good SD solution.
Re the speaker, it's just to seal up the dustcap and where the wires punch through the cone to reach the coil. Pretty much all cone-type speakers have this, but these days the dustcap tends to be bigger to hide the wires rather than having them on show like this one.
I remember watching the release and mentions of the Oric at the same time as the ZX Spectrum and C64. I only learned in my 40’s that it’s OS was based on the radio shack Trash 80. Absolutely loved the aesthetic. Thank you for sharing this.
Great video this! I also thought that Oric were French for the longest time. 😅 Such a capable machine with a truly fantastic keyboard but it seems it's sadly often overlooked. I really should do more with mine.
Oh, that'll teach me to comment before the end - I actually own that very Oric Atmos that sits behind Moss on the shelf. Bought it at a charity auction a few years ago 😅
Actually the Oric ended up being French, as the UK Oric company was sold to a French one, that carried on the Atmos production in France for a short while. They later launched the Telestrat - which sealed their fate !
The second machine I ever typed programs in was a friend's Oric 1 (The first was another friend's C64). I have vivid memories of this machine. Just as you typed PING and EXPLODE I also remembered ZAP! This was a fantastic little machine. I also contemplated getting an Atmos sometime after that, but never really got to it. By that time I was very impressed by Amstrad and got a CPC as my second system (My first was a TI-99 that I still have).
There was a Bulgarian clone of the Oric Atmos, called Pravetz 8D. A friend of mine had it and he lent it to me for about 6 months. I had a really crappy cassette player though, so I wasn't able to use it that much, but I loved to make small programs for it.
I originally had a 48k Oric 1 (sent instead of a 16K one as they didn't have any in stock!). I used this until the Atmos came out, it then died for no apparent reason. Noticing an offer to upgrade for about £30 I sent in the knackered old machine and got sent a spanking new Atmos. It was truly beautiful and even smelled nice.. I wish I still had it..
The only "French" connection the Oric has is that it has an RGB output, which means that with the right cable you can connect it to a SCART plug, thus useable with french TV's (which often had a SCART input, so it didn't matter that the TV used the french SECAM standard). That is why they were often used in France. P.S. you forgot to mention the "serial attribute" system the ORIC uses, which is like the CEEFAX (Teletext) video system.
The Oric-1 was the best selling computer in France. When the company was in trouble in the UK it was bought by a French firm who released the Telestrat. The French had the professionally produced Théoric magazine and MicrOric too. Oric was French-owned for about as long as it was British -owned.
@@stephenpalmer9375 depends if your talking about the grey plus 2 or the black model, the rgb out is very different between them, grey one is ttl level r,g,b plus 'bright', black 2 is analogue 'linear' rgb that can interface pretty much directly with a scart input, the ttl version needs a few resistors and diodes to convert the level, BUT the grey 2 pcb had options for linear rgb for version, the 'peritel' model, where scart input was pretty much the norm, such as secam countries , so some grey2's may be found to have linear rgb instead of the ttl as found in the uk, the grey 2 also has composite video on its monitor socket, the black 2 (and plus 3) dont the oric rgb is ttl out from a buffer chip but fed through internal resistors to give more correct levels for a normal 75 ohm load scart connection ,
I grew up with the ZX81 then the Speccy, but I had a poster of the ORIC on my wall. LOL. Check out Blakes 7 for the ORIC, it's a really good graphic adventure game.
Bittersweet memories of the Oric Atmos... I got xmas money from my mother way back when, and off I went to Woolworths in Paisley to purchase that Oric Atmos that I'd seen in the computer magazines, as an upgrade to my ZX81. Got home, eagerly plugged it in. It didn't work. Simply did not power up. Back to Woolworths to exchange it. They didn't have another unit to exchange with. So I got a refund. Now I had my xmas money back, and wondered what to spend it on, and decided on a whim to purchase a racer tourer bike instead of a home pc :D So, I had a - non-working - Oric Atmos for a day, and ended up with a bike. Good times.
Very interesting computer. Unfortunately, we didn't have it in Canada. Seems like a great computer for vintage collectors like myself. Thanks for sharing
one good thing is its not too difficult to find unused old stock replacement ULAs, unlike a lot of 'custom' chips in other home computers , i bought 15 of the things in the mid 2000s, 'just in case' , theyre still listed on ebay by a few sellers, more expensive than when i got mine, but still 'fair' price for what they are ,
Me too, but I'd never heard of the Tangerine Microtan 65 and the Nascom 2 had a 4 Mhz Z80, which was a step up (even when you apply the halving the clock speed rule to get rough equivalence between 6502 and Z80).
Bought Oric after my zx81 because it had 3 channel sound rather than Speccy’s beep. When I got a BBC (i was a teacher) to play Elite the Oric was eventually repurposed for playing a fanfare for pupils who donated their spare change to the school’s African charity. I wrote a quick random counter, connected a switch to 2 keyboard connections and put it at the bottom of the coin chute. The lovely 4 pen plotter (Oric labelled) was attached to my classroom Beeb. The kids designed a robot on squared paper (vectors), inserted the across and up numbers, and the plotter very reliably printed them their robot. Aah the days before National Curriculum when you could interpret how you liked. Thanks to BeeBug bbc basic utilities disc.
