Their Story: The Atari ST, James Norris' Timeless Passion for Retro Computing and Music Production
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In a world dominated by the latest technology, there’s something uniquely captivating about the machines of the past,...
The Atari ST Dev extension for Visual Studio Code is making progress.
Regis Cosnier (Dgis), the author summarizes the extension as follows:
"Atari ST Dev is a Visual Studio Code extension for building, running and debugging C, C++ and 68k assembly projects targeting Atari ST/TT/Falcon systems. It integrates a cross-toolchain using GCC/GDB, provides debug-time views for CPU registers, memory and hardware information, and hooks into Hatari's debugger via the cppdbg debug adapter."
🔗 Atari ST VS Code extension at Visual Studio Marketplace
🔗 Atari ST Visual Studio Code extension on Github
Thanks to flav_de for the hint!
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- Written by: 505
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The Re-Falcon project has been put on display at last weekend's Indianapolis Retro Computer Expo 2026.
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The 10th edition of the Dutch Atari Meeting took place past weekend and judging by the photos available this was a great event for all Atari platforms.
According to wildly circulating rumours also some Atari sceners were present, some of them meeting as ripe men, decades after their previous encounter when they were fresh and young.
🔗 Photos on the respective Flickr homepage
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What a Compiler Must Get Right (That You Don't)
When you write assembly, you know the context. You know which registers hold what, whether a pointer is aligned, whether the loop count fits in a word. You know because you put it there.
Consider a demo screen where you reserve a6 for the background rasters. You update the pointer in the VBL interrupt and just advance with a minimal (a6)+ in the HBL. All your other code simply does not touch a6, because you wrote all of it. Need to update a screen pointer? Just write the global. No function call, no overhead, no uncertainty.
A compiler has no such luxury. It must be correct for every possible input the language allows. It cannot "just know" that a pointer is word-aligned, or that two buffers never overlap, or that a register is free. It must prove it, or assume the worst. And not all code it calls may even have been compiled by it. Maybe it was built with an older compiler, a different language, or maybe you wrote it in assembly yourself.
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- Written by: PeyloW
Read more: GCC for asm Experts (and C/C++ Intermediates) - Part 2
Some more old ‘new game’ news is heading our way.
This unexpected gift comes courtesy of Neil Rackett of Mesmotronic, who created the 3D model of an ST running in a browser window.
This time, he’s ported an ancient MS-DOS game ‘Sopwith’ to the ST.
It features intense biplane action through charmingly retro vector style graphics and arcade style gameplay, with characteristic MS-DOS beepy early PC sound. Interestingly, this game was going to get a dedicated ST version back in the day, but this did not happen, until now.
It can be downloaded from his Github repository. Good luck figuring out the controls!
CiH - 22.3.26.
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This is a brain dump of what I have learned working with the GCC m68k backend, and maybe an attempt to convince someone else to try. This is the first of an unknown number of posts. No promises for how many there will be; I will continue as long as I have something to say and I find it fun.
I got my start with STOS Basic on an Atari 520STfm around 1990. Me and my classmate Tam formed T.O.Y.S. (Terror on Your ST) and I dubbed myself PeyloW. But in the scene, elite sceners wrote assembly; only lamers used STOS or GFA, every scroll text was clear about this. So we bought DevPac 2 and taught ourselves 68000 assembly, starting with snippets embedded in STOS and eventually graduating to full demo screens. The pattern that would follow me for decades was established early: high-level languages for tooling, assembly for anything that had to be fast. STOS gave way to PurePascal in the late '90s, but assembly remained the language that mattered — right through to the Falcon030 demo "Wait", released at EIL 2001.
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Read more: GCC for asm Experts (and C/C++ Intermediates) - Part 1
The live stream of this weekend's FOReVER party in Suchá nad Parnou, Slovakia can be found here. As it might be of relevance to understand what you see, this year's topic is "8bit winter games".
