In the Spotlight: 'Ika I Compofylla'
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During its 40 years long lifespan, Atari ST programmers invented several truely outstanding demo coding techniques.
In early 1989, Ilja...
The ADN party - for Atari Days Nancy - is a small but friendly convention that has been held in France for almost 15 years. Over a weekend about thirty ATARI fans will gather in a small and hot room to share their love and passion for a wide range of machines. To speak the truth I now feel a bit out of the demoscene for various reasons yet I am still fond of ATARI and I enjoy meeting cool people once a year so let’s go again! This year the event takes place from July 26th to 27th even though as usual you can be here on Friday night. As I write this I know that this time we will all think about our dear friend Shadow272 who passed away earlier this year. Our thoughts fly to his wife and family.
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- Written by: sts
Read more: (Almost) Live Report from the ADN 2025 party
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When you're talking on a demoparty to people that left the scene for some time and they ask you with their big, sad, brown eyes "If I'd be about to restart development, what's new on the ST regarding hardware and tools and what of those things is available and supported?" you nowadays have to take a deep breath and start talking for hours. Apparently it's a really good time to restart ST scening* now, because we have quite a boatload of supported projects that help developing... things for our beloved machine.
To make those future endeavors easier, I replied to the aforementioned question and the aforementioned people (let's call them "the other Avenas" for now, and, as we all know, you can't say "no" to those Avena eyes) - "Okay, I'll make a list, but you have to bare with being the opener of an atariscne.org article". They incautiously agreed, and now we got a list. And this sad excuse of an intro.
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Here we are in 2025 and this is the second (third?) of my unseen Sillyventure reports from times past. It finally gets its chance to shine on the hallowed pages of Atariscne. (How do you hallow web pages?)
Apart from the painstakingly time-stamped in-party alcohol consumption, this edition “enjoyed” a more dramatic journey home than usual. Want to find out more? Then read on! - CiH - April 2025.
DAY 1 - 12.36hrs, Friday 8th December.
Scene setting vignette from inside the party piece
We're at the party place, I've had coffee, there is Slivovitz and wine for later on. We've got front row seats, there's power there, and the Cuddly Demos are playing on the big screen on stage. Sitting on the left hand side is the Germanic presence of Front 6 and Samurai and the less Germanic presence of John 'Tronic' Cove. To the right sits my usual travelling companion and joint sharer of various (mis)adventures, Felice.
Right now, the party is in its early stages, with new arrivals trickling in. We've spotted Wiztom and various Finns, Rob Cowell, gWEm and shared a hotel breakfast room with Fready, of the Dutch Atari 8-bit cult. As all hotel made ‘eat until you burst’ style feats go, it was delicious.
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- Written by: CiH
Read more: Missing and Found Department - The Sillyventure 2017 Report.
Back in the late 80's and early 90's the first versions of the Atari STe machines carried the same DMA-chip as the previous ST computers. However, changes in the new machines made timings extremely close. Sometimes so close that the DMA-chip would fail writing data correctly. Atari recognized the issue and made an updated DMA-chip with larger toleranses for timing, which fixed the issue. Still there were a lot of previously sold machines with the old DMA-chip out there.
In modern times when you buy a used Atari STe, it's a gamble. Sometimes you get the new DMA-chip which works well. But more often than not, you get the old chip. Sometimes the old chip will work, sometimes not. The error might not show up directly, but the machine need to warm up for 15-30 minutes. To test the problem, simply save desktop settings, the partition will be screwed up after if the chip is bad. Remember to always use a spare drive that has no data!
Over 30 years later, after countless of speculation and various fixes; all from heatsinks, fans, patching of the DMA-chip and even replacing the processor, Christian Zietz of CHZ-Soft had enough and started a comprehensive investgation. In 2023 he presented the results and finally we knew what was wrong. There's no magic, no noise, no bad processors, just borderline timing that can differ from machine to machine. Atari knew the cause already back in the day and made the updated chip accordingly.
More amazingly, Christian dug even deeper and found out that Ataris programming recommendations for the DMA-chip might be another culprit that trigger the error. Atari recommends that two DMA-chip registers should be set with a single move.l instruction (for the pre-production ST DMA-chips). However, by setting these two registers separately with two move.w, the timings get slightly less tight and thus could perhaps help the bad STe DMA? Christian tested the theory on the open source EmuTOS that contains it's own harddisk driver with positive results.
