Post

Start the week with a unicorn! No, not the Torch Unicorn though I'd quite like one of those too. No, there'll be two camps for this one. You'll either instantly know what it is or, more likely, you'll never have heard of it because it never sold. This is the HH Tiger, aka the Tangerine Microtan 2.

Quite a different beast though, switching from 6502 to Z80!

Yep. I’m guessing the decision was to go Z80 for CP/M which meant an instant library of software, in this case Perfect Office. It also meant a world of pain for the chap tasked with writing the Z80 code. Meanwhile Oric Products International carried on with the 6502.

I wonder if this machine is somehow related to the Oric Phoenix? oric.free.fr/phoenix.html

What an interesting mix of technologies! Minitel, teletext AND a Kaypro compatibility mode?! Is it known who designed the phoenix or was it Oric France? The Tiger design was sold to HH so Oric couldn’t use any of that in a future machine.

As far as I know France was not involved, the few motherboards were discovered in England and Fabrice Frances (the guy who wrote the first proper Oric emulator) did a deep dive inside and there's a video (in French) of the system running somewhere on the internet.

Ha, here it is: www.youtube.com/watch?v=muRp...

I’ll watch that later, this is fascinating.

I almost got one of the motherboard, unfortunately it was sent from UK in non-tracked package, and it somehow never reached my place in Norway :-/

Noooo! That’s completely made of suck. How many were produced, do you know?

I'm not sure how many were made, but the batch that was found was of about 7 or 8 cards if my memory serves. It's been a while :) And yes that sucked!