The ORIC uses serial Attributes. This 'ancient' method means that every colour and effectual change requires a byte (6 pixels) to represent the change on screen.

This differs from most other computers of the 80's era. For example, The Spectrum 48K used two separate screen memory areas. One to hold the Bit map, one to hold the colour information. This pulls greater memory resources since both screens need memory allocated to them. By using Serial Attributes, the ORIC only required one area for screen graphics, although the TEXT mode still required separate character set memory.

In practice, this means the ORIC uses just 1120 bytes for its TEXT mode (regardless of whether colours are used or not) whilst its high resolution mode (HIRES) uses just 8160 bytes.

Sprites

Character Sets