Thursday, 9th of October 2025, 19:54
The photo is taken on my way to OFAM Atari Meeting in Southern Germany. Due to the train ride I didn't take bigger hardware items. The joystick is for eagerly playing "Midnight Resistance" on some Atari ST during the weekend for this months STOT round. Will be interesting to visit this long going event for the first time.
Also, the event is an occasion for us Paradox-guys to meet up after many years of missed chances. So we booked a proper housing and begin the weekend a day earlier. RaZen is here already, The Paranoid and ZWF are going to join this evening and tomorrow morning.
But let's wrap for now... Pizza time!
Friday, 10th of October 2025
We are still stuck at the Paradox Party villa here in Münchberg in a lovely park like surrounding in autumn colors. Despite other plans, we have mostly been using the sofa corner for exchange, chilling and talking through anything Atari for hours. A few lines of code have been written and some bugs could be fixed, mostly by raZen, but as it's all so cosy we have a tendency to rather speak about what could be done than actually doing things. Coffee, shopping, the usual bits.
We had a little FaSTEr racing battle on ZWF's STE and some first rounds of playing Midnight Resistance without notable highscore.
We are about to chose and visit a restaurant soon and then we will head over to the OFAM party place.
After same proper and rather meaty food at Schützenhaus Münchberg we walked to the OFAM location, a nice two room facility, where the hosts MacFalcon, Ektus and probably other helping hands had arranged drinks, network connectivity and power supply for all tables.
There were quite few visitors there, around 12 including us which was said to be less than usual for the Fridays where the seats usually get taken quickly. We have been told some people are sick, e.g. the Czech department (hope you get better soon) while many others are to be expected tomorrow. Record visitor count in previous years was 38, as we were told.
We could spot some interesting hardware, lots of boxes for tinkering, building and soldering. A Falcon 060 was in place, a 130 XE setup, a Mega ST and also a Suska 3B board, among lots of other stuff.
Bottom left: Getting goosebumps seeing such a desktopper case after decades, as one of these boxes of disputable beauty was housing my first 1040 STE (a long lasting love story with 4 MB, two diskdrives and TOS 2.06) many years ago.
Also, quite thrilling to finally meet some of the people from German atari-home.de forum with their renowned hardware expertise in real life.
Anyway, after a long and intense last night, we were all quite tired so that we decided to head back to our Paradox Party villa for the rest of the evening.
There we also had left our equipment which led to a sudden burst of unexpected productivity in various disciplines: raster code, maxYMiser activity and sync command implementation and a couple of lousy Midnight Resistance high score failures.
After this laid back and rather unproductive day (which was obviously necessary for restoration matters) it was good to end the day with that feel of satisfaction. Let's see what tomorrow brings.
- Details
- Written by: 505
ChrisTOS lately entered the extensively debated territory of Falcon production numbers.
We find speculations and numbers from few thousands up to several ten-thousands across the net, with a unreliable tendency to agree on about 12.000 machines, according to information from various approaches or Atari witnesses (edit: e.g. Mikro's in depth derivation).
Our Greek Atari fellow now used Calimero's serial number database and applied a statistical approach known as "the German tank problem" to the subject. His estimate and interpretation of total produced Falcons can be glamorousely followed in an Atari Works workflow video performed on Zerkman's zeST machinery.
- Details
- Written by: 505
Songbird Productions has been pretty busy lately mostly bringing famous ST games such as Vroom or Wings of Death to the Jaguar but here comes a new game called "Shape Shooter". Announced for release in 2026 the game preview already shows the core gameplay. It looks like an Asteroid clone but with 3D shapes and nice soundtrack as well.
- Details
- Written by: sts
Fresh from this weekends Deadline Party in Berlin comes an unexpected little screen from the Genesis Project.
One by One is a small music disk released at the party.
It looks like a one-man production by Elder0010.
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105102
- Details
- Written by: CiH
Drhelius has published a new pre-release version of Gearlynx on Github. Gearlynx is a C++-based and open-source cross-platfrom Atari Lynx emulator. Feedback, bug reports, feature requests and also backing the project is very welcome.
- Details
- Written by: 505
Hello once more, Atariscners. This update is to highlight and point out an interesting and obscure site for all things Falcon 030. (Up to very recent years, I guess.) I don’t know how many of you are already aware of this site, but it’s a pretty fair bet that a lot of people won’t know about it.