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Apparently, the Polish developer kTz from Retro Blitter Team known from his latest game Rogul is working on a STE enhanced version of Cannon Fodder, to finally catch up with the Am***.
The friends of the Polish Atariarea portal prepared this nice preview video
Atarimania also lists a WIP version already.
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gwEm writes:
In order to encourage people to enter the Buxton Bytes sample demo showcase I am releasing the full source code to my entry way in advance of the event.
https://github.com/gwEm303/sample_demo
The demo will run on a 1MB STe from a 11 sector 82 track DSDD disk. It incorporates the Kalms ADPCM route, a sample sequencer and three alternative memory management schemes.
As an example, a version of Daft Punk's "One More Time" in mono with a hybrid 25/12kHz sample rate.
I attach an MSA file those who are not keen to assemble the source code may try.
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PeyloW of T.O.Y.S. have been busy lately by optimizing the GNU C Compiler (GCC) v15.2 to create faster code for 68000 processor.
The improvements include using proper dbra/dbf loops, auto inc/dec of address registers (you know, the stuff that is nice on 68k!).
PeyloW writes in an Atari-Forum post:
At a very high level there are 7 groups of changes made:
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Cost Model - More accurate cost models, allowing gcc to chose better.
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Register Allocation – Adopt LRA, and tune to prefer fewer registers.
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Loop Optimization – Adopt new doloop hooks to enable more explicit use of dbra.
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Memory Access Reordering – More of cleanup pass for other optimisations, try to ensure memory access is sequential.
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Autoincrement Optimization – Which allows more auto increment to be used instead of indexed addressing.
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16/32-bit Optimization – And merging of 2x word accesses into single long access. Also narrow mulu/muls operators to word size if operand sizes can be determined at compile time.
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Various Smaller Optimizations – Grab bag of stuff. Single bit extraction bit btst/tas, and simple peephole optimizations.
While working on GCC, PeyloW also developed a separate tool to count 68000 cycles out of assembler sourcecode to easily check if the compiler changes actually improve stuff - but can certainly can be very useful for other purposes as well.
Both projects can be found on Github, see links below.
🔗 m68k GCC Build Scripts and Documentation
🔗 A detailed writeup of PeyloWs GCC optimizations
🔗 clccnt — MC68k Clock Cycle Counter
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The annual European Retro Computing Gathering "VCFe" will take place from 1st to 3rd of May 2026, in Munich, Germany. One focus this year are less present machines, the "Beasts of Burden", means more unknown working horses of the retro computer range. If that doesn't attract, keep in mind that may is also beer garden season.
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A couple of years ago on Silly venture a music demo was released from a new group; Nutmeg Mine.
The demo may not be the best since sliced bread and we have wondered how the hell Silly Venture could run the demo on an ST as it requires more than 4MB of memory. Maybe they had a zeST?
Anyway, Caulky, the coder of Nutmeg Mine's "Scatman John" demo is now making an attempt to win next year's Meteoriks awards "best writeup". If the category is added as Caulky hopes.
It is an entertaining and detailed description from the start of the demo group to the end of the demo.
🔗 Read the Writeup by Caulky/Nutmeg Mine
💾 Download the demo from Demozoo
💾 Download the demo from Pouet
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- Written by: Asn / Spice Boys
Swedish Atari Klubben's traditional "Slaskhack" is taking place from 20th o 22nd of March 2026 in Falköping. Currently, about 20 visitors are expected.
As the official announcement indicates, there is room for a cozy culture clash between:
"1. Traditionalists! Unite in the separatist group V.I.N.T.A.G.E. (Vampire Is Not The Atari Genuine Experience). The slogan is "Boo for Gigabyte"! (club chairman).
2. Forward-thinkers! The club chariman probably cried a little when color TV was introduced and called SVT in anger when we got more TV channels."
Sounds like a place to be!
