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Couldn't an Oric be connected to a hard-drive instead of trying to get SD cards or floppy disk interfaces etc etc. Why not a connect to a hard drive ?

The principle is the same, the problem lies in the interface.

I think the two strands we currently have are for different reasons.

With floppies, we're retaining some authenticity in the system and using a storage medium that was within the scope of the Oric's life.

If we were to use an HD, we'd meet the same interfacing issues. SDcard is very cheap, mobile, easy to plug into a PC for file transfer and potentially offers faster and more reliable storage options than HD. Given that, there's no benefit to going the HD route over SD, especially when solid state storage is moving into the PC realm too. We may as well just start there now with the SD card.

There's no reason why we couldn't use an HD, just little point.

All the IDE attempts I heared of stalled. I'm not a hardware guy, so I don't know the reasons. The most recent one I heared of was by Alexios:
http://www.bedroomlan.org/hardware/oric-ide

The idea with HD is that they are available and have been for a long long time. Memory cards come and go. My first camera used a smart card.
The SD readers I've seen are to emulate a floppy and to be used with a floppy drive interface. That is a problem as wouldn't you need a card for each floppy? and there is the lack of disk interfaces.

If hard drives could be added there my be some way of having the ability to read disk and tape images so the entire available catalogue could be stored on one device. It would be easy to keep a backup or transfer.

OK if not a hard drive then how about getting a USB interface for Oric? There was a serial port designed. Couldn't Oric make use of USB technology and just plug in a memory stick?

USB drivers, naaaasty....

Steve M wrote:The idea with HD is that they are available and have been for a long long time. Memory cards come and go. My first camera used a smart card.
The SD readers I've seen are to emulate a floppy and to be used with a floppy drive interface. That is a problem as wouldn't you need a card for each floppy? and there is the lack of disk interfaces.

If hard drives could be added there my be some way of having the ability to read disk and tape images so the entire available catalogue could be stored on one device. It would be easy to keep a backup or transfer.

OK if not a hard drive then how about getting a USB interface for Oric? There was a serial port designed. Couldn't Oric make use of USB technology and just plug in a memory stick?

The SD card solutions allow you to store multiple 'dsk' files on the same card, then you have some way to select the dsk you want to use like you would do in Euphoric or Oricutron.

Some support virtual 'dsk' that have like 256 tracks with 256 sectors of 512 bytes on 2 sides, which allows to store like 67108864 bytes (about 64 megabytes), so technically it's as close as a hard drive as you can be while still being possible to manage with only a slightly modified oric DOS.

The idea behind Cumulus was to have one single device to replace the equivalent of a Microdisc Controller plus a HxC floppy emulator.

That sounds promising.
Does the SD card reader support HDSD cards?
If it doesn't emulate a single floppy then is there another layer of DOS to operate the SD card and select which disk image is require? Does that effect Sedoric?

Most of these system support SD and SDHC.
The floppy selection is handled at a totally separate level, the Oric is not even aware of that.
Generally you have buttons and a small lcd screen, or a tv overlay in the output cable, it's really like in Euphoric: You select the file and as far as the Oric is concerned it's just a changed floppy.

Is there any chance of us ever seeing something like the Spectrum's Divide? Instant load from SDcard from an on screen menu on the Speccy.

Antiriad2097 wrote:Is there any chance of us ever seeing something like the Spectrum's Divide? Instant load from SDcard from an on screen menu on the Speccy.

If I understand correctly what it does, this is in the specs of the StratoCumulus project. Having a way to provide whatever "boot rom" you want.

(By the way, I wonder if a full ROM Sedoric (or any other OS could be usefull)