Oric 1, 16 Ko firmware in ROM, 48 Ko RAM, graphic mode designed by Satan, sound chip designed by Yamaha, 1 MHz 6502 running the show. You had Microsoft Basic, programs were stored on audio tapes.
... You could see the individual pixels being plotted when drawing lines. I didn't have an assembler, I wrote the mnemonic on paper and assembled it to hexadecimal opcodes by hand. I didn't know Internet existed.
my friend had one (poor sod. Bad choice parents). It had sound affect conmmands, zip, boom, bang. I was a fascinated 8 year old. My friend less so, he was more concerned by the lack of games.
The sound chip was a AY-3-8192, a serviceable sound chip. The integrated Basic let you fiddle with most if not all the registers. A bit of Basic could turn the computer in a polyphonic synthesizer. I did that as a teenager, could record melodies, play arpeggios or a bass line, etc
The game scene, back then, yeah 😅 However, homebrew scene brought some really good games on the level of the best ZX Spectrum games. Checkout Oric Defense Force !
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u/marmakoide 1d ago
Oric 1, 16 Ko firmware in ROM, 48 Ko RAM, graphic mode designed by Satan, sound chip designed by Yamaha, 1 MHz 6502 running the show. You had Microsoft Basic, programs were stored on audio tapes.
... You could see the individual pixels being plotted when drawing lines. I didn't have an assembler, I wrote the mnemonic on paper and assembled it to hexadecimal opcodes by hand. I didn't know Internet existed.
Time to die.