Christophe Bray has dedicated a lot of time and effort to creating a pretty comprehensive ‘one-stop’ resource for all things relating to the Falcon 030.
From documents, utilities, and his own personal history, there is even a collection of pretty much all the Falcon 030 games made, (until a few years ago and with a sprinkling of Falcon compatible ST games.) It doesn’t look like it’s been updated very recently, Also no explicitly demoscene content, to be found, but we go elsewhere for that sort of thing!
It’s in French, but there is an English translation option available. The place to find it, as below.
Or going back a bit further for those of you who love a deeper rabbit-hole to play in. Includes links to the Atari ST and Thompson T08 (French school computer?)
Look here for Thompson TO8 and ST too.
CiH - For Atariscne - July 2025.
- Details
- Written by: CiH
Mesmotronic celebrates the Atari ST anniversary with a little 3D representation of the computer in the browser. You can actually run a bit of software on it (Hatari is running in the back), similiar to Newline's Atariaviary, just in fancy 3D look.
Of course this representation needs a disproportional high amount of resources. So consider yourself lucky if you have a real Atari machine, in any case.
🔗 Mesmotronic's Atari ST in your browser
- Details
- Written by: 505
Five years after its debut at the LynXmas game jam, RED has finally been released! Discover this fantastic action-adventure game, packed with levels and deadly enemies, and restore the magic with your Atari Lynx!
🔗 Buy it from Coté Gamers
- Details
- Written by: sts
One of the more recent handbooks (as far as the ST/E/TT/Falcon's commerical lifetime is concerned), it has a wealth of information about the system for programmers.
As shown in the cover picture, it is split into chapters that cover all the subsystems like BIOS, XBIOS, GEMDOS, AES, VDI, etc., even covering early MiNT and MultiTOS versions.
The appendices also contain a massive amount of data, especially all the system calls, which are always handy to have when writing applications that use the system.
An absolute must for Atari programmers!
🔗Download the CD (PDF/HTML) version. Not a direct link, but you can search and download
- Details
- Written by: ggn
As reported on Czech Atari news portal, Michal Pavlis has created a new bootable FreeMiNT distribution for Atari Falcon (standard or accerlated) and TT systems with a minimum of 14 MB of RAM.
The distribution can save you a tedious installation process by simply being dumped on a 4 GB SD/CF card. After booting, it shows up as Unix-like environment with preinstalled most recent browsers (links, highwire, netsurf), compilers and utilities (e.g. midnight commander, curl or wget). Network support is provided via NetUSBee and PicoWiFi.
Pretty awesome!
🔗 FreeMiNT OS Distro on Github
- Details
- Written by: 505
The 18th edtition of OFAM - the "Oberfränkisches Atari Meeting" will take place in Münchberg, Germany from 10th to 12th of October 2025. This small, cosy and long lasting Atari event is organized by Chris aka MacFalcon and is open to all Atari systems. According to nebulous rumors there may also be a couple Atari demoscene representatives visiting again.
🔗 krupkajs photo gallery of last years OFAM edition
- Details
- Written by: 505
Atarimagasinet, a long running magazine from the Swedish Atari Club (Svenska Atariklubben) with issues ranging from 1990 to 2008 have been carefully archived to PDF-format.
During Hösthack 2025 (organised by Svenska Atariklubben, still going strong!) the past weekend all issues of the magazine have been made publically available. Lots of nostalgia here for Swedish Atari users.
The cover of the second to last issue of Atarimagasinet (2008)
🔗 Check out the archive of Atarimagasinet at Svenska Atariklubben
- Details
- Written by: evldhs
Back in the early nineties many soundtrackers appeared on the Atari ST and STe. Most of them mimicked what Noistracker/Protracker did on the Amiga.
Octalyser STe however went further and added support for six or eight channels as well as supporting higher quality samples (base note of 20 or 25 kHz instead of the regular 16 kHz). After some time Octalyser gained support for UMP plugins that offered higher quality replay routines, or replay routines that was tailored for demo or game development, the tracker also featured Falcon support once it was available. Many classic STe/Falcon demo and game musics have been made in Octalyser STe over the years.
Yesterday Blade of New Core announced that CD/TBL have agreed to release the Octalyser STe sourcecode and thus it's now available at ggn's Github repository. The entire tracker resides in one humongous source file, and if you want to exercise your Swedish, check out the link below!