Got an Atmos and it worked great. Think I hurt it with the wrong PSU though... Need to crack the lid and see whats what now that I have a new PSU for it.
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My first computer 🙂 I even had the pen printer and the 3 inches disk drive, such luxury for that time !
I have one, upgraded from an Oric-1 which seemed like a good deal at the time (1983 I think). Definitely the coolest tech thing I'd ever seen at the time. I wrote an alarm clock program that basically switched on the tape machine at the appropriate time, typically this meant starting my day to the gentle sounds of Van Halen's "Mean Street". I always hated using the TV as a monitor tho'.
Oric 1 was my first computer, given as Christmas gift in the early 80:s. This was in Sweden, where Oric existed for about two years. It was a great introduction to computers. The keyboard was as bad as described here though. Apart from being hard to type on the circuit board behind the keys oxidized, causing them to not work. Last 10 years I have been programming on an emulator. There are several good ones, so it is only for my own joy of learning about the computer and to have a nice project to work on now and then. I only code on it when I feel for it and it took some 2-3 years to get the 6502 working good, then some other 2 to get the 6522 IO chip to work and some more to get graphics, tape and keyboard working. Now I can play the old games that I played as kid on it, but I still need to do sound chip emulation. Great fun!
My first ever computer, mum bought it from Rumbelows in Waterlooville. Never got the bundled free software cassettes, so I typed in a few programs and realised I wanted a C64. Back up to Rumbelows to exchange it for the a C64, had that for a while and then got an Amiga.😂
The Oric 1 was my first colour computer (zx80 was the first but just black and white) Bought it in Harrogate but used it on my first home leave back to Scotland for Christmas 1983, I had nothing but trouble with it for loading games took lots of attempts to load maybe 1 in 5 attempts for success. I then took it back to the shop and asked for a replacement which they just swapped it out for a Oric Atmos which I loved the keyboard on and it was a little bit better at loading games and the like. In the end I moved on to a Dragon 32 computer as that seems to have more software support. The Atmos was in my opinion the great "what could have been" 8 bit computer but failed like so many others at that time in the early to mid 80's. As a collector I have a Oric 1 and an Oric Atmos with the printer and the diskdrive but I am also lucky enough to have the big brother of the Atmos, the mythical and legendary "LOOK RARE" Oric Telestrat computer which is slightly bigger than the original Atmos but has two cartridge slots, a reset button, two joystick connectors, and a scart plug that allowed for the sound to be output to the TV. There were also connectors for a disk drive , parallel/centronics port and an RS-232 port. its the same design of black and red keyboard and came with the new Hyper Basic Rom cart. It has the diskdrive interface built in to the computer (the atmos had to have it built into the diskdrive itself).
My memory of the Atmos was seeing one used in a hang glider to ploy up drafts so it could travel further shown what I think was Tomorrows World but I’ve failed to find any reference to this anywhere despite searching. The pilot plotted where the updrafts were strongest and then flew over that are until they’d enough height to reach the next location where they’d repeat the process all over again.
I quite like that they only advertised the memory available with basic. Since didn’t the C64 only have 49 or 51 or something k left after basic? (I know I could just look it up but the point stands regardless of the precise number)
I picked one up at a swap meet, never saw one before that, It had a lovely keyboard and I was going to turn it into something, now glad I didn't. Unfortunately I have no software for it, and I don't even know if it works. They have two problematic connectors, one being the upside down power supply, and the other being the RGB port where the horizontal and vertical sync are combined into one pin, I don't have a monitor that supports this, and I'll have to do something with the power connector before I accidentally plug in a centre positive 12V lead of which there are a squillion where I live. I'll have to get a wriggle on, get it going, then get one of those tape emulators you showed. Hopefully I can then download some software from the web.
A game by Loriciels made the Oric more popular in France : l'Aigle d'Or. It won the prize of best adventure game in 1984 for the Tilt! Magazine awards (the more popular magazine of video games in France during the 80s). It would be later ported for the Amstrad. It may have helped a bit to sell the computer. Great french creators actually began their carrier on the Oric, such as the creator of Another World, Éric Chahi.
Wow... 40 years later I learn (from 10:32) there were different ersions of the 1.1 ROM, with early versions *not* containing the fix for the tape routine bug... I'll have to check but I'm quite certain I had this 'early' 1.1 ROM in my Atmos and that explains why I had so many troubles loading tapes back then!!!
I haven't read all the comments, so apologies if this has already been pointed out. But the Oric name probably came from the TV sci-fi show Blake's 7, and the Orac computer in that.
Best basic Ive ever used was on the Atmos. So much better than the ZX series by a mile. Only the Amiga 500 and AtariST beat it but that was years away at the time!
