Talk:Tangerine Computer Systems

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Faulty tape checking routine

Did this really only manifest itself in the Oric Atmos? I ask because I had an Oric 1 and the tape seldom worked once the saved programs had reached a certain size.

- I had this problem as well with my Atmos. It broke my heart... Ryancolm 13:27, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

No the problem was worse if anything on the Oric-1. I seem to recall there was an actual error in the tape routines. When I was writing a book for the Oric and Atmos, using the atmos itself, I used tapes, and more than one occasion had to rewrite chapters because the tape writing failed.Geffers 11:47, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

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Attribute clash

Unlike what is said in the article, the Oric color clashes were actualy worse, much much worse than on the sinclair spectrum. Because, albeit the colors were restricted in 1x6 pixel blocks (unlike the spectrum 8x8 blocks) the problem was that the attribute commands to actually change the colors were themselves using 1 byte of graphic memory, there was no memory reserved for attributes so it would use the space corresponding to a 1x6 pixel block , making this block unusable. That means if you wanted to change the foreground colors on a line , there would be an empty 6 pixels gaps before the color change.
To make things worse, this restriction was valid for foreground as well as background color attributes, meaning that if you wanted to change background AND foreground colors, that would require an empty 12 pixels blocks. The only relief was that you could use "color inversion" by just switching a reserved bit at the beggining of each 1x6 pixel block, color inversion meant that the two screen colors could be replaced on the whole block by their "inverted colours" without the need for attribute space...(inverted colors: white<->black, red<->cyan, blue<->yellow, green<->purple).
The same restrictions existed in text mode (wit 8x8 pixel blocks instead of 1x8).
As you can imagine this made the creation of complex colored graphics very difficult, even impossible in most cases. That is why most games were either monochrome or using vertical color bands (color attributes being set at the left of the screen).

Feel free to clean up this ionformation and post it in the main article...