In the spotlight: The Tat/Avena Blog
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When looking at the Avena listings on Pouet or Demozoo one could be forgiven for thinking the crew is more or less inactive...
The schedule for upcoming Sillyventure party in Gdansk has been published recently. Among the usual compo slots there will be talks on different Atari matters, one of them by Suavek presenting his remarkable Re-Falcon project or Odipar and Steen showcasing their upcoming Atari ST chipmusic project "RhYMe".
Having a look at the compo rules also brings some changes. Sillyventure is addressing the generative AI debate by not allowing generative AI content in the music or graphics compos, while it stays permitted in other categories (games, demos, wild) when properly stated in the submission metadata.
According to the rules, "it is not permitted to use entire, sampled fragments of other people's copyrighted works". One could state this is kind of contradictory, taking into account LLM are fed with exactly this. But well, it shows how complex the matter is, also for scene events and its organizers. Good to see approaches experimenting and trying to adopt to the situation.
Furthermore, and presumably mirroring the challenging reality, the rules also explicitly exclude "Any entries of a political nature, containing any criticism or agitation, concerning current events, conflicts or images of living politicians."
đź”—Â Sillyventure website with timetable
đź”—Â Sillyventure compo rules
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- Written by: 505
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Ready for another trip down the history lane? ;)
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Back in 2013, Uros Vidovic (I'm sure that he is going to kill me for this link ;)) alias Vido contacted me with an interesting request. He managed to acquire NeoN 3D source code from Ole Dittmann with the intention of making a FireBee port (Vido is one of the most active FireBee users/supporters these days) and asked me whether I wouldn't be able to "recompile" them for the FireBee.
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Well, I agreed not to release the source code publicly (Ole's explicit request) with a vague intention to look at it one day, perhaps using AHCC (it was a Pure C project).
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During the following years (2013 - 2020) I touched base with Vido every now and then, frankly just making excuses. ;) Someone else got the code, too, even managed to compile something with AHCC but it didn't work even in Hatari and shortly disappeared afterwards.
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In September I finally looked at my TODO folder again and saw the poor guy sitting there, lost and forgotten by everyone. I have quickly realised that the AHCC path is a dead end: the compiler has serious bugs and unfortunately Henk is no longer with us to fix them.
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So back to Pure C, that worked but made compilation much harder. So after reaching the point that I could reconstruct the executables nearly 1:1 (the versions didn't match with the released ones completely) I made a bold move, switching to m68k-atari-mintelf-gcc with -mshort and libcmini. That worked surprisingly well and from then on I could iterate quickly and automate most of the boring tasks.
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In the following month I managed to fix many existing and new bugs (thanks to Vido and Swe for testing!), it even launched my short-lived path of bugfixing many FireTOS bugs on the FireBee as a byproduct.
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NeoN Grafix v1.3 running on a Falcon 060 with SuperVidel (1920x1080 16-bit truecolour) in FreeMiNT with memory protection enabled
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And here we are! So what's new:
- Runs in 16 and 32 bit colour and on 256-colour chunky screens, not only in 256-colour bitplanes. One binary detects the screen format at startup.
- Works on graphics cards (SuperVidel, NOVA, anything with EdDI), with correct colours whatever the pixel layout, including byte-swapped 16 bit.
- On 16 and 32 bit screens, renders are shown at the desktop's resolution. Only a Falcon in 256 colours still switches to 320x240.
- Runs under MiNT with XaAES or N.AES.
- New native FireBee version.
- No dongle and no installer.
Fixes:
- Lines no longer come out in the wrong colour on a 68040 or 68060. The original line routine rewrote its own code.
- No more noise in the object editor's views on machines with Fast RAM. The retail binaries have the TT-RAM flags set, so the second screen page could land in Fast RAM.
- On a Falcon with an external video clock, the picture is no longer shifted and miscoloured after a true colour render. The original only saved part of the Videl state.
- genlock: a pure key colour now matches, and 16 bit TGA files are read correctly.
