OFAM 2025 report

Thursday, 9th of October 2025

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. After leaving for the city and some 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.

At the location 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. But more on that later.

After the 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.

Saturday, 11th and Sunday 12th of October 2025

General agreement: the weekend passed by way quickly!

Saturday we spent most of the daytime enjoying the collective experience in the Paradox suite. After some initial issues in getting into Atari productivity mode, the flow was there: pixels were pushed, several projects and ideas were approached in a gentle manner, with longer coffee and snack breaks in between and occasional trials of Midnight Resistance on ZWF's STE resulting in a new personal high score (which in the meantime has been shot to total irrelevance by spkr with his sudden above 100.000 score in the STOT round).

Speaking of which: although we used the original disks for playing "MR", the external version of the Gotek was used for other bits. And the device with its led display and Atari like plastic case left a very convincing impression. I am far from experienced in these matters, but as a fan of "least modification of original hardware as possible", I was surprised you can use it as drive A: when plugged in into the external floppy connector without further adjustments and then switch back to the internal floppy drive anytime by just disconnecting it again.

We didn't want to break our period of making things on Atari, so it lasted till the afternoon, until we left for the outside world again. After some very necessary visit at the Italian restaurant we were on our way to OFAM after all.

There we found a different picture than yesterday. The place was well visited, my estimate is about 20 people, with some more people joining for a few hours and leaving again. The bbq was on in the yard, and everyone else was talking, showing stuff and working on things inside. A Midimaze setup was available in the other room with an 520 ST+ in very good shape, a perfect Falcon 060 (I think it was MacFalcon's one), another Falcon 030 and possibly some other machines.

In the different corners of the party place there were a number of interesting setups, with a rather rare to see Milan tower. Petr, the owner from Czech Republic also brought a very fundamental Falcon setup using his own RAM card. This place was a bit of a Atari Falcon RAMcard condensation point as also Lynxman, another expert in the creation of Atari addons and Falcon memory expansions, was present at OFAM.

Bottom: Petr's "Falcon essentials" setup

We took our seats in the middle of one of the rooms and started working on some bits. But all our attention was soon drawn to the major happening of the event.

The German developer team of the twiSTEr, thunder, lightning and more extensions was partly present to showcase there numerous addons and were about to present also a new project.

Generalised, those devices can be added modularly to your ST, STE, Mega ST/E and TT to obtain accerlation (e.g. 68020), USB ports, AltRAM, multiple and switchable Flash TOS slots, IDE-connectivity, realtime clock and possibly more. To be honest I find it quite difficult to keep overview of all those different extensions, their functions and target systems. An up to date overview table would be great.

Anyway, as there are all kind of modules and versions for different systems, even for different series of e.g. the TT, this meant an immense amount of testing of different constellations during the development years. The team took this very serious. Its impressive to find such a collective of experts, each in it's field, from pcb design, production, testing, firmware to driver creation. Apparently they feel the duty to release finished and polished products, while staying ready to improve and react when occasional issues appear.

Gaga and Tuxie were the team members present showing their developments in different variations, helping to fix and install things and explaining the challenges and findings in the process.

And OFAM was also the place where they first presented their latest baby: an extension for the Atari 520 ST (including blitter) all fitting in the small case of it. This could be an interesting option for all kinds of "I have little space" situations, at home or while travelling.

Fully equipped 520 ST

Big thumb up for the effort and continuity to make all those solid final (hobbyist) products!

The Paradox heartbeat synchronised with the TwiSTer team's showcasing and we all concluded it could be useful to have a little demoscreen for the twiSTer to put its performance on display. So after some testing, the Paranoid adopted a STE 3D routine and some graphics to make it work in Alt/Fastram and I joined in and created a little OFAM theme in maxYMiser for this minidemo. And the speed increase of the effect on the twiSTEr-machine was indeed very remarkable. With that, the night passed by and soon after we returned to our temporary homebase, we went to bed.

In the morning we decided to extend our breakfast & chat session till noon and then our ways separated again. Afterall, it was good to see each other in a relaxed and rather comfortable setting - a story to be hopefully continued (Greetings to Dan at this point!). We very much enjoyed the interesting weekend around the so far bit mysterious OFAM event, as well as meeting people "from the internet" (mostly atari-home.de forum) in real life.

And we were all truely amazed by the "hardware scene", which we found of a very similar spirit to the demoscene, just that the subject of optimization is rates of MB/second instead of framerate or smart pcb-design and firmware to increase compatibility for several machines and use cases.

Thanks to MacFalcon, Ektus, their affiliates and helpers for the great and very welcoming Atari event and to all the friendly visitors for the chance to meet and exchange!