The Oric 1 and Oric Atmos 

Interesting, thank you. Firstly I had an Oric1 that I traded in for an Atmos - the keyboard :) I used it a great deal (the early 1980s). I learnt 6502 assembly coding then bought from an Oric insider the first disc drive with Sedoric on it. I made an EPROM programer on the expansion bus (had to buffer the clock). I had no problems with the tape by using a proper data recorder. Then with that, I built a commercially available moving message display system using those EPROMs. Customers never knew that my product was built around a £100.00 Atmos ;) I can't speak more highly of this remarkable tiny machine - sold my whole Atmos kit to a French person, for a pretty centime, about 5 years ago. Do I miss it - hell YES :) All the best, Beamer.

I had a ZX81, then an Oric Atmos. I spent hours and hours writing BASIC programs for both. I loved my Atmos. I had ALL the games available for it. I had no problems with my Atmos. Coincidentally we had a fire in our house. Whilst the living room was virtually gutted, the Atmos worked after I left it to dry out on the back of the fridge for a week (the fire brigade soaked everything) I sanded the space bar straight, it had melted a bit and stuck down when pressed.

Thank you! All this brought me back to my childhood... Here in Bulgaria we had the same computer but named Praverz-8D, it was blatant copy of Oric Atmos. And slightly different games also.

My first computer in late 1983 was the Oric-1! It started my life-long fascination with computing. The best thing is I still have my Oric-1 which is going strong after more than 37 years, and have even done some things for it recently (see my videos!)

I dug out my old computers recently. The ZX81 and Oric Atmos. Both worked still. I have the Oric disk drive and surprisingly all the disks still load. The Atmos handbook was excellent. It had a guide to all the ROM subroutines and an assembler/MC tutorial, At 13/14yo I used that to learn MC programming and wrote a simple terminal emulator to go with the RS232 port I built on veroboard.

Man I wanted an oric. As a kid with PCW magazine salivating over these things.

Great video as always! I live in the United States so we never got any of these computers and it's fun to learn about them! I suppose there are emulators out there for the Oric Atmos.

I've recently found my Oric Atmos that's been living in the loft for the past how ever many decades. It powers up but I can't test the image (I can type zap, explode, ping etc!), great memories of Zorgons Revenge, Xenon 1 and Harrier Attack. I've even got the official Oric joystick and an old thermal printer. It was a great computer, loved it.

On my Oric-1 the display used to wobble up and down whenever sound was played. I think the speaker drew too much power (the sound was very loud) and they corrected this on the Atmos. I had a few games published for the Oric in the 1980s, in Oric Owner and Computer & Video Games. Happy days.

I had a Spectrum at the time of release of the Oric 1 and I seem to remember that they were released with a starting price of £99 for the 16K version as a direct challenge to Sinclair (that we had just bought the 48K version of for £129). A friend of mine had the Oric 1 and I remember the Scuba dive game. He was into machine code programming and was well into all the poke commands that he had to use to get round the bugs in the ROM. Interesting trip down memory lane.

The Oric's used embedded display attributes like a teletext terminal. They had a teletext mode IIRC. To change the background or foreground colour and optionally flash or double height took up a character position on screen and the characters to the right would have the selected attributes till the end of the line or till another embedded attribute. They used a similar scheme for the graphics, so colour changes took up a byte of screen memory somewhere to the left of where you needed the coloured graphics. Allowed for the multiple colours of the SCUBA program without using lots of screen memory that multi bit colour graphics would need.

I used to love going into WHSmiths or Boots and playing on the Oric typing in the sounds it would play. like BANG or something. Hated the keyboard, but now have an Atmos with that SD card storage. Need a PSU though !

I had an Oric 1 and an Atmos, everyone else had a Spectrum. I remember going into video game shops and there would only ever be a small number of titles for the Oric. I had to defend the Oric all the time and if anything it made me even more loyal to the brand. It's demise saddens me still.

After I sold my TA994/a I bought an Oric 1 for but only had it for 24hrs before returning it, after a somewhat real keyboard I couldn't live with the rubber keys. Also it claimed to have 16 colours but if I remeber right that was 8 forground and 8 background colors so really it only had 8. I went for a C64 in the end and glad I did.

I had an Oric 1 and Scuba Dive was one of my favourites, along with Xenon 1, and also some other game where you had a little boat to try and harpoon the Loch Ness Monster, but I can't find it on any list of old games. That Oricium game with Soft Cell on it also has Living On Video by Trans X at the end of game Edit: The game I couldn't find is in fact called Loch Ness Monster! Lol. It's great 👍🏼

I totally agree - nice games, which you can't play elsewhere .... I wish I can play L'Aigle d'Or ... pretty much the best game for Oric Oric had so many different types of games -chess, pool, pinball, quest/adventures, analog of classics (tetris, space invaders, ...). There for the first time II saw what a electronic spreadsheet is (Oric calc), what a text editor is (like pe2 in DOS). Suggestion: please make episode 2 for Oric and include more game types, applications. There was floppy, printer for Oric that could be interesting to revise.

I used an Oric for years and never had any problem reading or writing tapes.

Ah, I wonder who converted The Hobbit to the Oric? It'd pretty much need a total re-write, since the original was written in Z80 assembler and the Oric used a 6502.