It is only at this point that I realized how my Romanian Spectrum clone (Tim-S) is copied half from the Oric (all the Oric's ports exactly how they looked in the video, but it had additional ones like joystick, serial, centronics printer and Sinclair edge connector) and half from the Spectrum 128 (CPU, sound chip which is the same as Orics, ROMs, etc.).
I always recall Oric's ZX Spectrum links. Never considered The French Connection, or that it was French. 😉 As a result i always assumed until the last few years that it was powered by the Z80. The 6502 revelation kind of made me realise at least one reason it probably failed... 6502, Spectrum type graphics. It's like some kind frankenstein, with BBC Commode* CPU, Spectrum colour clash and Amstrad audio. No one probably knew what to do with it and ported (80's retyped) it on the Jupiter Ace. Well maybe not not the Ace. The main thing I've learned today is that the Oric Atmos had a full 64K available, if you could write your own IO routines. 👍 *Of course i know its Commodore and not a commode, I've got a Commode and a few Commodores. Actually, i only have the Commode now.
@@andygozzo72 Yes your right, i could see the detail using different available colours is better than the Spectrum's forced attribute clash. Limiting 2 colours too every 8x8 pixel block on the screen. I've no idea how the Oric had its graphics mapped to memory and why some of its display capabilities are similar, but i know the Spectrum well enough to see the Oric has a better display. I'll have to look up the Oric video chip and how it was used in the Oric to understand better.
@@techkev140 i dont fully understand the oric but from what i read it uses 'serial' attributes? whether fully correct or not i dont know, i certainly do know of the spectrum workings, having had at least 1 since christmas '84 and have the book on its ulas internal workings
The original Oric 1 keyboard was incredibly similar to the infra red removable keyboard in the TD1400 Tantel viewdata terminal (which we had and used also as a modem for our BBC Model B). Tandata was related to Tangerine somehow I think (did some people leave Tangerine for Tandata, and others go to Oric?)
Good enough for moss, it's good enough for me. Thumbs up. I live in Australia in the outback so not a lot of access to this generation of stuff. ***thumbs up***
the ram chips are 64kiloBIT (x 1 BIT each), (8 needed to store a 64k byte) not 8k, in terms of k being kilobytes, as you cant address them in that way ..the 16k machine used 2 4416 16kilo'nybble'/half byte (4 bit) rams, making 16kbytes
Myth. Oric name came from trying to do anagrams of Micro, but they forgot the 'M'. One thought about the red 'tick' in the Atmos era Oric logo is you can put a mirror against it and the M magically appears.
i dreamt to get one when i was a kid, and ended up finally to build a fake one in wood. The black and red keyboard was soooooooo rad !! my father had a zx81 and bought later a cpc 6128... shame on me !
I had an Oric-1 with a V1.1 ROM. I sent it back to Oric for repair and when it returned the V1.1 ROM was in there. They forgot the snazzy keyboard though :( Great machines.. wish I still had it.
My 2nd computer after my Acorn Atom, really wanted a disc drive to develop my programs on fed up with the tape system finally got an Atari ST but it was a different world.
Ha, but wasn't Oric a super star computer in the Brit Sci-fi series 'Blakes 7' circa 1978 - 1981? It seems to me the Oric is more likely to have been named after the mythical supercomputer, than a sweet 'made to make your mouth water'.
Why does the horrible Oric-1 keyboard look so familiar? I can't remember having seen the Oric-1 at a shop in the early 80's (I was still a young kid, that might also explain it), but they keyboard looks very familiar. Who else was using this keyboard?
Sorry there is a huge difference between the Oric and Spectrum. in hires mode the colours are serial and thus are more complicated than on the Spectrum.
Yet another machine where the cursors keys are all in the wrong place. Why on earth did designers think it was a good idea to cripple users and force them to use TWO hands to access cursor keys instead of being able to twiddle the cursor keys with one hand and still have the other hand free for doing stuff, such as I dunno maybe TYPING.
Hello from France : I confirm that the Oric Atmos was very popular here, and I considered buying one to replace my too weak ZX81. In the end I just borrowed a CPC 464 from a friend until school appointed me as the computer club manager, I kept my ZX81and had to run THOMSON T07-70 as part of the official French Education program.
I was given an Oric Atmos 20 years ago, and I think it would work with replacing the Power regulator.
I agree it's the best keyboard you could find on home computers. Even having a TRS-80 model III :D
My second computer, first I had a ZX81 which I bought second hand for £50. I saved up and bought the Atmos brand new. I didn’t like the keyboard on the Spectrum, and couldn’t afford a BBC Model B.
I had all - absolutely all of the available games. When I wasn’t playing the games I spent hours typing in my own programs in BASIC. I loved it!
