Omikron Soft, better known in the scene as OMK, was founded in 1987. It was one of the pioneer companies and one of the very few software houses in Spain that specialized with priority in the programming of commercial games for the Amstrad PCW system.
OMK was originally born in the home of its director, Francisco Lozano, operating from a small room set up as a technical office where initially they only had a couple of MSX microcomputers. With this basic infrastructure, the team took its first steps in software development, creating its first experimental entertainment titles such as "Viaje a América" or "Magic Pinball". Upon realizing the massive shortage of Spanish leisure software in the Amstrad PCW catalog and the wide opportunities of the retro market, the team made the strategic decision to shift all their efforts towards this professional computer system.
The group's genesis traces back to when programmer Víctor Diéguez García worked as Francisco's sound technician at a local radio station. Víctor formally proposed founding a software label, an initiative that was temporarily postponed due to his mandatory military service. Upon his return, both embarked on the technical journey of competing with the releases of major national software distributors in physical 3-inch floppy disk formats.
The commercial beginnings were complex due to the technical difficulty of optimizing stable subroutines on the PCW hardware, which was originally intended solely for word processing. However, after refining the code of "Viaje a América" from its initial MSX version, the leap to the Amstrad computer ecosystem was consolidated with the technical release of Formula 1, an absolute sales success that validated their production model.
From that moment on, various leisure releases followed one after another, defining the gaming catalog under the CP/M operating system for the PCW. Among their most celebrated arcade and action works are "Sky War", "Sir Lancelot", "Terracom", "Magic Way", "Buran", "Cubik Road", and "Space Combat", along with projects featuring official national licenses such as "La Corona Mágica". One of their most ambitious and remembered technical projects consisted of the development of **500 c.c. Championship**, an incredible motorcycle racing game inspired by the arcade cabinet *Super Hang-On*, incorporating sophisticated scroll routines and digitalized monochromatic graphics.
Technical Profile: Víctor Diéguez García
Head of technical development and the core pillar of programming at OMK. He stood out at the time for his ability to disassemble routines and squeeze maximum performance out of the Z80 processor in environments where other developers discarded the system due to its graphic complexity. He handcrafted his own cross-development systems using 16-bit Atari computers as production workstations, overcoming the barriers of the era's lack of technical documentation in Spanish.