đź’ľ Download 68020+ version (requires FPU)
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When it comes to source code, it's a bit complicated. Ole has unfortunately passed away in 2018 so not only he never saw the outcome of this agreement but also can't give us his blessing to release source code. So for now it is a private Github repo to which I'm happy to give access (after consultation with Vido) to anyone seriously wishing to continue its development.
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In the meantime, if you find a bug, you can let me know and maybe I'll fix it in the next 13 years (just kidding, it's much easier to debug/fix it these days).
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- Written by: MiKRO
For two decades Fandal maintained the website generally known in the community as "Fandal's website" or "A8.fandal.cz" which was dedicated to the collection, curation, metadata provision and promotion of all kinds of demos and games for the Atari XL/XE system. Among the Atari 8-Bit scene enthusiasts this place was an institution with its over 5.000 games and around 3.800 demos available.
Unfortunately Fandal came to the conclusion to stop his activities, also due to the exuberant wave of AI generated content flooding the retro computing sphere.
"All right, that’s it. My retro hobby is being eaten alive by AI at an ever-faster pace, and I definitely don’t want to reach a point where the news section is nothing more than a list of things generated by a prompt.
For this reason, and also because site traffic has been steadily declining to minimal levels, I’ve decided to stop all updates after more than twenty years."
I remember that in the pre retro computing revival era in the 2000s the website shone as an exceptional project "against the tide" and I always appreciated it. While it is very sad to lose this passionately hand-crafted institution of the Atari scene I have hope the archive remains online for further use.
EDIT: Apparently the PTODT-team has taken care of that providing a mirror!
What is left to say? Thank you Fandal, for for all the years of support and work for the Atariscene!
đź”— Fandals website (PTODT mirror)
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- Written by: 505
PiST - A new cross-IDE (Integrated development environment) aimed at Atari assembler projects.
It includes editor, assembler, emulation with debugger, sprite editor and much more. It is available for Linux, Windows and macOS.
PiST v0.10.3 in action
Further description of the software snipped from it's Github page:
- Editor with m68k Motorola-syntax highlighting, error markers and the current execution line, find/replace (Ctrl+F / Ctrl+H, F3 and Shift+F3, match highlighting as you type, match-case and whole-word options, and a hit counter that admits its cap — past 2000 it reads "N of more than 2000" rather than counting on), completion as you type (Ctrl+Space, or Tab on a word: mnemonics, directives, and the build's labels and equates), a Go to Symbol palette (Ctrl+Shift+O), a hover card for any mnemonic, TOS call or label (below), Ctrl+click to open an
includeor jump to a label, and a searchable 68000 instruction + TOS system-call reference dock that follows the cursor — on atrap #1/#13/#14line (or a push feeding one) it names the GEMDOS/BIOS/XBIOS call being made and what it is being called with, and every entry carries a worked example and one line on when to reach for it
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laoo of NG ported the Jaguar core from MiSTer to C++ which gives the
first really 99.99% accurate Jaguar emulator.
Of course it does not run at 100% speed. In fact the speed highly depends on how much the bus is used as this is the "base-clock" for the system.
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He provides precompiled binaries for Windows, Linux and MacOS.
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The emulator "speaks" MCP, so it can be used with AI agents to support
debugging.
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This finally solves the problem many Jaguar developers face as they test
their code with BigPEmu or VirtualJaguar and see it fail on real hardware. Now with JagMCP there is no excuse.
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- Written by: 42Bastian
Manu fulfilled his dream of going on a road trip in the USA, and he took the opportunity to ask some Atari fans to come on Friday, October 9, to Sunnyvale at the old Atari HQ. Flag unfurled in front of the Google building, Manu showed who's the boss over there ;-) the Atari video starts at 41'.
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The most relevant Pokey music tracker software has received a cleanup. After Rasters passing, the source code was fortunately made available, leading to various forks and developments. Unfortunately people lost overview about the changes and so JAC! took the initiative to clean up the sources and make RMT development future more proof.
