Like in 2015 and 2016, I spent the last weekend of January at the Global Game Jam.

In total, about 8600 games have been worked on by more than 42000 persons across 108 countries.

If there is one thing that can make a game look like it was professionally produced, it's definitely using a different character set than the one provided by the system.

Let's take a look at some existing games to show what I mean.

Here comes the first article about tips and tricks that can be used to make your Oric development easier and faster.

Choosing an assembler

Originally the Oric C development kit was using FRASM to assemble the 6502 code generated by the C compiler front-end.

One of the first changes we did when starting the OSDK was to use instead a real 6502 macro-assembler with an extended set of features, and ultimately we choose XA because it supported most of the C compiler preprocessor directives.

This article was first published in the CEOMag 296.

Our beloved Oric computer is equipped with a sound generator compatible with the one found on the Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, MSX and some models of Sinclair Spectrum, so theoretically there’s no real reason why most of the earlier Oric games had no music at all or perhaps just a game over tune.

osdk.org

While doing some maintenance on the Defence Force infrastructure, I realized that the osdk.org domain name was now available.

Few minutes later it was registered, and a couple of hours later there was working DNS and redirect information.

Web 2.0?

For now about 13 years the OSDK has been a version 0 point something despite having been used to create quite a significant amount of software.