An Ancient Bird Flies Home!
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Warning! This was expected to be a long text, and so it turned out as such. If you’re trying to read this in one go, then a...
Ah, that time of the year. That special time where Christmas trees are lit to shed candlelight onto our Atari keyboards, eggnog helps us through the fiercest debug sessions and the clicking sound of our disk drive is oh so jingly.
And amongst all this, Hemoroids wrapped us a very special gift this year: Square!
Yes, you read right, not Square V2 (well, it is on that disk somewhere, too, if rumors are true) but Square. The one. The one. Seen only by a chosen few (well, the whole of STNICCC 2015 compo audience, actually, but let's not digress). Subject to a lot of controversy and legends and awe.
Such a nice present, go get it!
💾 Download "Turlututu Chapeau Pointu Pack #50" from Fujiology
🔗 "Turlututu Chapeau Pointu Pack #50" at Demozoo
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- Written by: tIn
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At the closing of 2025, the Atariscne.org team wishes a cozy festive season and all the best for 2026! See you there!
Read a whole range of greetings cards and reflections by the Atariscne.Org editorial team in the scroller - to be enjoyed with a cup of your favorite beverage on any ATARI 520 ST and upwards :-)
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- Written by: 505
In the past few years, mOdmate had been working on a guide for Graph2Font, a tool for Atari 8-bit graphics that uses special tricks to display far more colours than would normally seem possible. Sadly, he didn't have time to finish it, but he passed the baton to Exocet a few weeks before he left us. The work has now been brought to completion and the resulting PDF is available for download.
Book title page with graphics by Ripek
The Atari 8-bit computers were very special to mOdmate, being his first contact with home computing, and he clearly poured his heart into this guide. Hopefully it will encourage more pixel artists to get involved with that fascinating platform.
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We totally missed that: YesCrew have just updated their "Whack A Virus!" game from 2020 to make it work also on 1280x960 TT resolution.
This is the screenshot from the ordinary ST high 640x400 version. Feel free to email us photos of your TT high setup showcasing the game!
Edit: An this is how it looks on the TT. Thanks for Mikro, who sent in this screenshot!
The TT high is a rare and fine setup, but for sure a good occasion to play this game which is without doubt one of the best looking Atari ST monochrome games.
💾 Download Whack A Virus TT High version
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- Written by: 505
Atari Lynx and Jaguar coder 42Bastian is working on new Atari Jaguar 3D engine and published a few work in Progress videos.
We asked 42Bastian what is his main motivation for the engine and he says:
"The motivation for this engine is multiple: In the last years since we made BJL I made different attempts for 3D code. But always just some rotating things. But ever since I played Cybermorph I wanted to have a real 3D engine.
Next is, I want to make a real engine, something w/o demo trickery someone could use to make a game out of it. And last, I wanted to show, that the 68k is not needed at all. I myself do not plan to make a game out of it, but hope to get the engine to a state where someone else can use it."
Interesting, so it's an engine using the Jaguar GPU only. If you want to have a look, the source code is available on Github.
🔗 Atari Jaguar Poly engine on Github
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- Written by: 505
T.O.Y.S. are having a preference for Damo's & Tat's TTrak YM-tracker. Now, Peylow/T.O.Y.S. released a command line tool for optimization of the file format for different use cases.
The TPMTool command line parameters
The tool can merge several TPM-files into on TPN or SNDH file, while e.g. appyling the same set of instruments on all tracks There is also the very handy feature to strip all unused instrument and pattern data, so we end up with a remakable smaller filesize (see below).
From the official readme file:
"A tool for working with TTrak Module (TPM), TTrak Multi Module (TPN), and SNDH files with embedded TPM/TPN file and player.
TTrak is a YM2149 Chip Tracker for the Atari ST family of computers, available at https://ttrak2149.com.
TPM Tool can show information about TPM, TPN, and SNDH files.
TPM Tool can merge one or more TPM, TPN, and SNDH files into a single TPN or SNDH file with shared instruments and one or more sub-songs.
