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Best Newbie Book for Learning Basic on Oric Atmos?

Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2020 7:16 pm
by OricSociety
Hi all.. hoping to buy an Atmos this year... new to the Oric platform... hoping to eventually carry over and develop a small game I made on the Sinclair Spectrum (Invasion of the Cloud People) to the Oric platform.

Tell me, what do you feel, beyond the user manual on the Oric Atmos, is the best all around book to learn Basic on Oric for creation of video games?

Thanks
TJ

Re: Best Newbie Book for Learning Basic on Oric Atmos?

Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2020 9:16 pm
by Dbug
The Atmos user manual is actually quite good, you can take a look at the book PDF in the Oric Library:
http://www.defence-force.org/computing/ ... /index.htm

Re: Best Newbie Book for Learning Basic on Oric Atmos?

Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2020 12:02 am
by ibisum
I find the best thing to do is break into a massive .TAP collection and use Oricutron to print sources, say to a local repo, and read the code from there - some cool BASIC stuff has a bit of assembly, e.g. for scrolling or sounds, and if you spend a bit of time browsing .TAP's, you can get a pretty good feel for BASIC in the Oric world. Most Oric software was BASIC; these days the new toolkits are really worth checking out too, such as OSDK (C) and 8-bit Unity, which is bonkers if you think about it.

If we'd had these tools in the 80's. Having the machines now still alive, is a pretty nice art. AIC and C woulda made Oric *nuke* the other contenders in 1983, hehe ..

Re: Best Newbie Book for Learning Basic on Oric Atmos?

Posted: Thu Jan 30, 2020 1:00 am
by Steve M
The original Oric-1 came initially with little details so a lot of Oric-1 guides cropped up. Oric produced an Oric-1 manual and then a larger one, so the need for all the alternatives like Ian Sinclair's book were a bit obsolete.

The full Oric-1 manual is OK. The Atmos manual is considered to be better. It's a good start but doesn't really tell you how to program Space Invaders.

There's a couple of books called the Atmos Book of Games, which might be useful. Most of the books came out for the Oric-1 with a few being converted to the Atmos. If it's not already done, you'll have to convert Oric-1 programs to Atmos code, which can be easy in some cases and harder in others.

The list of Basic commands is available online, and you can download a few books, like the Atmos manual. The magazines can be useful too with Oric Owner being the main English one and Théoric the main French one.Most of these can be downloaded too.