New Oric Phoenix or Pravetz 9D

[jorodr]

Thanks DBug, but you may institute an inquiry by oricians to choose a name if you want
Tropos and Messos are good names, but I want this to be community project.

[polluks]

What about 'Oric Ionos' or 'Oric Mesos' or 'Oric Tropos'?

Surprise: https://www.facebook.com/pages/ORIC-Ion ... 7007200811

[norik]

If I am not late, let me also express something about my needs. May be these are not good for the first version of 9D, or may be it'll be good for 10D?

First of all, I'd like to have two versions - Desktop and Robotics.

About desktop version I think that

0. Backward compatibility may be weakened in case we can replace functionality: if we have disks, or better SD's or USB flash drives, then we don't need tape interface.

1. It needs to be contemporary Oric, Oric which works with today's hardware and solves today's problems.

2. That means, we need more RAM, we need to implement tcp/ip stack, for example.

3. Ethernet interface. Of course we can connect it to the net via serial. But ethernet would be cool.

4. Better graphics.

5. VGA or DisplayPort output. - that's MUST. Are we supposed to find a TV from the last century? Comon, it's convenient to connect it to the monitor, like we do with Raspberry Pi.

6. MIDI interface would be great, but not necessary. We would be able to connect portable keyboards, midi keyboards, even manage MIDI devices. That's good to have for creative persons, artists.

7. modern keyboard. Probably PS/2. If you ship it with keyboard, then we cannot replace it. USB is hard, probably PS/2 is good solution.

About robotics version, I think it must be small board, with at least 64kb RAM(memory is limited on most 8bit controllers), many ports, so we can use it instead of arduino. May be PWM, but not necessary.

[norik]

I think it's completely possible to make a machine we can use to check emails or chat. In console. of course. And we won't have hardware NSA backdoors, we just need some minimal hw which is able to run a couple of console programs.

[ibisum]

>6. MIDI interface would be great, but not necessary. We would be able to connect portable keyboards, midi keyboards, even manage MIDI devices. That's good to have for creative persons, artists.

My opinion about MIDI is that its really worth getting working on the Ori-1/Atmos machines, as a bit of a priority, because it *does* represent a networking protocol stack that would fit in with resources we have. Doing full-blown TCP/IP .. hmm .. not sure its really necessary, if we can just dump SYSEX, use reserved NRPN's for a namespace, do conversions from CC #'s to page #0, and so on .. its a little simpler, and still gives us a way to network, is my point.

So, 6 or 16 Atmos's, all wired up with MIDI IN -> OUT/THRU, with one of them (a Telestrat) doing TEXT->SYSEX conversion, for an e-mail setup? This would work, imho, with little fuss. Just as long as we can get things working on the hardware side up to the optocoupler, that is. I'm yet to attempt that, but I heard others have.

My personal interest would be to add breadboard/proto-space on the Cumulus board, and add a little MIDI I/O configuration there, somehow. If the Cumulus Firmware could be set up to send/receive commands by writing to out-of-bound blocks (i.e. not used by the disk system..) then we can give the Oric a peripheral boost, put it on the network, add other features too. Imagine an Oric with 128gigs of disk space, containing a converted Wikipedia dump, images .. and all! (even primitive samples converted, wouldn't that be lovely!

[highwayman]

how about using an emulator on a raspberrypi or beaglebone etc.

start with an oric, then add the extra ram etc using emulation - it's easier to debug.

[jorodr]

I've finished the capturing the schematics of the computer. I'm waiting the summer to have enough free time to start routing.

[iss]

And this is what I'm doing right now - porting Oricutron for raspberrypi .

[Hialmar]

Fabrice Frances said to me that he made a version of Oricutron for Raspberry Pi.

You might want to ask him for his code.

He said that he had to overclock the Rasb to get a fast enough emulation.

[iss]

Thanks, Hialmar!
Unfortunately I don't have Fabrice Frances contact.
Else the overclock really helps.
Oricutron can be easy compiled for raspberrypi, but my idea is to make emulator running on "bare metal",
so all resources can be used. If this become success I want to make an interface board, so normal
Oric peripherals can be connected - of course this is only dream for now ...

[Hialmar]

Sounds awesome