As a testament to the keyboard on the Atmos it survived a house fire that gutted our living room, after the fire-brigade had finish the whole room was a black wet mess. I placed the dripping Atmos over the fins of the fridge (no central heating) and left it there for a fortnight while I redecorated the living room. The TV was replaced by the rental company. I plugged the Atmos and it worked! The space bar was a bit bent so I took it to bits and sanded the bend out of it.
I continued to use the Atmos even after I’d saved up for an Amstrad CPC464.
Sadly I don’t have it now. Don’t get divorced you’ll be surprised what ex-wives will take just to be spiteful!
remember getting magazines with endless games code to copy ? hours and hours wasted in most cases but you didn't know until you wasted the time !!! then had to put blu tack on your sisters bee gees tape to save it ???
I had an Atmos, never played a game on it!
I did have word processor software for it called 'Author', I did some of my Open University assignments on it!
And yes a nice keyboard.
Me too! I used the Oric Atmos to write my thesis. Printed on a Brother with thermal paper, what needed to be copied, otherwise it would fade away. But the Brother printer was silent, very nice when you worked at night!
I had the luck to work for the designer of the Oric machines, Paul Johnson, during the 2000s. He assembled the most brilliant group of people I have ever worked with.
That name rings a bell. I purchased the original Tangerine which was a single board with half a K of memory. I upgraded it with a print out of a cassette loading routing which needed typing in every time you wanted to save anything to tape. What this meant of course was that if I needed to save/load a few bytes of code I had to type in a hundred or so bytes of machine code!! I purchased a 6522 via for an astronomical price which I used with a Tandy keyboard. This 6522 was busted. "How do you know it's busted?! someone at Tangerine said. Because it doesn't work I replied. I managed to get a second one out of them. I then had to learn all about keyboard double bounce etc., etc. Space Invaders came on several sheets of A4 which of course needed to be typed in every time. Later I learnt the joy of eproms. Imistake
I'm an American, I love watching these things about vintage computers, even if I never heard of them!
I'm a Canadian, my uncle married a British woman, and gave me his Oric 1 that he brought from London. It never worked correctly. That is, random keys stopped responding due to some fault in the chips. Alas, my dad disposed my vast collection of Atari 800XL and games, including the Oric, and a book with 100 BASIC games on it...
The Oric does have a reset switch, it's located in the square hole on the bottom of the machine. My guess is they really didn't want you to press it accidentally but it also retains its code in memory after use.
So we’ll hidden I didn’t even notice it :) I’ll go on a hunt for it now :)
Or you could type CALL 583 to run the reset machine code routine manually. Jeez, how can I remember that but not my debit card PIN number? 😂
I bet that was a relief as the original Oric-1 power supplies had a habit of the cable breaking.
Unfortunately for the Atmos, the floppy disk drives used a soon to be obsolete 3” discs along with the Amstrad.
@@simonochana3189 Did the drives use belts like the Amstrad one or were they the better direct drive type as used in the Tatung Einstein.
Eine schöne Einführung zum Oric Computer - Danke - A nice introduction to the Oric Computer - Thank you.
Cudos for making the bug an actual bug and not showing a generic insect!
I remember going into WH Smiths, seeing an Oric 1 and entering:-
10 SHOOT : EXPLODE : ZAP : PING : GOTO 10
And it started making these noises in a loop rather louder than I was expecting. I hit the Esc key, but would it stop? No, nothing that obvious. An assistant came over and hit Ctrl-C...
The Oric did have an older sibling: the Microtan 65 from 1979. The Oric 1 itself was a great little computer for its time and the bugs in its ROM were wildly exaggerated. The only one which ever gave me any trouble was a badly handled interrupt which could throw out a garbage character on the printer port when generating hardcopy output. Easy to work around and it didn't stop me from using the little MCP-40 plotter to draw wireframe graphics for my 2nd year university project.
Nice review. Thanks!!
The keyboard of Oric 1 was semi-mechanical, and I have an excellent memory of comfort.
Especially in comparison with the spectrum.
When I had the opportunity to put my fingers on the horrible unstable gums of a spectrum (not to mention the obligation to press several of these gums because each touch had 15 different functions :-))
The Atmos Rom did not correct a cassette bug, which is an urban legend.
The reason is that the Oric-1 had at the time the "fastest" writing speed on cassette (2400 bauds).
Much faster than all the other computer of the era (including the CPC).
It had also a speed 8 times slower (300 bauds) but no intermediate speed.
Also without rewriting the cassette routines, the publishers tended to use fast speed to spend less money with tape and do not make users crazy to load at 300 bauds.
On the other hand, by thinking of correcting a bug, they added one in the Rom Atmos.
The consequence, it is that all the commercial programs stop after loading (don't start automatically).
It was a boon for the pirates.
Publishers had to quickly hack a solution to avoid that.
This had been deleted from the Rom Atmos, but from memory, there was a CALL which allow to display the names of the authors of the ROM of Oric 1 on the upper line of the screen.
I picked up one of these absolute beauties a couple of weeks ago and my Erebus arrived this morning. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. Good timing though.
