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Oric AtmosThe Oric Atmos was a home computer marketed in 1984, mostly in the United Kingdom. It was based upon the 8-bit MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor operating at 1 MHz, and was normally available with either 16 KB or 48 KB RAM. The Atmos was similar in size and performance to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, but it had a proper full-travel keyboard and better sound through the use of the GI 8912 programmable sound chip. The 48K version actually had 64K of RAM but only 48K was normally available, as the rest overlapped with the 16 KB BASIC interpreter in ROM. The other 16 KB 'shadow RAM' bank could be swapped in and was used to hold the Disk Operating System software for the optional external 3-inch floppy disk drive (the same type of drive as the later Amstrad CPC and MSX series home computers). The Atmos had a built in television RF modulator and also an RGB output, although it used a rather quirky screen mapping scheme. In LORES (low resolution) mode, it had 28 lines of 40 characters (each 6 pixels wide and 8 pixels high), whilst its HIRES mode had 200 rows of 240 pixels with three lines of text at the bottom — an uncommon combination in home computer graphics modes. The graphics were handled by a semi-custom ASIC (ULA) which also managed the interface between the processor and memory. It used its own dialect of the BASIC programming language: Version 1.1 from Tangerine Computer Systems, which included tokens for built-in sound patterns: EXPLODE,PING,SHOOT and ZAP.
The Oric 1 was an earlier version marketed in 1983. The main differences were that it had a different case with chiclet keyboard (reportedly better than the ZX Spectrum's), and an earlier version 1.0 of the BASIC ROM (not significantly different from the Atmos version), apart from this the hardware design was the same as the Atmos. Oric_Atmos_and_Oric_1
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