French Oric with modulator ?

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Steve M
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French Oric with modulator ?

Post by Steve M »

Did Oric France make the Atmos without modulator ?
This Ebay seller seems to think his Atmos is as it left the factory and has some sort of plate where the RF socket should be - which he says is "factory fitted".
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/253453757914 ... 3453757914
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Symoon
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Re: French Oric with modulator ?

Post by Symoon »

The warranty label says it's built in France, and Jean told me long ago that "they removed" (maybe meaning "did not mount") the modulator on French Atmos. French Atmos were produced after Oric was bought by Eureka (French company).

So I suspect I don't even have a real French Atmos - but having the modulator removed means removing a way to connect the Oric to a screen, whyyyy ;)
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Steve M
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Re: French Oric with modulator ?

Post by Steve M »

Didn't they make use of the RGB socket? The one on Ebay appears to have the extra pin in the centre (for 5v) which I think was added to ensure the SCART sockets were turned on - (if that's the right way of putting it?)

I think I was told French Oric's didn't have the extra connection, but that one seems to have it.
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Symoon
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Re: French Oric with modulator ?

Post by Symoon »

Yes French Atmos did have the extra pin, which saved an additional power supply that was required for the Scart users.

French were massively using RGB/Scart I think, but the modulator was another option (and could be useful years later, to plug our Oric on PCs thru old TV cards, with an ugly picture but better than nothing).
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Steve M
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Re: French Oric with modulator ?

Post by Steve M »

Thanks. I think it was André M that told me they didn't have the extra pin (!) I was sure I'd seen it mentioned at least.
I'm wondering if there is any problem with putting a modulator back on?
I guess the French Atmos wouldn't be in it's original condition any more. Is it better to keep these as they are, I wonder? There must be less of these than the original Atmos.

(I have some old boards that I could pinch a modulator from - just thinking out loud!)
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iss
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Re: French Oric with modulator ?

Post by iss »

Steve M wrote: Thu Mar 01, 2018 9:15 pmI'm wondering if there is any problem with putting a modulator back on?
In my opinion there should be no problem to solder RF modulator. It's interesting if the PAL PROM and the resistors are on board...
BTW, the Oric was just sold for 68.88 GBP (~95 USD) - very high price again despite the missing '1' key.
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Re: French Oric with modulator ?

Post by Steve M »

Bah, I missed it. I was going to put a bid in - but I don't think I would have paid that much.

Yes, these prices are getting a bit alarming. My friend sold an Oric-1 for over £200 recently. It did have the box, but not in great condition.

I was agonising about whether to bid on some French books that were a bit over-priced - and had expensive postage on top. I put some bids in hoping to combine the postage to get the price down, but I got outbid again.

It's getting to be no fun trying to collect Oric things. I'm not paying £20 for a single Oric tape, and then have to pay another £10 or so for postage. £20 or £30 for a book? It's not happening, for me at least.

Maybe I should sell up? Ha!
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dreamseal
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Re: French Oric with modulator ?

Post by dreamseal »

I couldn't spot an official "introduce yourself" topic on here, so since I was the person that purchased the Oric mentioned in the post above, I thought I'd make my first post a reply to this topic. I realise the price I paid was probably a bit steep, but because I already owned an Oric with a missing key, I felt it needed some company. It was a different key that was missing, so I thought I'd make one keyboard complete and keep the other machine as a backup. Both machines appear to work well though, but now one of them is missing two keys.- I'd be lying if I said I only had the two machines. I bought another one with a complete set of keys. Not sure why, just wanted to have another backup I guess.

Amazing how much people are paying for an Oric Atmos these days. I've been keeping an eye on this one over the past few days:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Vintage-Oric ... 2676091190

I'm guessing the disk drive is the appeal in that listing. Will be interesting to see how much it goes for.

I am by no means a long time Oric user, in fact prior to this year I'd never owned an Oric. I have had a bit of a fascination with it for a while though. I grew up in the 80s with a VIC 20, which also has a 6502 and two 6522 chips. I think it might have been just over 20 years ago that I first learnt that the Oric had a 6522 chip in it. It wasn't long after the birth of the Internet as we know if today, and I was at that time very active working on a VIC 20 emulator called V20. I had created a web site that had a few details on how one might go about creating a VIC 20 emulator and one of the documentation sources for the 6522 chip I had found was on a website dedicated to the Oric (I really can't remember now what site that was). Anyway, since then I've been aware of it and only this year decided I was going to branch out from the VIC 20 and look at other 8-bit retro machines. The Oric is the first one that attracted me.
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Dbug
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Re: French Oric with modulator ?

Post by Dbug »

Welcome :)

There's no "introduce yourself" policy here, mostly because I absolute hate these forums what make you feel like you are at some Alcoholics Anonymous meeting ("Hi, my name is mickaël, and I've not touched my Oric in two days"), so it's left to the responsibility of people if they wish so :)

Regarding this ebay listing, it's a surprisingly good one, because it's rare to find a working set of Oric Atmos with Microdisc, and working MCP 40 is not that common either, and regarding tapes, it has some hard to find stuff like Tyrann.
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Re: French Oric with modulator ?

Post by Chema »

Welcome abroad :)

Don't hesitate to ask, if you have any question or doubt. We are a small community and there is not a lot of activity in the forums, but people is ready to comment or answer any question promptly :D

Oh, and getting a disk controller is a must, if you really want to explore the machine. It takes the Oric to another completely different dimension.
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dreamseal
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Re: French Oric with modulator ?

Post by dreamseal »

Thanks for the welcome Dbug and Chema. :D

Yes, I noticed the community wasn't that big. That's part of what I liked about it as I was reading through a few discussions. Lot's of interesting topics and I haven't yet seen a single argument. The VIC 20 Denial forums sometimes go off on a tangent with two or three people insulting each other about things seemingly unrelated to what is being discussed. It's quite sad to see that happen when it does.

First question then: What are my modern day options for getting a disk controller? I'm definitely keen to have disk capability, but not sure what availability is like. Being so used to the VIC 20, I find it unusual that the Oric doesn't have a cartridge system, although I did read through the topic where the possibility of building something like that was discussed and then prototyped. Really caught my interest that one.
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Re: French Oric with modulator ?

Post by Dbug »

I seem to remember an argument, maybe 6 years ago, I think :)

More seriously, the Oric world is small enough to not lose people on pointless infighting: We have our own opinions about things that should be done and how they should be done, everybody is free to give their opinion and do their own stuff, there's no restrictions on the links toward other communities either, and we try to promote sharing stuff as much as possible (for example, the Cumulus hardware is freely available, which is why there's been multiple production batches by different persons)

For the disk controller you'll find some people building new controllers cards as well as SD card based solutions, most of them are Microdisc compatible (means they run pretty much most of the available software) but you can also find some controllers for Jasmin system (mostly in France) as well as Apple II compatible ones (mostly in eastern europe).

Regarding cartridges, the Telestrat has two cartridges ports, and Fabrice Frances did some cartridges on the expansion bus for normal Oric machines.
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dreamseal
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Re: French Oric with modulator ?

Post by dreamseal »

I've just purchased a Cumulus online. Looking forward to receiving it and then giving it a go. :D
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