I'm really impressed with the Atmos design. The keyboard is one of the best feeling keyboards I've used
Hi - Whereabouts did you get hold of an Erebus? I can't find one for love nor money!
@@trevorboys9140 eBay. Funnily enough I bumped into the guy I bought it off at Crash live. I don't think he's got any more stock but it's worth watching his eBay shop for them
One of the best looking machines. When I win the lottery one will be my first frivolous purchases!
To be honest it's more nostalgia goggles than mandela effect. I used to to lust over the original Oric and the Mattel Aquarius. I clearly had a thing for chicklet keyboards and lack of success. It took me 40 years to get my hands on both :) Though I don't have an Atmos.. which I agree is probably the most beautiful 8-bit
To sell the Atmos as a 48K machine despite not helping much marketing-wise was surprisingly honest. Other brands would have called it a 64 on the basis that it does mount 64 K worth of memory chips.
Tangerine also did some rather nice early kit computers.
But, yeah, I had a Jupiter Ace and my flat mate had an Oric Atmos and, okay, he didn't have FORTH, but his computer was still lovely compared to my rubber-keyed spectrum-a-like.
`SHOOT` and `EXPLODE` could also be used for a very rudimentary drum machine. ;)
If you've got a manual... I strongly recommend typing in the demo program called "The Androids"
I had an Oric-1. Loved it. Spent many days in my bedroom programming it and playing games. Never had the upgraded Atmos though.
My friend had an Atmos, and his Dad's Oric-1 was the first computer I ever saw, it was amazing!!!!
My first computer loved my Atmos 👍
Love the Oric! Thanks for showing some Oric love.
I have a mint condition Atmos, boxed. It's amazing. Playing Manic Miner on it is identical to the Speccy version, but with beautiful AY music 👍
The Oric version has squashed sprites though because the udgs are 8x6 not 8x8.
And 12 more levels!
Had an Oric-1, alas lost in a move. Still have the printer safely at my parents' stashed away. Got the Oric as it had a ZX81 and the 6502 seemed like more to learn having done the Z80 and pushed the ZX81 to its limits and beyond (managed 8 octaves audio via cassette port, spectrum level high res graphics after rewriting display code and had neat kinda audio system that took the cassette input and plotted it based on the input level and scrolled along).
One thing that bugged me with the Oric was the lack of volume control and dam, it was loud.
A bunch of Oric peripherals did appear. Microdisc were late. I believe due to problems with Oric-1 ROMs coming in 2 forms. The EPROM version wouldn't be compatible. Microdisc appeared with Atmos livery and all Atmoses had the single ROM. Plotters came with both Oric-1 and Atmos. Oric modem, joystick and joystick interfaces. I think the Oric 80 column printer never arrived but you could connect other printers thanks to the centronics port.
Amazing quality of the video, thanx for trying the Erebus interface. 😎
Thanks!
Cheers!
It's funny, I was watching Chinnyvision's video on the Oric-1 earlier - and his speaker had a similar "splat" of glue all over it. I do like the Atmos keyboard, so much better than the original. Interesting to hear about the ROM upgrade too. Pulsoids is good fun on the Oric, and the Erebus looks like a good SD solution.
Re the speaker, it's just to seal up the dustcap and where the wires punch through the cone to reach the coil. Pretty much all cone-type speakers have this, but these days the dustcap tends to be bigger to hide the wires rather than having them on show like this one.
I remember watching the release and mentions of the Oric at the same time as the ZX Spectrum and C64. I only learned in my 40’s that it’s OS was based on the radio shack Trash 80. Absolutely loved the aesthetic. Thank you for sharing this.
... its OS ...
Great video this! I also thought that Oric were French for the longest time. 😅
Such a capable machine with a truly fantastic keyboard but it seems it's sadly often overlooked. I really should do more with mine.
Oh, that'll teach me to comment before the end - I actually own that very Oric Atmos that sits behind Moss on the shelf. Bought it at a charity auction a few years ago 😅
Nice!
Actually the Oric ended up being French, as the UK Oric company was sold to a French one, that carried on the Atmos production in France for a short while. They later launched the Telestrat - which sealed their fate !
The second machine I ever typed programs in was a friend's Oric 1 (The first was another friend's C64). I have vivid memories of this machine. Just as you typed PING and EXPLODE I also remembered ZAP! This was a fantastic little machine. I also contemplated getting an Atmos sometime after that, but never really got to it. By that time I was very impressed by Amstrad and got a CPC as my second system (My first was a TI-99 that I still have).
There was a Bulgarian clone of the Oric Atmos, called Pravetz 8D. A friend of mine had it and he lent it to me for about 6 months. I had a really crappy cassette player though, so I wasn't able to use it that much, but I loved to make small programs for it.
Back in the day I had an Amstrad CPC, a ZX Spectrum + and a C64, as far as I knew back then those were the only 3 home computers that existed.