Octalyser 0.96 playing the Falcon Lost Blub 8-channel soundtrack on a plain STe machine
🔗 Check out the Octalyser STe sourcecode repository
- Details
- Written by: evldhs
In 2024, an unexpected email dropped into my inbox from someone called Simon. He was wondering if I might be able to recover the contents of some old Atari ST floppy disks and transfer them into a format that a modern PC could read.
As it turned out, Simon had been part of a group called The Cyberpunks (also known, on occasions, as The Androids). The Cyberpunks formed after two Simons met in a Lancashire, England high school in the late-1980s. They taught themselves to program as children (initially on the ZX Spectrum and BBC), and since they were the only people in ther school who knew how to code, they became friends.
What followed was a deep dive into the world of ST disk restoration, source code archaeology and demo revival, all culminating in a new megademo release at Silly Venture 2024 WE.
This is the story of how one man's dusty box of floppies, once forgotten in a parent's loft, sparked a 30 year comeback!
- Details
- Written by: Tronic
Read more: Their story: Cyberpunks (UK), a forgotten demo, unreleased for 33 years!
Write comment (4 Comments)Bocianu has updated his Atari 8 toolkit, respectively the online sprite editor SprED.
Information from the offical description on gitlab:
"SprEd is a web-based editor for Atari 8‑bit Player/Missile graphics. It focuses on creating, previewing, and exporting sprites (players and missiles) with support for multiple modes, per-line color changes (DLI), animation timelines, and ready-to-use export templates for popular tools and languages on the Atari platform."
Along with matosimis tools there seem to be quite some activity in this field.
- Details
- Written by: 505
Few of our readers have probably missed the news about a new Wonderboy-like platformer being in development for the Atari ST.
Today the developer at SamSoft opened up pre-orders of the game. There will be both physical and digital releases as well a bonus to get your name in the game credits. The game is scheduled for release in mid-2026.
Screenshot from Miracle Boy in Dragon Land development version
🔗 Check out the site of SamSoft to pre-order your copy
- Details
- Written by: evldhs
Let us provide just a little reminder, that these two Atari STE/Falcon enhanced games with very classic apparance are currently subject to the ST Offline Tournament (STOT) on Atari-forum.com. Both games, "Williams defender" and "Invasion of the emerald saucers" have been released in their latest version in 2025.
Matt Lacey, the author of "Invasion of the emerald saucers", used DML's "Atari Game Tools" to create the game and takes part in the round as well.
Grab your joystick and join in whenever you like.
🔗 Read more on the current STOT Round at Atari-forum.com
- Details
- Written by: 505
Well known HDDRIVER by Dr. Uwe Seimet has been subject to discussion in various forums, articles on patches and tests regarding the infamous STE "DMA chip" in the past months.
However, the software received two updates in September and is now available in version 12.71. While the topic mentioned above has not been adressed, a lot of other new features are listed on the official website.
- Details
- Written by: 505
Pawel Goralski aka Saulot (of Chosneck magazine fame) announced a new hardware extension.
Saulot writes:
NokturnFM are cartridges for your Atari ST (and compatible) that add FM sound capability to your system. See it as adding Adlib to your Atari ST since it has OPL2 (YM3812) or OPL3 (YM262-M) on board depending on cartridge type.
A lot of 8-bit and 16-bit systems used to have OPL options as well. There were Adlib / Sound Blaster sound cards for PC, computer peripherials on MSX computers, C64, arcade games as well as Yamaha synthesizers. Even Atari ST had it's own 'FM Melody Cart' with cost reduced OPL2 soundchip.
Here is an example video:
Diving into that Dune soundtrack by Stephane Picq is highly recommended btw :-)
From 8th September 2025 until 10th October 2025 12.00 C.E.T. both cartridges can be preordered on the project website. Production run is planned shortly afterwards.
🔗 Read more about the project on the Nokturnal website
- Details
- Written by: 505 and Saulot
Swedish Atari User Club SAK is holding its HöST(h)ack meeting from 19th to 21th of September in Falköping.
Among the people on the visitor list we find beloved scene veterans from Sommarhack and many other interesting names, such as the Atari clone pioneers PeP (Vampire V4SA) and agralund (Raven), MRF (aka Mister Future - decade long lost musician of the group Paranoia), Atari developer gokmase or the Substation and Octalyser luminary Blade/New Core.
- Details
- Written by: 505
