The NOVA 64 seems to be a legal copy of the Oric Atmos for the Yugoslavian market.
Here is what the Oric FAQ by Jim Groom says :
"A Yugoslavian company (believed to be Avtotehna, based in Ljubljana) obtained a licence to make 5000 machines. Machines were made, but whether they were under license or not is not known in any detail. It is thought that they assembled parts shipped from the UK. I have a contact in Yugoslavia who says there were several in his village and about 30 in a school in the next village. This may suggest that more than 5000 were made. They were known as the Oric Nova 64 and were Atmos based."
Thus, the NOVA 64 seems to be an exact Atmos machine, only the "NOVA 64" label being different. But we hadn't the chance to test one yet to confirm this statement. The motherboard however seems a bit different from well known Issue 3 & 4 ones used in most official Oric machines (RAM chips layout is different).
The 64 in "Nova 64" comes from the fact the Atmos has really 64 KB RAM, but
16 KB are masked by the ROM at startup, thus leaving "only" 48 KB to work with the Basic language.
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Thanks to Ranko Vukcevic for the pictures.
We need more info about this computer ! If you designed, used, or have more info about this system,
please send us pictures or anything you might find useful.
I''ve used this machine ..unbelievable experience for that time
Wednesday 8th February 2012
Miroslav (Serbia)
We used to have few of them back in late ''80s, in my elementary school. It was a fun machine, it had internal speaker and great built-in basic for that time. Probably one of the best looking 8-bit computers at that time too....
Monday 30th January 2012
Misha (Yugoslavia/Serbia/USA)
As a matter of fact, the "Oric Nova 64" was officialy adopted by the federal government in Yugoslavia as the main educational-purpose computer in schools (both primary and secondary) in 1986., after several years of heavy discussions about which computer should be the most appropriate one for that use. It was assembled in Yugoslavia, by "Avtotehna" - Ljubljana, out of parts imported from Oric directly, under exclusive licence (only the label "Oric Nova 64" was printed in Yugoslavia). Each and every school had to have "Nova 64" for educational purposes, but almost noone has ever really worked on them. In 1988. most of the schools have acquired more powerful computers for computer science education (some of them even purchased PC clones) independently from the government regulations, so "Nova 64" was slowly but surely pushed away. To say nothing about strangeness of such computer in the country where "Commodore 64"s and "Spectrum 48"s ruled for years then... All these informations can be checked out in Yugoslav computer magazines of that time, primarily in "Moj Mikro" (published in Slovenia).
I myself have graduated from the computer science high school in 1989., but never put my hands on "Nova 64"''s keyboard - those computers were kept in locked clasroom, in order to prevent anyone touching that expensive, but completely useless machine in time when my school has already purchased 32 PC clones and installed them in a classroom with unrestricted access (unlike the classroom equipped with "Nova 64"s)... Only once have I seen a couple of first-year students working on "Nova"s, but under strict supervision of three (!) teachers, while my (senior) class was making programs in Fortran 77 on those PCs next door completely unsupervised...
Thursday 26th January 2012
drvmandic
NAME
NOVA 64
MANUFACTURER
Oric
TYPE
Home Computer
ORIGIN
Yugoslavia
YEAR
? 1984
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
Tangerine Basic (in fact unlicensed Microsoft Basic)
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