retroric/lxpollitt--orictape

Tools for creating and editing Oric tape files

orictape

Found some decaying cassette tapes with all the programs you wrote as kid on them? You'll need a command line tool to show you the mangled wave forms, where the suspect bits are, and give you the best chance of reconstructing your childhood masterpieces.

About Oric

Oric was the name used by Tangerine Computer Systems for a series of home computers, including the original Oric-1, its successor the Oric Atmos and the later Oric Stratos/IQ164 and Oric Telestrat models.

Released in 1983, the Oric-1 was based on a MOS 1 MHz 6502A CPU, and came in 16 KB or 48 KB RAM variants for £129 and £169 respectively. Both versions had a 16 KB ROM containing the operating system and a modified BASIC interpreter. During 1983, around 160,000 Oric-1 computers were sold in the UK, plus another 50,000 in France.

About the tool

Tool shows:

• Audio audio waveform with interpretation of bits, highlighting the bits where the audio is damaged.
• Each corresponding byte, highlighting bytes where audio was damaged, check sum errors, and unrecognized symbols.
• The program itself in Basic, again highlighting the suspect bits.

Scroll around in any direction using the cursor keys.

Emulators

Once you've reconstructed your programs, you'll need something to run them on. Here's a few to try:

• http://www.bannister.org/software/oric.htm
• http://www.emucamp.com/oric.html

TO DO

• Make the code not look like the first golang program anyone ever wrote.
• Compare two copies of the tape and take the best bits from each.
• Ability to edit bits, bytes, and keywords.
• Export reconstructed program as .tap and .wav files.