Most significant measure was to create Java port. RMT runs as standalone package or can be compiled for Windows, Apple and Linux.
The general housekeeping, evaluating and removing unused code, fixing shortcut bindings and revision of the menu structure results in a simple and now graphically scalable interface. JAC! is open to suggestions by musician to increase the usability.
đź”— RMT on Github
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With the imminent release of the Atari Falcon 030, Reservoir Gods have updated their development tooling to support the exciting new DSP 56001 chip in these computers. We can't wait to get our hands on one of these bad boys!
Well, we may be 33 years late to the party - but better late than never! The rg cross-development tools now fully support the Motorola DSP56001.
rg-asm
rg-asm now features comprehensive support for the Falcon DSP: the complete DSP56001 instruction set, dual parallel moves, DO loops, all memory spaces. It can emit in many formats, including standard .LOD, .P56, .OUT, .CLD/.CLN, as well as raw bina$
One of really nice new features is support for mixed mode assembly. You can now write your 68030 code and DSP code in a single file, and seamlessly switch between both.
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- Equates & constants: 68k constants are automatically inherited in DSP blocks
- Symbol export: DSP routines and labels export back to the host 68k code as equates
- Macros & structs: Share macros and structs between your DSP and 68k code
- Flexible layout: You can embed DSP code as either 3-byte per word packed or 4-byte per word unpacked
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- Written by: Mr. Pink
Read more: DSP Support comes to RG assembler and disassembler
A few decades have passed since we last saw a new MagiC release for Atari computers.
But time of wonders are not past us and today Andreas Kromke (authour of the original MagiC, Kaos and more) released v6.30 complete with MagxDesk 5.
MagiC 6.30 on a Falcon 030 in 256-colour mode
MagiC is now open source under the GNU GPL v3 license.
đź’ľ Download MagiC sources and binaries (see MagiC/Releases for zip archive of binaries)
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Logiker has announce another round of the ATASCII compo. Submissions can be sent in until 9th of November. The entry presentation, voting and publishing of the results is planned for the week after. Last year some impressive pieces have been shown.
đź”— ATASCII Compo 2026 website
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The invitation demo for Buxton Bytes 2027 (9th-12th of April 2027 ) has been released at the beginning of October. It's a very stylish joint venture prod by Evil, Jade, gwEm and Tronic and also meant as an invitation call to contribute to the various "non-compo compos".
Buxton Bytes - a stylish delight for plasma devotees
More details on the categories, attendees etc. can be found on the Buxton Bytes 2027 website.
đź”— Buxton Bytes 2027 invitation on Demozoo
đź”—Â Buxton Bytes 2027 invitation on Pouet
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A quick release, with 68000 and ColdFire builds
This is a quick release with various bug fixes. It is the first release with 68000 and ColdFire support, and those builds have not been fully tested yet. The 68000 build uses software floating point; the 68020–60 and ColdFire builds use the hardware FPU. NanoSVG, which draws SVG images, works in floating point, so SVG is slowest on the 68000. A 68000 build without SSL is also included, for local pages and for HTTP proxies such as WebOne.
New in this release: Copy and Paste for text, animated GIFs, an optional screen buffer, much more complete flexbox and grid, line-height, position: fixed, viewport units, styled buttons and text fields, live :focus styles, resumable downloads and run-time switches for SVG, WebP, HTTPS, GIF animation and the screen buffer.
The next full release will be HighWire 1.0, to avoid problems with another project.
Highwire showing the Wikipedia website, screenshot from the Highwire site
🌏 https://highwire-browser.github.io/
đź’ľ Download Highwire 0.5.0 Beta 4
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And Lotek Style's excursion in the realms of Atari related physical audio releases continues... enjoy!
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Stu – Escape Return [Vinyl, 7", 45 RPM, Single, Limited Edition][Bleep Street – BLEEPST32]
https://www.discogs.com/de/release/11539404-Stu-Escape-Return-
Well known Musicmon-Wizard STU dropped another two-track bomb on 7" single in 2017. This is pure Atari chiptune madness pressed onto vinyl.
