Greetings,

2013 marks the 30th birthday of the Oric 1.
Some of the Oric community main sites have joined to organize some celebrations during 2013.

You can read more about it on the official celebration page (english and french) here:
http://oric30years.defence-force.org

We also have a facebook page with regular posts about the Oric machines, their history, peripherals, etc...
https://www.facebook.com/OricBirthday

I have an Oric-1. I bought the Oric rather than a Sinclair ZX Spectrum because I liked the proper bus expansion connector on the back and I wanted to experiment. It''s actually my second one since the cassette input failed in a few weeks on the first. The replacement failed too but by then the Oric-1 circuit diagram had been published in Oric User Magazine and comparing the diagram with what was actually in my Oric-1 (it wasn''t quite exactly the same) I could see part of the cassette interface that looked badly designed so I tried fixing it and it worked!!! The solution, if you have an Oric that won''t load from cassette is to fit a pull-up resistor on the input from the cassette interface to the 6522 VIA chip. I just soldered the resistor under the PCB across pins 18 and 20 of the 6522 VIA. I used 2k2 but 4k7 would probably be plenty. The original design used only the on chip pull-up but I knew from experience that the pull-ups in the 6522 were often very weak.

I remember a friend of mine had one of these. What most impressed me was that there were four built in commands for making sound effects: "shoot", "zap", "ping" and "explode".