My colleague had ORIC-1 back in the 1980s. It was a very rare computer in Finland. Commodore 64, MSX computers and Sinclair ZX Spectrum were much more popular. But ORIC 8-bit computers had some following in Europe, I guess especially in France and to a some extent in the UK.
I googled for ORIC emulators and found Oricutron sources from github.com. This emulator was written by Peter Gordon, with assistance from others.
Today (February 10th, 2018) I grabbed the source from GIT (9e31a7d) and packaged it for Fedora Linux 27. It was easy sailing apart from the fact that I could not find the ORIC system ROMs anywhere! They were not in the source tree, so the emulator would not start. After some insane googling I managed to find a LHA-compressed distribution for Commodore Amiga. That package contained the missing system ROMs, so I finally got the emulator up and running. I do not know much about ORIC machines, so I just tried a few games to verify that the emulator works.
Here are the RPMs for Fedora Linux. Make sure to get oric-system-roms
RPM too, it is essential for the oricutron
emulator to work!
For testing purposes and amusement you will probably want a game, so here is one for you:
Unfortunately this emulator does not know how to uncompress zipped or gzipped tape images, so you must uncompress Xenon 1 first:
gunzip /path/to/the/downloaded/xenon1.tap.gz
Then become superuser (root) to install the emulator and system ROMs:
dnf -y install /path/to/the/downloaded/oricutron-1.2.0-9e31a7d.kk8.x86_64.rpm
dnf -y install /path/to/the/downloaded/oric-system-roms-1.0.0-2.noarch.rpm
And finally test oricutron
with Xenon 1 game. Wait for a while until it is loaded!
/opt/oricutron/bin/oricutron --tape /path/to/the/downloaded/xenon1.tap
For some reason my cursor keys work fine in ORIC Atmos BASIC when I boot the emulated machine. In other words, when I press UP, the cursor goes up, when I press RIGHT, the cursor goes right, when I press DOWN, the cursor goes down, etc. But when I tried to play Xenon 1, I had to use keys Z and X to move left and right, and SPACE worked as fire.
Have fun! I know I did. It was nice to see ORIC Atmos. Yes, I know, it has only eight colors and the overall look is that of teletext screens, but nevertheless, this was an important computer for those who had it back in the day. There are programmers out there who started their careers with ORIC. Let's preserve this machine too with the help of emulators and software dumps such as tape images.
UPDATE March 11th, 2018: kk8 release adds just the documentation file /opt/oricutron/doc/ReadMe.txt
. The earlier releases had none.
UPDATE March 15th, 2018: I strongly recommend checking out my Manic Miner on ORIC page too. The ORIC port of Manic Miner (a legendary platform game originally written by Matthew Smith for Sinclair ZX Spectrum) may well be the best port of them all! The ORIC release has a whopping 32 rooms in total, making it 12 more compared to the other 8-bit ports. I absolutely love this Manic Miner, it is superb, wow!
So many thanks to Peter Gordon for creating Oricutron, and to whoever did the Manic Miner ORIC port back in the 1980s. Thanks also to the ORIC hackers for the tape image and the scanned color chart. It is a great privilege to be able to play this fantastic Manic Miner port.