3 ms·

Can you say a little bit about the storage system on the Atmos? How does a system that old access that much storage?

boffinAudio 3y ago
Each of these systems has expansion capabilities, in the form of some sort of data I/O ports - skilled hackers over the years have added storage features to each of them, giving us the interesting situation that the peripheral controller being used to give the machine access to a USB stick is about 1,000 times more capable than the original host CPU .. ;) The Oric Atmos has multiple forms of this peripheral available, which emulate the old physical disk systems that were used (but very rare now) back in the day, but in this particular case I'm using the "Erebus" expansion adapter which provides a means of loading programs, formerly available only on tape, instantly, akin to loading a ROM cartridge. (I'm using this instead of a disk emulator because the 10-LINE BASIC Competition entries we are displaying are distributed as .TAP - captured tape - files) There are other storage-emulation peripherals for the Oric Atmos (we have them all at the museum), such as the Cumulus adapter, and these basically use a PIC or some other MCU to emulate the old disk interface. Its extremely gratifying, as an old-school Oric fan, to be able to load up a single SD card or USB stick with all the software I can possibly find, and have a "fat" Oric loaded to the gills. As the Oric was an underdog back in the day, this is really rewarding nowadays .. ;) (I have one disk with nearly the entire contents of the software archive on https://oric.org/ https://oric.org/ ..) In terms of how the 64K machine accesses 8-gigabytes of memory addresses - it doesn't. The peripheral MCU 'brokers' this for us - the user selects a .DSK or .TAP file, stored on the USB stick, and the peripherals' onboard MCU exposes this to the old machine as if it were a physically loaded floppy disk - or tape, in case of .TAP. There aren't (yet) API's exposed in these peripherals to allow the original machine to mount/unmount .DSK files programmatically - the user still needs to physically 'mount' the binary blob they want to use, akin to inserting the media - but the firmware for all of this is open source so it probably won't be long until there is an onboard API for mounting/unmounting blobs. Thanks for the interest!
- quercusa 3y ago
  Thanks for the explanation!
  - boffinAudio 3y ago
    You're welcome - I hope you'll check out the scene. Its a lot of fun!

Each of these systems has expansion capabilities, in the form of some sort of data I/O ports - skilled hackers over the years have added storage features to each of them, giving us the interesting situation that the peripheral controller being used to give the machine access to a USB stick is about 1,000 times more capable than the original host CPU .. ;) The Oric Atmos has multiple forms of this peripheral available, which emulate the old physical disk systems that were used (but very rare now) back in the day, but in this particular case I'm using the "Erebus" expansion adapter which provides a means of loading programs, formerly available only on tape, instantly, akin to loading a ROM cartridge. (I'm using this instead of a disk emulator because the 10-LINE BASIC Competition entries we are displaying are distributed as .TAP - captured tape - files) There are other storage-emulation peripherals for the Oric Atmos (we have them all at the museum), such as the Cumulus adapter, and these basically use a PIC or some other MCU to emulate the old disk interface. Its extremely gratifying, as an old-school Oric fan, to be able to load up a single SD card or USB stick with all the software I can possibly find, and have a "fat" Oric loaded to the gills. As the Oric was an underdog back in the day, this is really rewarding nowadays .. ;) (I have one disk with nearly the entire contents of the software archive on https://oric.org/ https://oric.org/ ..) In terms of how the 64K machine accesses 8-gigabytes of memory addresses - it doesn't. The peripheral MCU 'brokers' this for us - the user selects a .DSK or .TAP file, stored on the USB stick, and the peripherals' onboard MCU exposes this to the old machine as if it were a physically loaded floppy disk - or tape, in case of .TAP. There aren't (yet) API's exposed in these peripherals to allow the original machine to mount/unmount .DSK files programmatically - the user still needs to physically 'mount' the binary blob they want to use, akin to inserting the media - but the firmware for all of this is open source so it probably won't be long until there is an onboard API for mounting/unmounting blobs. Thanks for the interest!

quercusa 3y ago
Thanks for the explanation!
- boffinAudio 3y ago
  You're welcome - I hope you'll check out the scene. Its a lot of fun!