A Escape (Seven Inch Version)
B Return (Seven Inch Version)
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- Written by: Lotek Style
42Bastian keeps improving his Atari Jaguar engine. Another WIP showcasing video recording has been published featuring lovely Virgill Hively tracker music, so what can go wrong entering this 3D world for a moment?
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- Written by: 505
Back in 2010, when I released my HHeretic/HHexen for the first time (!), I had a dream: to be able to play those two games (and others: Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, ...) while listening to their great MIDI soundtracks. I knew next to nothing how MIDI works, how MIDI synthesis works, I only knew there is something called Timidity and that it is slow.
So for all those years I'd wished that somebody would create "something" to move this further.
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A few years ago I purchased the great mt32-pi (which ended its development in a rather sad way...) for listening to ScummVM games' music (which I wholeheartedly recommend!) but it took me another couple of years to connect the dots: many of those SDL ports still had support for MIDI and even better, they often did it in an uniform way, via SDL_mixer! So that was only a "small" step to actually implement a native Atari MIDI driver there, link everything together and voila. HHeretic and HHexen got their music (same as did PMDoom, PMHeretic and PMHexen, btw).
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OpenTyrian, that was another story: just a quick port, never heard of that game in 2010, almost a "./configure && make" job, done. Over time there were newer ports by insane/.tSCc. and medmed on AF but always from the stale sdl1 branch (2020; EDIT: In the meantime my pull request has been accepted!). So I didn't feel the need to update my own port (unlike HHeretic/HHexen which got updated in 2024).
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Until now - I managed to backport all non-SDL2 commits from master back to the sdl1 branch so we've got all the cool improvements and bugfixes. I even optimised audio playback a bit, so the OPL emulation is almost usable on 68060@66 MHz (FireBee should shine). And yes, I do know about NokturnFM project, everything at the right time. :)
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Those who know me are aware that I don't care very much about making quick SDL ports just for the sake of releasing something. I can promise you that these three projects have been extensively tested and thanks to them SDL contains tens of bugfixes and improvements.
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So enjoy, play test and feel free to report any bugs. Currently I'm not aware of any SDL issues, the executables should fully work in GEM (window/fullscreen) and XBIOS (fullscreen), on all Atari machines with >= 8bpp output.
Open Tyrian in action in a GEM window running FreeMiNT
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UPDATE 2026/10/02: FireBee executable has been relinked against a fixed SDL version, sound should be working again.
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- Written by: MiKRO
rg-dis is a companion to our recent rg-asm; the McCartney to its Lennon; the Sporty Spice to its, err, Ginger Spice. Whilst rg-asm puts things together, rg-dis pulls them apart.
The unique thing about rg-dis is its deep knowledge of Atari hardware. It understands the full memory map of the machine; all the hardware registers, system vectors and operating system variables. It has full understanding of all the GEMDOS, BIOS and XBIOS calls. It knows all about AES and VDI and their data structures.
With this knowledge, it can annotate all operating system calls; input arguments and outputs.
And as it also understands assembly language, it can track how registers are stored and loaded, and assign contextually aware names to functions, making the disassembly far more readable.
It can also detect strings; both raw strings and VT52 enhanced ones (which it annotates), and gives them meaningful labels too.
Based on the same library that powers rg-asm, it can also show you cycle timing for instructions.
rg-dis has convenience functionality that allows you to disassemble files directly from containers like ZIP files without unzipping them. It also understands common Atari disk image formats, and you can disassemble files directly from them.
Another useful disk based feature - it can disassemble bootsectors directly, or full raw disk images, or any range of tracks and sectors you specify. Very handy for working with raw disk images.
rg-dis is a single binary with no dependencies - just unzip and run.
This is the second in our range of tools for Atari developers. More to come.
