Keyboard The keyboard has 57 moving keys with tactile feedback. It is capable of full upper and lower case with a correctly positioned
space bar. It has a full
typewriter pitch. The key layout is a standard
QWERTY with
ESC,
CTRL,
RETURN and additional cursor control keys. All keys have auto repeat.
Display The display adapter will drive a
PAL UHF colour or black and white television receiver on approximately Channel 36.
RGB output is also provided on a 5 pin
DIN 41524 socket. Display features are: • Select background colour (paper) from one of eight. • Select foreground colour (ink) from one of eight. • Flash characters on and off approximately twice a second. • Produce double height characters (even line top, odd line bottom). • Switch over to user-definable character set. This feature is used to produce Teletext-style colour graphics without the need for additional RAM. Available colours are black, blue, red, magenta, green, cyan, yellow, and white. Each character position also has a parallel attribute, which may be operated on a character by character basis, to produce
video inversion. The display has a fixed black border.
Screen graphics mode The graphics mode consists of 200 pixels vertically by 240 pixels horizontally plus 3 lines of 40 characters (the same as character mode) at the bottom of the screen to display system information and to act as a window on the user program while still viewing the graphics display. It can also be used to input direct commands for graphics and see the effect instantly without having to switch modes. The graphics display operates with serial attributes in the same way as characters, except that the display is now considered as 200 lines by 40 graphics cells. Each graphic cell is therefore very flexible by having 8 foreground and 8 background colours and flashing patterns. The video invert parallel attribute is also usable in this mode. ASCII characters may be painted over the graphics area, thus enabling the free mixing of graphics and text.
Sound The Oric has an internal loudspeaker and amplifier and can also be connected to external amplifiers via the 7 Pin DIN 45329 shared with the cassette interface. A
General Instruments AY-3-8912 provides 3 channel sound. For
BASIC programs, four keywords generate pre-made sounds: PING, SHOOT, EXPLODE, and ZAP. The commands SOUND, MUSIC, and PLAY produce a broader range of sounds.
Cassette interface The cassette recorder connects via a 7 Pin
DIN 45329 socket shared with the external sound output. The interface includes support for tape motor control. Recording speeds offered as standard are 300 baud or 2400 baud. A tone leader allows tape recorders' automatic level control to stabilise before the filename, followed by the actual data with
parity; finally,
checksums are recorded to allow overall verification of the recording. The circuit was designed using a
Schmitt trigger to remove noise and make input more reliable. The system allows for verification of stored information against the tape copy, to ensure integrity before the information is flushed from memory. There was however a
bug within the
error-checking of recorded programs, often causing user-created programs to fail when loaded back in, this bug persist in the updated ROMs for the Oric Atmos. Available basic commands are CLOAD, CSAVE (for programs and
memory dumps), STORE, RECALL (for arrays of string, integer or real, added with Oric Atmos roms). Filenames up to 16 characters can be specified. Options on the commands exist for slow speed, verification, autorunning of programs or specification of start and ending addresses for dumping memory.
Expansion port The expansion port allows full access to the CPU's data address and control lines. This allows connection of add-ons specifically designed for the Oric, including user designed hardware. The range of lines exposed allows external ROM and RAM expansion, thus allowing for
ROM cartridges or for expansion devices to internally include the required operating software on ROM.
Printer port The printer port is compatible with the then standard
Centronics parallel interface allows for connection of many different types of printers from low quality (e.g. low-resolution
thermal printers) to high quality printers, such as fixed font
daisy wheel printers or
laser printers, though the latter were uncommon and expensive during the period of commercial availability of the Oric range. Most contemporary computer printers could produce text output without requiring specific
drivers, and often followed de facto standards for simple graphics. More advanced use of the printer would have required a specific driver which, given the proliferation of different home computers and standards of the time, may or may not have been available. ==Peripherals==