Oric v Spectrum (who knows these machines!)

[stevelanc]

Maybe for the UK members more than the US!!!

 

Let me start with some examples:-

 

1) The Oric version of Manic Miner had 12 or so more levels than the Spectrum (back in 1983 the Oric 1 was my first computer so at least I had some bragging rights).

 

2) The Oric version of Hunchback had scrolling walls (the Spectrum didn't). Hence the Oric version was better. And harder.

 

3) The Oric version of Mr Wimpy was a far more faithful port of Burger Time than what the Spectrum could offer.

 

Being an owner of both machines let the debate begin.

 

Steve

[Pengwin]

Been a long time since I posted in AA, but i couldn't help adding an answer to this post.

 

I also had an Oric (Atmos though) and a Spectrum. I also agree that the Oric version of Mr Wimpy was far better than the spectrum version (in fact I am creating a remake on my Mac based on the Oric version). I also noticed recently that the spectrum version has a problem with collision detection, but that's just an aside.

 

I personally think that the Oric was a superior machine to the Spectrum, unfortunately it was too late into the market to gain the support achieved by Sinclair, Commodore or Atari. If software companies had paid it more attention, i think the machines, and the company, would have lasted a lot longer than they did. It wasn't as powerful or useful as the A8 range, but it was still a damn fine computer.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

A friend of mine had an Oric before I got my C64 and an Atmos later. No bad machines, some submissions to the Minigame Competition a few years ago where really great.

 

Check out Cyclotron and Cube!

[Pengwin]

The Oric is also a good machine to learn 6502 assembly on. whilst it doesn't have the tools that the atari has to offer, the memory structure doesn't through you many curves either.

[deathtrappomegranate]

I have an Oric 1. I always liked that machine.

 

It has some nice touches, like some of the BASIC sound commands, "shoot","zap" and "explode". That is just what teenage programmers of that era wanted!

 

Unfortunately, it was later to market than the Spectrum, and didn't have the advantage the Spectrum had of a small army of ZX80/ZX81 devotees looking for a natural upgrade path. The advantages that it did have over the Spectrum were too small to have any great impact, especially as the Spectrum had quickly developed a large software library. The pre-Atmos keyboard was terrible, and I mean worse than the Spectrum. The BASIC dialect was OK; a little better than Sinclair, but a lot worse than BBC/Acorn.

 

The bottom line is that it really had no USP (other than that the name sounded as though it might have, kind of, possibly been sort of related to Blake's 7; maybe).

[JamesD]

I have an Oric 1, an Atmos, and a Spectrum +2 in my collection.

Both were cool machines and each has it's good and bad points.

 

The semi serial display on the Oric makes it more difficult to program games with a lot of on screen action. However, programmers that have mastered it turn out some impressive stuff.

It has a sound chip but the way it's interfaced to the CPU makes it slower than it should have been.

Accessing the full 64K of RAM requires external circuitry which is only in the disk controller. That was a bad decision given the number of drives out there. It has a slower clock speed than many other 6502 machines leaving it at a disadvantage.

If the full 64K were addressable without a drive and the clock speed had matched the Atari it would have been a force to recon with.

 

The Spectrum display allows fast animation but the way it implements color isn't as attractive as systems with color at the pixel level.

Many games were little more than monochrome since the color attributes never change.

The addition of a sound chip addressed the worst of it's shortcomings but since earlier versions didn't have a sound chip, most software still uses the beeper at least partially which takes more CPU time.

It has a decent clock speed which helps out the Z80's longer instruction cycle times but it wasn't fast enough to really dominate.

 

Both machines definitely have more personality than many other machines out there.

Edited February 11, 2009 by JamesD

[BSA Starfire]

I also own both and have since they were new, the speccy 48k+ was bought at full price & the Oric 1 48K was bought if I remember right for £30 new when the Co-Op electrical closed down. To be honest they were both great but the TV modulators weren't great on either, both had poor tape handling reliability & the general reliability for both was not great either( Both have been for repair several times over the years). For the money I think the Electron was the best of this era of UK machines, good basic, great keyboard & some fantastic arcade ports by Acornsoft, my freind had one and I was very impressed, of course it was the SQUARE choice as it was like the BBC's we had at school, so very uncool. The speccy of course wins hands down for games, was any machine other than the 2600 ever stretched as far technically as the speccy?

On another note, the Dragon 32 plays a very fine game of Manic miner, and also had some good games but why was everything in green ? Anyhow it was another fine classic brit 8-bit wonder.

 

Chris