đź”—Â https://rg.atari.org/tools/rg-dis/index.htmlÂ
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- Written by: Mr. Pink
... perhaps 10 years late but hey, it does. ;)
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I don't remember how long it actually took me to convince / exhaust him, but one day in Spring 2019 PeP gave me access to his sv_drivers git repository. Naturally, I jumped right onto it let it sit on my disk for another seven years. :-)
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A couple of months ago, while working on a totally unrelated project, I remembered about this repo and out of curiosity (the famous first words ;)) I tried to compile at least sv_xbios.prg (unfortunately, there was no history, just a random dump of its 2019 state). Of course there were a ton of errors, referencing an ancient mintlib, requiring native Atari tools and gcc etc. And most likely I would have given up if it weren't for Claude -- I let it fix them, one by one, every time with a careful code review.
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It took Claude maybe 15 minutes to get me into a proper cross-compilation friendly state (of course, with my previous verification that I can produce 1:1 identical builds as the last official release). And after that... I was hooked. One bugfix after another, with Claude disassembling NVDI drivers, comparing code paths for different bit depths, relentlessly searching for stuff which would have taken me weeks to find and analyse. Then I could design a fix, verify it and move onto the next bug (yeah, there were quite a few!)
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When I was done (after ~2 weeks) I got this crazy idea: how hard would it be to actually include SV_XBIOS.PRG into CT60 TOS itself? As it turned out, not very. Literally less than 100 lines of code.
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Parallel to that (what are you supposed to do while waiting for Claude's responses, right?) I got an even crazier idea: first I let Claude design a SVEthLANa driver for Linux. I was blown away to see that the whole "driver" was basically just a few configuration settings because the OpenCore MAC unit, which Nature used in the FPGA, has Linux support already (which actually makes sense, how else would have the OpenCore authors tested it, right?)
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Seeing that its transfer rate was much better than FreeMiNT's, what about porting the whole driver from Linux to FreeMiNT to see whether its (presumably) cleaner design wouldn't help here? At first, the numbers weren't very encouraging but it got better very quickly (upload = sending from Atari to PC, download = receiving from PC to Atari):
- Baseline (Linux-m68k current kernel's driver for FW010): upload 700 KB/s, download 1.4 MB/s
- FW009 driver: upload 3274 KB/s, download 710 KB/s (that 710 KB/s was actually a driver limit, due to a bug in its implementation)
- FW010 driver by Nature: upload 135 KB/s (!), download 1.6 MB/s (here we can see that download more or less matched but upload was totally broken)
- Ported driver: upload 42 KB/s (!!!), download 3 MB/s
- After discovering and working around four hardware issues with Svethlana's DMA: upload 4 MB/s, download 3 MB/s (huh!)
Yup, you read it correctly, FreeMiNT now beats Linux by a factor of 2-4 and surprisingly, it isn't because the Linux driver doesn't contain the workarounds (it uses a different way of preparing packets so the bugs are not so visible there).
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An interesting fact: 32bpp resolutions, at least the 1920x1080 I have been using, seems to upset Svethlana's DMA in a much more visible way. My fixes are almost useless in 16bpp but in 32bpp I can see all of them working their ass off to keep the packets flowing (that also means that there is a slight performance decrease, about 200 KB/s in both directions due to retransmissions).
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Where to get all this great stuff you ask?
- grab Linux 7.3 when released, (almost) everything has been pushed upstream (yeah, I also added some framebuffer fixes; of course, with Linux being Linux and m68k being a totally obscure platform, you are most likely going to end up with compiling everything by yourself... not so hard with docker and debian's multiarch support but still, nothing for newbies)
- SuperVidel Drivers 1.00Â (unpack & replace your existing files)
- CT60 TOS 3.00Â (built-in SV XBIOS, with a few fixes/additions inherited from CT60 TOS 1.03f which has been released today, too)
- New SVEthLANa driver is now part of FreeMiNT snapshots
Look at my hastily filled desktop with random utilities to see this in action! :-)
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- Written by: MiKRO
Hi everyone,
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this was on my TODO for a very long time. I'm sure that you are aware of the existence of Atari HQ CD-ROM and various leaked source code and documents available at Lonny Pursell's fantastic Atari Document Archive.