I'd speculate that the colourful label may have been a response to the ZX Spectrum case rainbow.

had both of em in the 80s at the time amazing machines

Haha, that game Cock'in is quite funny! At 13:28 I think the sound is for the worm you can collect for some bonus points I guess. So dope that people still do stuff on it.

I remember the Atmos demo. I was impressed by the animated bird. The manual was good too. I think I learnt 6502 assembly language from that manual. Happy days.

I learned programming on my Oric, but it was a tedious process having to use cassette tape for storage. A few years later I reconfigured the Oric to title my home video's.

Got an Oric1 48k instead of spectrum as upgrade for my zx81, wanted to learn 6502, loved the machine, alas lost due to theft in late 90's - so if you get an Oric and the manual has my name written inside the front cover - poke me. Also - why oh why didn't they add a basic volume control - was just a bit too loud as my parents attested many a time when I found the inbuilt commands, Zap and the other three preset sounds crafted into commands. Didn't push the oric as much as the zx81 - got 8 octaves sound out of the cassette port and managed highres graphics by rewritting the display interface - alas took over a minute to draw a line diagonally but managed to get same resolution as spectrum. Then Atari ST(did some nice funny demo jokes on the local WH Smiths and would pop in there after saturday lunchtime pub and sneak a program that would stay resident and in highmem to skirt the reset button and had many good laughs :) and from there PC's of various forms, though did enjoy the psion range fully and still have my Psion 5MX and still wished for modern version of that - a whole month on two AA batteries even today wins hands down.

Just got my first Oric 1, boxed, and a few tapes, no tape deck yet so not tried it properly yet, but thankyou for the information about the Oric

'Cock'In' was also released as 'Chicken Chase' on the Commodore 64 (coded by Jawx). It was released on the Firebird/Telecomsoft label in the UK (the 199 Range, I think). Quite an amusing game.

It would be nice for somebody to do a video on the Microtan. An exotic machine I remember which was available with an hex pad.

Still have my Oric Atmos from the 80s and some games on tape. I've not started it up in about 15 years. Where can I get advice on what do check / do 1st start up? 🤔 I'm also interested in getting this Erebus but guess I should check it stand alone 1st. Cheers, Steve

Very interesting video about technic and history of the Oric computer. Thanks for this and for using the Erebus interface to try the games. ;)t

I've seen/heard a number of reviews knocking the oric with regard to loading programs saved to tape. That wasn't a problem with the Oric. From recollection, and across a number of friends and computers from differing manufacturers, they key problem for EVERYONE was the tape machine. My favourite ROM hack was some machine code I wrote to work around stretched tapes that were starting to be problematic. It use a small space in memory reserved for user for machine code away from normal program space. This directly called code in the operating system for loading program without the auto-run element. This way you could save a clean, unstretched copy of the software (tape) that was becoming problematic. The 6502 processor meant I'd some code in common with the BBC I used at school. ;)

Had a 48K Oric 1 and then an Oric Atmos. I learned how to program BASIC and 6502 on them, they weren't great, but they hold great memories for me.

Thanks for this, you just make me think again buying oric 1 off amazon, i was buying for nostaligic purposes but not now

Quite amazing to see that some people decided to publish new software in 2014 :-O What could be profitably of such a development? Is existing family base still so big? Do you have example of similar situation for other 80s machine ( I had a MO5 but not possible to read tapes anymore :-/)

I didn't know a single kid from 1981-1986 who had an Oric. Where were these kids !!?

My first computer oric atmos, and my first command zap shoot explode and defence force K7

Blake's 7 and Orac?

Having tried to load a game from tape on an Oric I know the pain first hand. It’s an interesting machine, shame it never really had a chance

There is a bug that if you draw a line with zero length it will draw a line across the screen. I think this is also on the Atmos.

Is there any file where to see the games that came out for Oric-1?

I'm got a working oric atmos...was thinking of selling it...any idea how much they sell for these days ?

I still got my oric 1 and my oric atmos

do u know about Dragon 32? can u help me out? thanks.

The black and white label is for 16k machines and the coloured is 48k machines.

Why didn't you play Harrier Attack?! I've still got my Oric-1 and I love the keyboard - much better than the rubber key Speccy!

There's a special place in hell for parents who purchased that computer with the gawd aweful keyboard for their kids to use as a word processor.

I'd really like to see the Tiger running sometime, though understand this is unlikely to happen.

My Uncle Paul Wright learned how to program on these when he went to a collage for children who had missed school due to disabilty in the 80s. Oh I think you might need to check out the Muse song Won't Back Down. Then understand the god partical Higgs Bosum. My Uncle Paul is my God Father and I'm in the church of England. The nation has kept me as a slave till I was 37 years old then understand Muses song New born. I don't have Blue eyes but green. They finally hurt me so bad that Pip from South Park doesn't have anymore Fucks to give. Sad that people will rush into their own extinction and kill life on planet Earth. My guiding principles taught to me by my Uncle Paul. The movie Silent Running is not ever something that should be allowed to happen.

professional keyboard? Professional? You call that chiclet nightmare professional?

30 then 73 now - why oh why do people think "old" people can't use computers ! We invented the damn things. Should have demoed Zorgons Revenge. My two kids loved that. Must get them out of the loft and if they work (have Oric 1 and Atmos) I will buy the Erebus. Still got and RGB portable TV. What do people do for display these days. Guess there is an RGB DIN to VGA or whatever these days on Amazon?

Zap ping shoot explode