From there, it's been sort of silent for a couple of years, no official EmuTOS with the software fix and no word from the best and most common driver (Hddriver) about implementing the improvement.
Until Sommarhack 2025 that is. Nerve of Ephidrena released the dmapatch.ttp program together with the DMA Bliss intro/cracktro. What the dmapatch.ttp does is reading the Hddriver binary, patching the move.l DMA-register access with two move.w instead and writes out a new driver.
Atariscne.Org was intrigued and made our own tests with Nerves patch program.
Check out the quite lengthy video below where we take an Atari STe with a bad DMA-chip, partition a disk with Hddriver 12 and see it fail!
Then run Nerves patch and try again, will it work?
Atariscne.Org fiddling with bad-DMA and dangerous demoscene patch programs
🔗 Nerve/Ephidrena Hddriver patch sourcecode
🔗 DMA Bliss cracktro (featuring dmapatch.ttp)
🔗 YMSE by Ephidrena (music from the video)
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- Written by: evldhs
The Atari ST demo "Motus" was released in 2019 by SMFX. Back then it required 2 MB of RAM to run the demo.
spkr has reworked the code and memory handling so the demo is now working on a bog-standard Atari ST with 1 MB of RAM from a floppy disk.
Rumours say a couple of floppy disks with the demo on it are available on demand.
🔗 Download Motus final version
🔗 Download and comment on Pouet
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- Written by: 505
The mysterious faulty DMA-chip in Atari STE has been matter of research from different sides. While many investigations resulted in the advice, to replace the DMA-chip by a "good" one, e.g. Czietz (chzsoft) has investigated into another direction and found that the problem may be solved in software instead. Further analysis of the different chips showed, that if the software driver part handles some edge cases differently, the chip works as it should!
Some nebulous guys picked up the theory and patched the famous and still developed HD driver by Dr. Uwe Seimet. The patch is not related to the product and to be used at own risk, obviously. However, if this proves to be true, we could see an end to the unfortunate "bad DMA-chip" tragedies resulting in massive data loss (talking straight from the horse's mouth).
The patch is accompanied by a lovely STE intro released at last Sommarhack.
🔗 Download and comment at Pouet
🔗 Dowload and comment at Demozoo
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- Written by: 505
Lotek style writes:
A pretty unexpected sign of life comes from long lasting company THALAMUS. Surprisingly they are are still alive and it seems they are also focusing the retro-market.
It seems that original author Colin Porch was working on a sequel to 'Head over Heels' for years and it is coming to Amiga and Atari ST in 2025.
🔗 News on head over heels sequel on timextension.com
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- Written by: lotek style
The new Atari ST version of the wonderful classic "Yoomp" by Dekadence is now subject to the current round of the "ST Offline Tournament" (STOT) - a monthly gaming competition being held on a monthly base on Atari-forum.com. The tournament rules can be summarized simply as: use your beloved ST (or emulator for the bad boys) to play a selected ST game in a fair but competitive surrounding, take photos of your CRT with the highscore and post them in the respective forum thread. The game is played for a month and the STOT organizer, Thorn, is managing the score table in the forum thread. Thanks for all this at this point! :-)
STOT is running since 2007 but fell in a slight winter sleep the past years. It's really refreshing to see a revival of the tournament with up to 11 participants in the last rounds. Sometimes game developers themselves adopt their games for the tournament or take part playing even (e.g. with Randominer, Faster or Chroma Grid). But no worries, if they are too good, they get disqualified ;) However, the format is a really nice opportunity to test and play new games and unknown classics and enjoy using the real hardware with others. Feel free to join the common experience of STOT anytime!
Currently chronicthehedhog leads the Yoomp excess with crazy 3.471 points, followed by wietze with 3.115 points. But we still have about two weeks to go.
🔗 STOT: Yoomp thread at Atari-forum.com
🔗 Download and comment Yoomp at Pouet
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- Written by: 505
Those of us that have not been present at last Sommarhack party might have missed Ggn's new Friday night show.
But you can still enjoy it online 2 Fridays later!