And reminds me of this! ;)
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The overly talented AY-musician Pator traditionally active on the ZX spectrum scene published an alpha version of a new AY/YM tracker working in the webrowser. Bitphase has a slick interface and comes with full pattern and instrument editor. This looks like a modern and flexible solution for creating AY/YM tracks.
The slick Bitphase frontend
You will find a few demo tracks in the tracker, e.g. Pator's great Kizuna track he did for the related smfx/Joker demo.
Also, there are good news in Atari matters. Timer effect support is on the plan, and of course those timer based sounds are going to be made exportable as well. While the track so far had .psg export, just today spkr/smfx put a cherry on the cake and implemented .sndh support. So by this day we have a new Atari tracker I would say!
SNDH-export - the most important feature, obviously!
All this raised our interest, so with the help of spkr/smfx we were able to conduct a quick interview with the creator himself!
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Read more: Pator just does it! Bitphase - a new Atari (not only) tracker
Excuses for lazy Atari pixel artists get more and more troublesome to make up, as "Agent_M" recently published a new PI1-oriented pixel painting tool for Windows.
NeoDegas may come handy for some quick pixels
Features as listed by the author:
- Full PI1 format support (load/save .PI1 files)
- 6 drawing tools: Point, Line, Rectangle, Circle, Fill, Selection
- 16-color palette with live editing (RGB sliders)
- Color swap function to reorganize your palette
- Copy/paste selections
- Undo system (10 levels)
- Magnifier window (16×16, 32×32, or 64×64)
- Status bar with coordinates and tool info
- Clean, efficient interface
🔗 NeoDegas website and download
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- Written by: 505
The fourth issue of this nice paper based magazine has been published in January 2026.
It also features coverage by Krusty/Benediction and spkr/SMFX on the subject of "plasma" effects, discussing the range of effects summarized under this effect label on various platforms and at different angles.
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TheNameOfTheGame, a long time user at the Atari-Forum recently released his take on Phase scrolling on the Atari STe.
The examples cover both infinite horizontal and vertical scrolling using a tile map. The assembler source is is available and the examples can be built with VASM, but likely easy to get going with Devpac as well.
Horizontal scroller demo in action
🔗 Github page with the sources and example binaries
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Whilst we’re waiting for further updates on the Thrust-resembling ‘Cavey Taxi’, Chicane has taken it on himself, to apply some of the techniques and knowledge gained in making the 50 FPS racing game ‘FaSTer’ on the STE, to update the ST version of Lotus 2.
The updates are STE-specific, so you can expect usage of the STE hardware to enhance the original’s gameplay. The STFM version being somewhat stripped down in comparison with the Amiga version according to Chicane. The aim being, as with Lotus 1, to bring this as close to the Amiga as possible.
There is a work in progress on Youtube, it is unclear when this is going to be released, or even if the whole game is going to be updated. A likely outcome could be a single level ‘proof of concept’ release. Chicane thinks that the third part may be a bit too much even for the STE to run decently.
YouTube link below. Yes it is a bit glitchy at this early stage.
CiH for Atariscne.org - Feb 2026
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Vulture/Odyssey of Synergy Megademo fame (you remember their awesome guest screen "Symbiosis", do you?) published a very interesting article on his and the general Dutch demoscene roots, including some remarkable photo material and current project information.
Odyssey's guest screen stood out of the usual ST demoscreen mass as it featured some beautiful pixel art, advanced design and also some entertaining storytelling elements
Side-note for the more obsessed ones: the blog post also includes an optional "spot the havoc" riddle!
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Joska from Norway who brought us "L'Abbaye Des Morts" for the Falcon
some years ago released a new funny and addictive game called:
"DINO RUN"
There are several incarnations of this type of game, which is some
sort of "Flappy-Bird-On-The-Ground" and now we have a Falcon version.
Watch out for the Pterodactyl!
🔗 https://atari.joska.no/dinorun/
🔗 https://demozoo.org/productions/387581/
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- Written by: Lotek Style