Using TPM Tool to convert TPM, or SNDH with embedded TPM to TPN or SNDH with embedded TPN has size benefits even for a single song. This is because TPN strips unused instrument, pattern, and digi sound data.
File size examples for converting the TTrak 1.04 sample modules, this is also memory savings when using music composed with TTrak in your productions:
DOOMER.TPM (36Kb) -> DOOMER.TPN ( 7Kb)
LYNDON.TPM (36Kb) -> LYNDON.TPN ( 4Kb)
TOMCHI.TPM (67Kb) -> TOMCHI.TPN (17Kb)
WOBBLA.TPM (37Kb) -> WOBBLA.TPN ( 6Kb)"
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Wong CK aka Probe House Software has released PH PDF beta 7 few weeks ago:
"This is a beta GDOS printer driver that outputs PDF docs instead of to a printer. So now you can create PDF document from your favorite Atari program.
Current beta supports Atari GDOS, Speedo GDOS, NVDI & TTF-Gdos, TrueType fonts and 24-bits colour graphics which gives your PDF output nice looking fonts, VDI drawing squares, circles, ellipse as well as VDI patterns and hatchings. Lots of new VDI calls supported."
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Keith Clark has been showcasing a new and impressive Atari STE game engine on his X account. This is clearly lifting the STE into a Megadrive look&feel!
Our Polish friends from Atarionline.pl published an additional video clip on youtube. Have a look!
As Equinox once put it - high framerate or nothing!
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Slippy published YM2149-rs, a "cycle-accurate YM2149 PSG emulator with real-time audio playback and visualization. Includes a Bevy plugin for easy integration into game engines and creative projects. Supports SNDH, GIST, Arkos-Tracker 2/3 & YM2-YM6 and AY formats with drag-and-drop file loading."
As the author explains further "It's not just a sndh Web Assembly replayer [...], it's a complete YM2149 ecosystem in rust. From low-level Chip emulation up to a bevy (Rust Game-Engine) plugin with layered architecture and support for sndh, ym, ay and native arkos tracker Format (with multi-psg support).
The Website offers download for pre-built binaries for MacOS, Windows and partially Linux. To test it yourself. No need to install rust and compile..."
🔗 YM2149-rs on Github
🔗 Slippy's comprehensive article series on YM2149.rs
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- Written by: 505
Last month Norwegian Atari developer Joska released "BGEM", a next generation BubbleGEM replacement for GEM Applications supporting this post-Atari standard running under MiNT and XaAES, N.AES and probably MyAES, too.
The application comes in proper style with a HYP-hypertext help file.
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The previously announced Street Fighter II conversion of the game boy version for Atari XL/XE has been put online in version 1.10. This looks incredibly good!
The game comes as a 4 MB cartridge (.car) file. So, it won't be for everyone to boot that up, according to tests reported on AtariAge forum, the game should work with the wonderful SUBCard though.
🔗 Vega's Streetfighter II website
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During December Uwe Seimet's HDDriver has received two updates, mostly bug fixes, so now version 12.75 is available.
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Pawel aka Saulot has managed to fulfill the last creative step of his Norkturn FM project (we reported earlier): The production is finished!
These cartridges are looking good, and should be sounding even better
The development was a tedious ride, as he expressively states on his website:
Production of NokturnFM2 and NokturnFM3 carts has ended few days ago. The thing(s) that should not be arrived, not wanted, pure commercial suicide and over thirty years too late. But it’s here - plug and play Sound Blaster / Adlib sound for all 16 / 32 bit Atari’s :) ...
Congratulations on finishing such a project! :-) And, of course good luck with the last step, the logistic adventures.
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Hospes from Mystic Bytes (msx/gfx) and Krzysztof “kTz” Jarzyna (coder) have just released a new STe musicdisk showcasing remixes of Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge. In an article published on Ataricrypt's very informative website we can read that he wasn't quite happy with the STe version of Lotus that still featured YM chiptunes so that he composed his own visions of what could have be done. Not sure the message will be read by the author of the STe enhanced version who also brought us FaSTEr last year but in the meantime feel free to enjoy his songs!