I originally had a 48k Oric 1 (sent instead of a 16K one as they didn't have any in stock!). I used this until the Atmos came out, it then died for no apparent reason. Noticing an offer to upgrade for about £30 I sent in the knackered old machine and got sent a spanking new Atmos. It was truly beautiful and even smelled nice.. I wish I still had it..
The only "French" connection the Oric has is that it has an RGB output, which means that with the right cable you can connect it to a SCART plug, thus useable with french TV's (which often had a SCART input, so it didn't matter that the TV used the french SECAM standard). That is why they were often used in France.
P.S. you forgot to mention the "serial attribute" system the ORIC uses, which is like the CEEFAX (Teletext) video system.
similar to the Peritel/RGB on the Speccy +2?
The Oric-1 was the best selling computer in France. When the company was in trouble in the UK it was bought by a French firm who released the Telestrat. The French had the professionally produced Théoric magazine and MicrOric too. Oric was French-owned for about as long as it was British -owned.
@@stephenpalmer9375 depends if your talking about the grey plus 2 or the black model, the rgb out is very different between them, grey one is ttl level r,g,b plus 'bright', black 2 is analogue 'linear' rgb that can interface pretty much directly with a scart input, the ttl version needs a few resistors and diodes to convert the level, BUT the grey 2 pcb had options for linear rgb for version, the 'peritel' model, where scart input was pretty much the norm, such as secam countries , so some grey2's may be found to have linear rgb instead of the ttl as found in the uk, the grey 2 also has composite video on its monitor socket, the black 2 (and plus 3) dont the oric rgb is ttl out from a buffer chip but fed through internal resistors to give more correct levels for a normal 75 ohm load scart connection ,
Not the only, Oric ended up being a French company indeed, once it ceased existing in the UK ;)
I grew up with the ZX81 then the Speccy, but I had a poster of the ORIC on my wall. LOL.
Check out Blakes 7 for the ORIC, it's a really good graphic adventure game.
Blakes 7 and the Oric Hmmm...wonder if that had something to do with Orac....cheers
I have mine in its original box and even a brand new Tape deck to go along
Bittersweet memories of the Oric Atmos... I got xmas money from my mother way back when, and off I went to Woolworths in Paisley to purchase that Oric Atmos that I'd seen in the computer magazines, as an upgrade to my ZX81.
Got home, eagerly plugged it in.
It didn't work. Simply did not power up.
Back to Woolworths to exchange it. They didn't have another unit to exchange with.
So I got a refund. Now I had my xmas money back, and wondered what to spend it on, and decided on a whim to purchase a racer tourer bike instead of a home pc :D
So, I had a - non-working - Oric Atmos for a day, and ended up with a bike. Good times.
Very interesting computer. Unfortunately, we didn't have it in Canada. Seems like a great computer for vintage collectors like myself. Thanks for sharing
one good thing is its not too difficult to find unused old stock replacement ULAs, unlike a lot of 'custom' chips in other home computers , i bought 15 of the things in the mid 2000s, 'just in case' , theyre still listed on ebay by a few sellers, more expensive than when i got mine, but still 'fair' price for what they are ,
I always liked the look of the Tangerine Microtan 65 but my first micro was a Nascom 2.
Me too, but I'd never heard of the Tangerine Microtan 65 and the Nascom 2 had a 4 Mhz Z80, which was a step up (even when you apply the halving the clock speed rule to get rough equivalence between 6502 and Z80).
Merry Christmas and thanks for all the brilliant entertainment. I had an Oric 1 (aged 30something!). 😊
Bought Oric after my zx81 because it had 3 channel sound rather than Speccy’s beep. When I got a BBC (i was a teacher) to play Elite the Oric was eventually repurposed for playing a fanfare for pupils who donated their spare change to the school’s African charity. I wrote a quick random counter, connected a switch to 2 keyboard connections and put it at the bottom of the coin chute. The lovely 4 pen plotter (Oric labelled) was attached to my classroom Beeb. The kids designed a robot on squared paper (vectors), inserted the across and up numbers, and the plotter very reliably printed them their robot. Aah the days before National Curriculum when you could interpret how you liked. Thanks to BeeBug bbc basic utilities disc.
Got an Atmos and it worked great. Think I hurt it with the wrong PSU though... Need to crack the lid and see whats what now that I have a new PSU for it.
My first computer 🙂 I even had the pen printer and the 3 inches disk drive, such luxury for that time !
I have one, upgraded from an Oric-1 which seemed like a good deal at the time (1983 I think). Definitely the coolest tech thing I'd ever seen at the time. I wrote an alarm clock program that basically switched on the tape machine at the appropriate time, typically this meant starting my day to the gentle sounds of Van Halen's "Mean Street". I always hated using the TV as a monitor tho'.