In the video a number of Atari games are presented that were actually written by Atari demosceners, great idea! The video has been recorded on real hardware (Mega ST, Mega STE and Falcon) and features slides with additional information on the games. Be prepared for some surprises!
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- Written by: 505
Hard to believe, but the FPGA-based Suska-board project is running for 20 years now. Feels like yesterday, that news on the project was spread the first time. I find it impressive, how Wolfgang Förster kept on working more or less continuously on it all the time and apparently, there are still new developments being made:
"The Suska-IV-B hardware is, of course, only as good as its FPGA core – the modeling within the FPGA. And we had something special in mind: it was meant to be a Falcon, and it became a Falcon+. Unlike the original, however, it features 48MB ALTRAM, 14MB RAM, a 32-bit data bus, a USB subsystem, Wi-Fi capability via PicoWIFI, an HDMI video interface, and various expansion options."
State of the Suska presented on their website
As shown, the Falcon modelling is advanced. However the DSP is still missing, but is being worked on, according to the Suska creators.
While we can expect that the final product will be for sale, there is also Zerkman's free and open source zeST project offering a ST clone on very cheap low end FPGA-hardware.
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GliGli has created a patch for gwEm's well-established ymVST plugin for Digital Audio Workstations. Apparently a special feature has been asked for (well, by GliGli himself) so he just implemented it straight away. The author describes:
"it takes a MIDI file (exported from the DAW, from a project where ymVST was solely used), and a bunch of patch exports from ymVST, and makes a VGM or SNDH file out of it."
🔗 GliGli's ymVST midi + ymVST patch to VGM / SNDH converter
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- Written by: 505
A new point and click adventure game was released today for the Atari ST.
Features of the game (snipped from the games website):
- A no-budget Lucasarts style point&click gameplay
- NOT a Sierra style point&click: no death, no softlock (hopefully)
- 2 languages (english or french)
- A little more than 100 screens!
- A little less than 20 different musics!
- Precisely 26 digitized sound effects (STE or F030 required)
- Only one ending
Animated gif image from the itch.io site
The game works on a regular Atari 520 ST, but requires a harddrive with at least 2.5 MB free space. STe and Falcon users get to enjoy digitized audio as well.
💾 Visit itch.io for more info and download
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- Written by: evldhs
As you may have noticed Tat/Avena and Damo/RG have released a new demo last weekend.
There are many things to say about this wonderwork. But even better when the creators themselves speak up and explain what they did there! Tat just published an article about the technical background of the production and his take on the "curl-noise" on his blog.
🔗 Read more about "Short and Curly" on Tat's blog
🔗Download and comment "Short and Curly" on Pouet
🔗 Download and comment "Short and Curly" on Demozoo
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- Written by: Tat and 505
The demoparty train keeps on rolling and the fellows of Ephidrena are currently visiting Black Valley demoparty in Norway, after having released their long awaited STE music demo "YMSE" just last weekend at Sommarhack.
A few Atarians and STEs are present and rumours say even an Atari release was in the works for Black Valley too, but cancelled due to rightly giving the social experience priority.
Photos by Nerve/Ephidrena
A party stream is available via Scenesat.
🔗 Black valley Demoparty website
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- Written by: 505 and Nerve
Retro books (or books about retro subjects) - everyone does it these days, you can find a ton of them around from self publishing houses. Usually good print quality and format, contents most of the times so-so, written by enthusiasts who aren't really good reporters or writers.
Instead, how about reading one of the first ones?
Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers was released back in 1997, as a bunch of HTML files in disk format, priced at $20 per copy. Its author, James Hague, an 80s programmer himself, idolised the people featured in the book, therefore he took good care in making interesting conversations which he then transcribed to the book. And, to our delight, a lot of them were using Ataris!
Adam Billyard, Danielle Berry, Chris Crawford, David Fox, Steve Hales, Archer MacLean, Jeff Minter, Philip Price. And then coin-op legends like Eugene Jarvis, Ed Rotberg. And foreward by John Romero. How many of those so called "Retro Books" can present such a lineup?
Since then James has kindly released the book for free and is hosting it on his website for quite some time now. A recommended read, head over to https://dadgum.com/halcyon/ and enjoy!