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A new version of the graphic software Vision was just released.
Vision has been developed by Jean Lusetti and Patrice Peyrano since the 90s and is now open source. It works on Atari ST 1 MB RAM machines and also supports high end machines with graphic cards. Beside a picture manager, it features standard drawing tools, image processing (also real time zoom), slide show, album and image browsing modes as well as batch conversions. Beside that it's damn cool that there are applications like that in development in 2025, it also looks damn great!
Vision running on high-end Aranym setup (picture taken from the developers website)
Changes:
- Bug fixes:
- LDV modules working with palettes was buggy (no palette change)
- Gamma LDV was buggy when performing on images with a palette
- Memory leak in ordered dither fixed
- New/improved features:
- New LDV: QRCODE which generates a QR code from a free text
- Core features developped by Guillaume Tello (thanks to him!), LDV interface: myself
- Can also be ran via a .VCS script: ldvqrcode.vcs from SCRIPTS folder
- New LDV parameter type: TEXT
- Used to input some generic text
- Advanced edition using template files (.ATT)
- Used/required by QRCODE LDV (so this LDV won't work on previous Vision versions)
- New scripting command: new
🔗 Jean Lusetti's Atari website
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The French crew MPS apparently just released a simple party intro that was officially done for the Atari Days Nancy event past summer (see the refering report by STS).
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"Son Shu Shi" is game of the month December at the ST Offline Tournament. First of all, this is an amazing jump and run game, with impressive graphics and love put into it.
But beside, this game also has a very interesting history, with quite some demoscene context. It was created by two talented and passioned Belgian ST demoscene brothers (The Raider Brothers), working on this "once in a lifetime project" back in the 90s, while at some point the French oldschool group "Next" was involved in a way (e.g. Lap/Next as musician). Evenmore, some of the other Next crew members also acted as Expose Software, a game publisher company that also published other games made by ST sceners! However, the story of the publishing process seems not to have a happy end in this case. Thus, the game was sort of lost and only an unstable cracked version existed many years.
Then the story continued with the Replicants suddenly returning in 2022, restoring the previously cracked version by replacing corrupted data with data found on a rare original disk and also adding many fixes and patches for all kinds of Atari 16/32 computers. Wow!
It's all a very twisted and interesting story with lots of connections. Highly recommended to dive into! And to do so, who could be more helpful than ST Graveyard from Atari Legend, who presented the whole story in a complete video feature on the game few years back, all in his dedicated and uniquely passionate kind of investigation! Quite a treasure.
This video takes you perfectly down into this rabbit hole. Soul food for the winter days!
Well, and of course, feel free to play the game itself. Personally, I played it the first time ever last week: it's impressive, tough and very colorful!
🔗 ST Offline Tournament S07R12 - Son Shu Shi
🔗 Son Shu Shi - Review on Atari-Legend
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Apparently the planned date for Sommarhack 2026 was set to 3rd - 5th July 2026. For location booking reasons the Sillyventure SE 2026 date was also set to the very same date.
Thats a pretty great looking logo!
After an intense SV vs. SH catfight*, a series of on-topic fucktros* and defamatory diskmag magazine campaigns* the situation could finally be resolved between the organisers by having a match of the soon to be released* final version of Ready Steady Bang, so now
- Sommarhack will take place from 3rd to 5th of July 2026
- Sillyventure will take place from 30th of July to 2nd of August 2026.
___
*from unreliable sources
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Ataricrypt has made a review of one very special entry of the Sommarhack 2024 zero bitplane competition: PHF Rally 2 was an impressive and fun, well actually thrilling to play game featuring gwEm music, which is not using graphics memory obviously!
🔗 PHF Rally 2 - Zero Bitplane game review by Ataricrypt
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All files from the recent SV compos are now available for download in two large zip-files.
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