Oric 1 was my first computer, given as Christmas gift in the early 80:s. This was in Sweden, where Oric existed for about two years. It was a great introduction to computers. The keyboard was as bad as described here though. Apart from being hard to type on the circuit board behind the keys oxidized, causing them to not work. Last 10 years I have been programming on an emulator. There are several good ones, so it is only for my own joy of learning about the computer and to have a nice project to work on now and then. I only code on it when I feel for it and it took some 2-3 years to get the 6502 working good, then some other 2 to get the 6522 IO chip to work and some more to get graphics, tape and keyboard working. Now I can play the old games that I played as kid on it, but I still need to do sound chip emulation. Great fun!
My first ever computer, mum bought it from Rumbelows in Waterlooville. Never got the bundled free software cassettes, so I typed in a few programs and realised I wanted a C64. Back up to Rumbelows to exchange it for the a C64, had that for a while and then got an Amiga.😂
The Oric 1 was my first colour computer (zx80 was the first but just black and white) Bought it in Harrogate but used it on my first home leave back to Scotland for Christmas 1983, I had nothing but trouble with it for loading games took lots of attempts to load maybe 1 in 5 attempts for success. I then took it back to the shop and asked for a replacement which they just swapped it out for a Oric Atmos which I loved the keyboard on and it was a little bit better at loading games and the like. In the end I moved on to a Dragon 32 computer as that seems to have more software support. The Atmos was in my opinion the great "what could have been" 8 bit computer but failed like so many others at that time in the early to mid 80's. As a collector I have a Oric 1 and an Oric Atmos with the printer and the diskdrive but I am also lucky enough to have the big brother of the Atmos, the mythical and legendary "LOOK RARE" Oric Telestrat computer which is slightly bigger than the original Atmos but has two cartridge slots, a reset button, two joystick connectors, and a scart plug that allowed for the sound to be output to the TV. There were also connectors for a disk drive , parallel/centronics port and an RS-232 port. its the same design of black and red keyboard and came with the new Hyper Basic Rom cart. It has the diskdrive interface built in to the computer (the atmos had to have it built into the diskdrive itself).
My memory of the Atmos was seeing one used in a hang glider to ploy up drafts so it could travel further shown what I think was Tomorrows World but I’ve failed to find any reference to this anywhere despite searching.
The pilot plotted where the updrafts were strongest and then flew over that are until they’d enough height to reach the next location where they’d repeat the process all over again.
I do remember dithering between buying a Spectrum 48k or an Oric Atmos. Chose wisely with the Speccy all in all!
I did have an earlier Tangerine computer, the Microtan 65.
I quite like that they only advertised the memory available with basic. Since didn’t the C64 only have 49 or 51 or something k left after basic? (I know I could just look it up but the point stands regardless of the precise number)
I picked one up at a swap meet, never saw one before that, It had a lovely keyboard and I was going to turn it into something, now glad I didn't.
Unfortunately I have no software for it, and I don't even know if it works. They have two problematic connectors, one being the upside down power supply, and the other being the RGB port where the horizontal and vertical sync are combined into one pin, I don't have a monitor that supports this, and I'll have to do something with the power connector before I accidentally plug in a centre positive 12V lead of which there are a squillion where I live.
I'll have to get a wriggle on, get it going, then get one of those tape emulators you showed. Hopefully I can then download some software from the web.
A game by Loriciels made the Oric more popular in France : l'Aigle d'Or. It won the prize of best adventure game in 1984 for the Tilt! Magazine awards (the more popular magazine of video games in France during the 80s). It would be later ported for the Amstrad. It may have helped a bit to sell the computer. Great french creators actually began their carrier on the Oric, such as the creator of Another World, Éric Chahi.
Wow... 40 years later I learn (from 10:32) there were different ersions of the 1.1 ROM, with early versions *not* containing the fix for the tape routine bug... I'll have to check but I'm quite certain I had this 'early' 1.1 ROM in my Atmos and that explains why I had so many troubles loading tapes back then!!!
I haven't read all the comments, so apologies if this has already been pointed out. But the Oric name probably came from the TV sci-fi show Blake's 7, and the Orac computer in that.
Best basic Ive ever used was on the Atmos. So much better than the ZX series by a mile. Only the Amiga 500 and AtariST beat it but that was years away at the time!
It is only at this point that I realized how my Romanian Spectrum clone (Tim-S) is copied half from the Oric (all the Oric's ports exactly how they looked in the video, but it had additional ones like joystick, serial, centronics printer and Sinclair edge connector) and half from the Spectrum 128 (CPU, sound chip which is the same as Orics, ROMs, etc.).
Don't forget that the ship's computer in 'Blake's 7' was Orac.
The C64 has the ROMs overlapped over the RAM in a similar way, but they still called it a 64k machine ;)
The ROMs could be paged out making the RAM available. It was also possible to copy the contents of them into the RAM at the same address.
You said Apple I had the 6502, but more importantly, so did the Apple II, which sold in the millions and had thousands of games and other programs.
It really is a sweet looking device. It’s a shame it didn’t reach its full potential.