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Sommarhack, the legendary demo party that always felt just out of my reach. For years, I watched from the sidelines, thinking it was one of those events I’d never get the chance to attend. Then, unexpectedly earlier this year, an email from Spkr landed in my inbox. Suddenly, what once felt impossible started to feel real.
It wasn't an official invitation, but a spot on the reserve list. That was enough. I accepted immediately. Hope turned into anticipation. A few days later, another message came through. This time, it was confirmed. I had a place.
I'd heard from my Atari friends who'd attended previous Sommarhacks how amazing it was, and how much fun they'd had. Truth be told, I was always quite envious. But would it live up to my expectations? My imposter syndrome peaked, and I even had doubts about going... Ultimately, I bit the bullet and booked my tickets from London Gatwick to Stockholm, Sweden.
I was going to Sommarhack!
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- Written by: Tronic
Read more: My party report: Sommarhack 2025, Hedemora, Sweden
A quite interesting interview was recently published, where Tillmann Bubeck, the programmer of the 16 Bit home computing era classic "Rings of Medusa" is answering questions on his memories and the making of the game. Tilmann Bubeck is also known for demoscene contributions and especially the development of later Neochrome Master versions under the pseudonym Chaos Inc. of Delta Force.
Unfortunately there is no English translation. One particularly interesting story was about how he actually found a publisher:
He spent the last 1-2 school years with coding in a daily, second coding shift right after school and creating this game concept together with Gogo/Tex/Delta Force/TCB. The two in fact almost never met in person as they lived far apart and mostly relied on using phone for communication. The game idea was developed just basing on what they liked themselves and it's pretty amazing how this completely worked out in this case. When the game was finished, a publisher was to be found. The approach for them back then was not writing mails or using telephone, but simply visiting the Atari fair in Germany and go directly to the companies booths with a disk and the game on it. Quite crazy, but also very down to earth compared to todays complexity. Just imagine how a 19 year old teenager comes along a fair booth and says "hey, I have something, can I show it to you?", the publishers would load the DD disk on an ST and inspect the game. And how all this worked out in the end. In this case, it was Starbyte Software, and they were landing a hit just with that.
If you want, enjoy the whole interview in full length:
Thanks to Lotekstyle for the hint towards the interview!
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It has been quite a demoparty weekend, with Shadow Party, Lost Party and Sommarhack taking place at the same time.
The results from Lost party, an 8-Bit multi platform party that took place in Poland last weekend, are available on the respective website. There you will also find links to watch the stream in case you missed it (events and compos). Krupkaj also provides a nice set of photos from the event at his gallery page.
🔗 Lost party photos at Krupkajs photo gallery
The results of the events are available on Demozoo as well and the list of entries and contributors shows! We hope for more information soon.
🔗 Shadow Party 2025 on Demozoo
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- Written by: 505
Absolutely on the boundary of Atariscene-related content plus appreciatively taken from a post by Monsoft on the Polish Atari scene portal atariarea.krap.pl, this article might be of interest for a few. Is it? Is it not? Let us know!
And yes, apparently the good old silly season hole is kicking in. However, with Sommarhack and Sillyventure I am sure it will be not for long.
🔗 6502 Illegal Opcodes in the Siemens PC 100 Assembly Manual (1980)
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This one has passed me by for some reason. Guilliame Tello has quietly continued work on his very useful MPlayer movie player for various flavours of Atari compatible hardware.
As of the 29.11.2023, he has released a new version of MPlayer, now at 4.3 beta. It’s a movie player, screen capture application, movie converter and more.
Apart from steady improvements and bugfixes, Guilliame has provided support for Apollo Vampire super-enhanced hardware. Needless to say it remains friendly to anything with a Fuji badge with a 68030 processor or above.
Some more features have been added as below:
Enhanced support for Psound card
Apollo Vampire Standelone V4+ supported !
Albums of videos
Tool to compute the real DMA frequencies
Enhanced files to add subtitles/comments
Internal tool to record Enhanced files
Pause available (Alt+Control)
There is a new revamped menu as well.
So if you like playing or disassembling movies on your Atari, head on over to Guilliame’s website at
http://gtello.free.fr/mplayere.htm
Written by CiH - 29.6.25.
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