When looking at the Avena listings on Pouet or Demozoo one could be forgiven for thinking the crew is more or less inactive compared to its late 1990s heyday.
In fact, nothing can be further from the truth and I wanted to draw Atariscne's attention to some of the latest under-the-radar content. Of course, we all remember Tat from landmark Falcon productions such as Sonolumineszenz or more recently the goalpost moving 44 (chapeau Tat!). In between his day job at Sony's elite advanced technology group Tat has been actively working on a number of Atari projects.
News and deep technical dives on these projects is available on what appears to be an anonymous blog, but is actually a gold mine of "the good stuff": results of his bleeding edge experiments.
Here are some particularly juicy articles which we'd like to draw your attention to:
A massive project Tat has been working on is an add-on for the Hatari emulator which adds features similar to the old Steem debugger. Sadly not officially part of Hatari, the debugger is almost a requirement for fixing certain bugs when developing under Hatari.
As someone who is fond of looking at disassemblies of other people's YM drivers, this is a very good starting point for understanding what you may see in Easy Rider when looking at YM drivers. It could even be some inspiration for writing your own!
I can say from personal experience that these notes describe 90% of the challenges you face if you want to create a multi-part 4K demo with music on the ST, or any platform. Tat takes things to another level though, in particular with his knowledge of packing.
Here Tat shares more of his coding articles and source code, including Falcon must-see Sonolumineszenz.
A covid lockdown project Tat worked on after being inspired by some chats with Damo and I. This is really low-level information and explains how and why you can get the YM and 68K to synchronise on a cycle level, essential for the sync square effect.
The fashions in ST demos have unfortunately returned to minimising CPU time used for the music. Using a dump of register writes to the soundchip might be a way to claw back some precious CPU cycles. On the other hand, such a register dump can be quite big. Tat presents a novel solution to this problem.
gwEm/PHF June 2025
Comments
Thanks for all your help over the last..... 30 years, Tat! I will always be massively appreciative :)