I always recall Oric's ZX Spectrum links. Never considered The French Connection, or that it was French. 😉
As a result i always assumed until the last few years that it was powered by the Z80. The 6502 revelation kind of made me realise at least one reason it probably failed... 6502, Spectrum type graphics. It's like some kind frankenstein, with BBC Commode* CPU, Spectrum colour clash and Amstrad audio. No one probably knew what to do with it and ported (80's retyped) it on the Jupiter Ace. Well maybe not not the Ace.
The main thing I've learned today is that the Oric Atmos had a full 64K available, if you could write your own IO routines. 👍
*Of course i know its Commodore and not a commode, I've got a Commode and a few Commodores. Actually, i only have the Commode now.
its graphics arent really that much like the spectrum, its quite different
@@andygozzo72 Yes your right, i could see the detail using different available colours is better than the Spectrum's forced attribute clash. Limiting 2 colours too every 8x8 pixel block on the screen. I've no idea how the Oric had its graphics mapped to memory and why some of its display capabilities are similar, but i know the Spectrum well enough to see the Oric has a better display. I'll have to look up the Oric video chip and how it was used in the Oric to understand better.
@@techkev140 i dont fully understand the oric but from what i read it uses 'serial' attributes? whether fully correct or not i dont know, i certainly do know of the spectrum workings, having had at least 1 since christmas '84 and have the book on its ulas internal workings
The original Oric 1 keyboard was incredibly similar to the infra red removable keyboard in the TD1400 Tantel viewdata terminal (which we had and used also as a modem for our BBC Model B). Tandata was related to Tangerine somehow I think (did some people leave Tangerine for Tandata, and others go to Oric?)
I never knew they games were colour. We had a black/white TV for it!
The Oric is getting popular these days!
Good enough for moss, it's good enough for me. Thumbs up. I live in Australia in the outback so not a lot of access to this generation of stuff. ***thumbs up***
I want an Oric so i can play the Blakes Seven game someone wrote for it. Yes, yes, yes I could get an emulator.... ORAC for the ORIC!
the ram chips are 64kiloBIT (x 1 BIT each), (8 needed to store a 64k byte) not 8k, in terms of k being kilobytes, as you cant address them in that way ..the 16k machine used 2 4416 16kilo'nybble'/half byte (4 bit) rams, making 16kbytes
Named for Orac, the super computer in Blake's 7.... I had one in 83/84... wrote some software for my university course on it... Lovely little machine.
Myth. Oric name came from trying to do anagrams of Micro, but they forgot the 'M'. One thought about the red 'tick' in the Atmos era Oric logo is you can put a mirror against it and the M magically appears.
i dreamt to get one when i was a kid, and ended up finally to build a fake one in wood. The black and red keyboard was soooooooo rad !! my father had a zx81 and bought later a cpc 6128... shame on me !
I've never understood why British micros tended to have internal loudspeakers whereas the C64 sent the audio over the TV modulator.
I had an Oric-1 with a V1.1 ROM. I sent it back to Oric for repair and when it returned the V1.1 ROM was in there. They forgot the snazzy keyboard though :( Great machines.. wish I still had it.
My 2nd computer after my Acorn Atom, really wanted a disc drive to develop my programs on fed up with the tape system finally got an Atari ST but it was a different world.
can you tell me where wood i get oric atmos emulator
Ha, but wasn't Oric a super star computer in the Brit Sci-fi series 'Blakes 7' circa 1978 - 1981? It seems to me the Oric is more likely to have been named after the mythical supercomputer, than a sweet 'made to make your mouth water'.
I had one, best keyboard ever. Not many games loaded apart from Xenon one
Little known fact.. Rees from Ctrl-alt-Rees TH-cam channel owns the Oric from the IT Crowd😬
Remind me warm memories 😂👍
The Oric Atmos looks excellent for its time. Did the French version have an AZERTY keyboard?
No, it didn't - QWERTY - same as ours.
@@cretski67 Some resellers gave some sets of stickers to put on the keyboard, similar to what they did on the Telestrat
I thought oric was a sound-a-like name from orac, the name of the computer in a box from Blake's 7?!
Why does the horrible Oric-1 keyboard look so familiar?
I can't remember having seen the Oric-1 at a shop in the early 80's (I was still a young kid, that might also explain it), but they keyboard looks very familiar.
Who else was using this keyboard?
Oric Atmos rules!
The 16k never emerged my dad ordered one 4 months later they offered 48k for 129 as there where oo many problems with the 16k version
And what about the Microtan 65?
👍
Sorry there is a huge difference between the Oric and Spectrum. in hires mode the colours are serial and thus are more complicated than on the Spectrum.
Tamago-chi is pronounced with a Long O.
Yet another machine where the cursors keys are all in the wrong place. Why on earth did designers think it was a good idea to cripple users and force them to use TWO hands to access cursor keys instead of being able to twiddle the cursor keys with one hand and still have the other hand free for doing stuff, such as I dunno maybe TYPING.
It really is a sexy wee beast.
French don't wear berets since WWII 😄😄😄. You need to know that...
first !