Talk:Tangerine Computer Systems

Faulty tape checking routine

Did this really only manifest itself in the Oric Atmos? I ask because I had an Oric 1 and the tape seldom worked once the saved programs had reached a certain size.

- I had this problem as well with my Atmos. It broke my heart... Ryancolm 13:27, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

No the problem was worse if anything on the Oric-1. I seem to recall there was an actual error in the tape routines. When I was writing a book for the Oric and Atmos, using the atmos itself, I used tapes, and more than one occasion had to rewrite chapters because the tape writing failed.Geffers 11:47, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

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Attribute clash

Unlike what is said in the article, the Oric color clashes were actualy worse, much much worse than on the sinclair spectrum. Because, albeit the colors were restricted in 1x6 pixel blocks (unlike the spectrum 8x8 blocks) the problem was that the attribute commands to actually change the colors were themselves using 1 byte of graphic memory, there was no memory reserved for attributes so it would use the space corresponding to a 1x6 pixel block , making this block unusable. That means if you wanted to change the foreground colors on a line , there would be an empty 6 pixels gaps before the color change.
To make things worse, this restriction was valid for foreground as well as background color attributes, meaning that if you wanted to change background AND foreground colors, that would require an empty 12 pixels blocks. The only relief was that you could use "color inversion" by just switching a reserved bit at the beggining of each 1x6 pixel block, color inversion meant that the two screen colors could be replaced on the whole block by their "inverted colours" without the need for attribute space...(inverted colors: white<->black, red<->cyan, blue<->yellow, green<->purple).
The same restrictions existed in text mode (wit 8x8 pixel blocks instead of 1x8).
As you can imagine this made the creation of complex colored graphics very difficult, even impossible in most cases. That is why most games were either monochrome or using vertical color bands (color attributes being set at the left of the screen).

Feel free to clean up this information and post it in the main article...

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Didn't the Oric 1 run on Forth rather than BASIC? Or was it only the French version that did this? Fourcultures (talk) 14:42, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

All Orics ran BASIC as standard. Forth was available as a separate language and was bundled in the box for early Oric-1s. Terryhfs (talk) 13:18, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Proposed split

It might (and this is just a suggestion) be beneficial to both subjects to split the Oric-1 computer (and its descendants) into a separate article from this one (whose subject is the parent company).

I would want to keep the Oric-1, Atmos and other closely-related machines in the same single new article (don't see any point in having a separate one for each, as they're very closely related). This might provide scope to expand the technical info on the Oric-1 family while freeing it from the chronological ties of the parent article.

Any discussion in favour or against this idea welcome, thanks. Ubcule (talk) 19:26, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

I would agree although the title would have to be "Oric series" or equivalent (I don't actually like Oric series but can't think of a better one at the minute!) - the Atmos is as least as notable as the Oric-1. It is odd that there isn't an Oric article when this Tangerine article would basically just be a stub without all the Oric material and all it has extra is the Microtan which already has its own article.Retro junkie (talk) 15:04, 3 December 2011 (UTC)