30 years have passed already?! Incredible...
I remember perfectly how I looked a those magazines whith ads about home computers, all beyond my possibilities (yeah, maybe except the ZX-81). Soon after a couple of friends got their ZX Spectrum, one got an incredible C64... and my parents finally gave me my very own home computer: an Oric-1.
It was fantastic until I realized I could only dream with the games my friends ran in their machines. I got Zorgons, which was quite impressive, but the rest... well you know the feeling. And in a few months not only new software was not seen, but the computer itself stopped being even mentioned on mags.
But this turned out to be quite an advantage, as I could not do anything else than concentrate on what I could do with it: programming. And that indeed open a new whole world to me. In fact I think that is the reason why I chose computer engineering as my career (though time would drive me out of this path into something completely different).
I got an spectrum a couple of years later, and after watching the incredible games and programs that appeared for that machine, I put a lot of effort trying to make the old Oric do similar things... with no success of course (BASIC is not the best language for this, and CM was beyond my comprehension at that time where good books and tools were not easily available). Until I found this community, the C cross-compiler, the OSDK (a bit later on) and the incredible amount of information the Internet brougth directly into my hands. It was like getting back to 1983 almost 15 years later!
And that is why I am still developing things for the Oric, you know. And also that is why I still have it working at home (transformed into an Atmos) and spend wonderful hours facing the challenge of making it run the games that most impressed me
After some experimenting I started working on pinforic, as you already know. I loved text adventures and wanted to see the Oric running the best ones: Infocom's. Porting pinfo to the Oric proved to be not too easy. Thanks to Fabrice Frances we could add disk support and overlay ram access, so we could implement some kind of virtual memory to make the games run... or crawl until Fabrice rewrote most of the interpreter in CM. I promised him to learn CM, because it seemed the only way to do things that fit into memory and ran smoothly.
I needed some years of learning and experimenting, because I really wanted to learn how something like Knight Lore was done, so I designed and implemented the WHITE+NOISE isometric engine and, with the help of Twilighte and many others, Space:1999 was created. Looking back at it I am sure many things should have been done differently and it would have been more efficient both memory and CPU-wise, but I am quite satisfied with the result.
And what next? You know for the posts in this forum that I started to experiment with 3D, as Elite was another of my favourite games, and so 1337 was done. I am quite sure it was the best thing I ever programmed. And still it could have been better if I had dedicated a couple of years more to its development, but...
And then came SkoolDaze. I really wanted to have it on the Oric. I loved it on the Spectrum, and it was another unexplored path for me, with so many sprites moving and with such an incredible (by those times) AI. And this time it was clear to me that it had to fit in the Oric's 48K, so I could run it on my tape-based Atmos.
Well, I only hope this is not the end. I really find it exciting and challenging to do all this, and when I have no project in sight, I feel like something is missing.
Sorry for the loooong (and probably boring) post, but I always get too excited when talking about the Oric, and cannot control myself
on the old B&W TV, brothers and I were so excited, video games was only available in theatre hall or in cafés, and i had not enough money to win an "invaders" game.
