Alternatives for Cumana Reborn?

[xahmol]

I read on Facebook that the creator of the Cumana Reborn will stop making them after his present batch. Reason is mainly that parts scarcity and custom regulations make it harder and harder for him to be cost effective, while also their is probably some market saturation that most of the target public in the market already have one.

My Cumana Reborn is working great, so for me no immediate issue.

But it is still an uncomfortable feeling that if for any reason my Cumana Reborn breaks down, there are no replacements or logical alternatives.
Also, I would not have a clue now what to recommend to people having an Oric but no disk solution yet. Other alternatives are not made new as well, and are extremely costly when you need to buy them second hand from eBay or so.
Also, obviously no available disk options to buy also makes developing for disk options less attractive.

So just curious: is there any alternative solution being worked on by somebody? Or some other alternative that is available to buy new?

And no, Erebus and Tapduino are no alternatives to me by lack of .dsk support and lack of interactive storage access for loading and saving from within a program.
The Twilighte card might be an alternative, but not sure of its present status and if it is already a stable and viable alternative. Have to say that I did not try mine for over a year now as the Twilighte card at that time was way to frustrating and unstable for me, especially compared to the Cumana Reborn. And alas you can not connect the Twilighte Card and your Cumana Reborn at the same time, so if pressed to choose I connect the Cumana Reborn.

[Chema]

The only real alternative is the Microdisc clone card that is being built by Silicebit. However, he builds them by hand and on his (scarce) free time, so patience is a must. Maybe he could share the files once he finishes building his last batch (whenever that is)?

I have one of those and they work incredibly well. You can attach there up to 4 drives: 3, 3.5, 5.25 or a Gotek. However, no nice case or included power source. That is up to the user.

[ibisum]

I am in a similar boat, with a couple of Cumana Reborn's, a real Microdisc and some Cumana builds to maintain, but my general approach is that the Oric future lays in something like the ORICART [1] expanding to include (maybe) an onboard ESP32 with SD capabilities and maybe also serial over Wifi, or perhaps some kind of ESP32-hosted filesystem shim to the Orics' DATA port ..

[1] - https://forum.defence-force.org/viewtopic.php?t=2260

[mmu_man]

If only the design was Open Source… There's nothing more frustrating than finding out you have to redo work that has already been done because it's not documented.

[Dbug]

Maybe we could ask Piotr to provide his designs so other people can do it if they want?

We have that for the Cumulus already, and everybody acknowledge that it was all work done originally by Retromaster and then by Metadata, so no risk to have people forget who made the original Cumana Reborn design.

If the documents, schematics, bom, etc... are shared, I can host them on the SVN with the rest of the hardware stuff.

[Silicebit.]

I have several controllers half-finished and several unpopulated PCBs, too many controllers to do (large list), and very short time to dedicate to them! I want to finish all them y release all documentation.

Controllers.

At the moment, i'll be happy if Mike host the documentation about EprOric on his server.

[Dbug]

At the moment, i'll be happy if Mike host the documentation about EprOric on his server.

If you tell me where the latest version is, I can do that.

[ibisum]

A bit of Twilighte Board, a bit of Cumulus, a couple of stacks of Exos, some 8bit Hub, and we might have a solution ..

[mmu_man]

Shush I'm working!
Well, actually no, I haven't touched this project for a while…

[Dbug]

For what's worth, it looks like Piotr has a few more Cumana Reborn units for sale on Sell My Retro:
https://www.sellmyretro.com/offer/details/40497

[Silicebit.]

At the moment, i'll be happy if Mike host the documentation about EprOric on his server.

If you tell me where the latest version is, I can do that.

Hi Mike!

The latest version of EprOric is here:

EprOric_Rev_A.zip

EprOric Rev.A

(13.47 MiB) Downloaded 111 times

[Dbug]

Thanks,
there you go: https://osdn.net/projects/oricsdk/scm/svn/commits/1664