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On one rainy afternoon I went through all of the folders and noticed a lot of interesting files there, related to the area I'm heavily invested in: Sparrow, Falcon030, Falcon040, Microbox. But they were all those ancient formats, as Christian Zietz had already found out. Since the schematics were already decoded, what about the rest?
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Namely: what I had saved (frankly, I can't vouch that I had saved *all* of the files, maybe I skipped some, I don't remember anymore) is 710 files:
- PageStream 2: 209
- Plain text, incl. 68000 assembler source: 148
- GEM Metafile: 104
- DynaCADD 2.0: 91
- AutoCAD DXF: 78
- WordPerfect 4.1 for Atari ST: 26
- CorelDRAW 2 (pre-3.0 format): 21
- Microsoft Write for Atari ST (Mac Word 1.x format): 12
- WordPerfect 5.0/5.1 for DOS: 11
- 1st Word Plus: 4
- AutoSketch, HP-GL: 3
Initially I planned to obtain each program (usually an Atari application) , open the file, read it and in the best case convert it into something readable (like print to PDF via Hatari or so), in the worst case at least document my findings. As you can imagine, this is a really time-consuming job and every time I started I also quitted very soon afterwards.
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However since I have gotten accustomed to using Claude for various boring tasks, it was just a matter of time to find this TODO and let throw Claude at it. To be honest, I didn't expect much: maybe some summary which Claude decodes from the proprietary formats using brute force or something like that. Its output (Claude Opus 5 1M context + xhigh thinking) blew me away. It converted every single file into a perfectly readable output, using a custom-made python script harness!
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So that uncovered a whole new world: weekly status reports, memos and faxes, service guides, hardware specs, manufacturing orders and even 245 drawings exposing assembly views, PCB silkscreens, pinouts, flowcharts, diagrams and even the nice logo you see above.
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Since it is not in my power to read through all of it now (I'd rather code, you know...) I asked Claude for one more favour: to create a story from all of this data. And again, I was blown away. See for your self!
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My updated Sparrow page with the story about Falcon origins: https://mikrosk.github.io/sparrow
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Complete converted archive: https://mikrosk.github.io/sparrow/techpubs (each SVG has a text version for easy grep'ing)
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I'm pretty sure there's a lot to explore, Claude is infamous for skipping / not understanding the whole context so don't rely on its generated Falcon history!
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- Written by: MiKRO
Hi!
I've just released ASE v1.12 with a bunch of emulation fixes and a few new features I think are pretty cool.
The biggest one is probably the new ST display settings. I've added several shaders for a more retro look or cleaner image, but there's one I've been working on especially for ST emulation: Colorize Dithering.
It detects common dithering patterns, like checkerboards, and turns them into solid colors and gradients. That means some games and images can appear to show colors well beyond the original ST palette, in some cases even tens of thousands of colors. Combined with Anti-Aliasing, it can make some 3D games look surprisingly different.
I've published a video in my youtube channel showing how those features works:
Drive B is now emulated too. Adding it also fixed quite a few compatibility issues with games that tried to detect or access a second floppy drive.
There's also a new Bitmap Explorer under the Debug tab. It lets you browse ST RAM graphically and extract things like sprites, tiles and screens from games. Every game stores graphics differently, so it won't work perfectly everywhere, but it's already usable with a lot of games. I have more improvements planned for future versions.
Thank you!
Best regards
đź’ľ Get the emulator and the sources on GitHub
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- Written by: The Bit Culture
A**** online magazines have published an interview with Vasyl/Joker, who was showing an impressive presence in form of skillful pixel graphic entries at various Atari parties during the last years.
Vasyl's Atari ST graphics entry for Sillyventure 2026 summer edition
Read more about his views on the Polish scene, platforms, motivations and (drumroll) AI in the interview.
đź”— Interview with Vasyl
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- Written by: 505
