I was looking at some videos for the Oric and I noticed that there was a 2 character blank space on the left side of the display. So I did some reading and it turns out that the Oric has a very unique system for choosing colors, using "Serial Attributes" that are stored in screen memory.
So why are there 2 blank spaces? Because you use those two character spots to choose the foreground and background colors.
You can even switch from text to hi-res graphics and back again "on the fly" which is quite clever.
It had 240x200 graphics and each byte in hi-res mode would store 6 pixels. The most significant bit would invert the colors.
Here's some pages that tell you all about the oric's graphic display:
http://www.osdk.org/www_osdk/index.php?page=articles&ref=ART3#title3
http://oric.free.fr/programming.html
http://home.btconnect.com/geffers/files/contents.htm
and since the Oric is 6502 based, why not see what the code will display on an Atari?
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