German keyboard Oric Atmos

[xahmol]

Just saw on X this post:
https://x.com/retrojournal_de/status/19 ... Z0oS-omuBw

IMG_1361.jpeg

Never knew there apparently was a German keyboard Oric Atmos.
Anybody here ever saw one in the wild?

[iss]

Anybody here ever saw one in the wild?

Never saw but I want one!
The only reference is from @SteveM's site and the pic:

germanoric.jpg

I have a theory (and some facts!) but will let others answer what they know.

[Dbug]

I found that one on ebay years ago:

image_2025-11-03_084154121.png

[xahmol]

Would indeed be curious if it is a different ROM of that they wired the keys differently.
If it is a different ROM, I guess it would go back to standard UK on using a Loci, Cumana Reborn , Erebus or anything replacing the ROM?

[Dbug]

The Oric Nova 64 has the exact same 1.1 ROM as the Atmos despite having custom letters on the keyboard.
And when using a French Oric, you can load a custom French charset from the Sedoric disk, I doubt they made a custom ROM for the German machines, that would have forced to select which character to use, which means quite a few programs would have looked different (a bit like the problem with the Pravetz 8D)

[xahmol]

So how would that then work for those French and Pravetz machines, the keyboard mapping is just different?

Was curious also because I do own two German keyboard Commodore 128Ds. And for those actually the ROM is different, also the keyboard has a key to switch between the two layouts and the two charsets.
Which is also the reason I had to buy a German version of the JiddyDOS ROM to keep that functionality, as the standard JiffyDOS version would just revert it to the US ROM.

[Dbug]

So how would that then work for those French and Pravetz machines, the keyboard mapping is just different?

Well, on the Pravetz the upper case letters are the normal Latin characters, but the lower case characters were redefined to be Cyrilic, and that's about it.

On the French thing, it's mostly the usual replacement of characters, like { is generally redefined into é, } to è, ^ to ê, and @ to à (there are probably a few others but can't remember right now), it's up to the software to use them or not, there's nothing special added to do that automatically as far as I know.

[xahmol]

[On the French thing, it's mostly the usual replacement of characters

No AZERTY then on a French Oric Atmos?

And see here actually an AZERTY Oric 1 ROM.
https://www.oric.org/index.php?page=sof ... m_log=2380

This is by the way that German C128D keyboard. With arrow to that key to switch layout and charset.

IMG_6050.jpeg

[Dbug]

It's not an official ROM, it was made by André Cheramy.

There were Azerty "patches", which were literally stickers to glue on the keyboard, like here on the Telestrat:

image_2025-11-03_161055887.png

[iss]

The ad comes from "RUN (Deutsch) 1985-03" page 83 (available on archive.org).

As @Dbug said, I doubt also there was a "factory" ROM with German (or any other) localization.

To make such ROM you need to have:
- char set;
- 2 keyboard tables 64 bytes each (normal and shifted);
- (eventually) modified function KEY2ASCII at address #F4EF for BASIC 1.1b ROM;
- (eventually) keyboard PCB with different routing.

There are ready ROM's by @Euphoric (aka Fabrice Francès) for DE, ES, FR, SE, UK (file date 1996-10-14) but they were built for use with Euphoric emulator and better compatibility with PC localized keyboards. They use 'AltGr' to map extra chars as 3rd table. Maybe this ROMs can be used with LOCI too we need to experiment.

I'm trying to put some order classifying different ROMs I've collected over the years but it's a big mess...

[Steve M]

Yes, we recovered two or three of these keyboards from Steve Hopps of Opelco, who exported Oric products. I think there is mention of Oric intending to produce different ROMs in Oric Owner - or one of those mags. The keyboards were maybe prototypes, but the one I have doesn't even work.
Obviously it would need a ROM change for the characters to work as the key switches are the same.
I thought it was German and then some of the guys decided it was Swedish and then it seemed to go back to being German. I would have thought the German was most likely as they had enough Orics to have user groups and mags produced.
I think Orics financial problems may have put the project on hold with IQ64/ Stratos/ Telestrat taking more of the development time. We've also seen some of the other ideas talked about by Oric were being worked on as we discovered the Pheonix board amongst Steve Hopps collection.