Atariscne.Org takes a look at the 4x4 truecolour rotozoom race
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- evldhs
Recently there have been a number of rotozoom demos released in what's called truecolour or RGB screenmodes. They got quite...
We all remember those absolutely crazy videos posted by DML some years ago, the Falcon was rendering Quake 2 and even Half life levels in a way that made many jaws drop.
Quake 2 level running on a Falcon 030, screenshot by DML
After some wait the binaries are here for us to enjoy, and all those who doubted can see that it was for real all along. We get binaries for plain 16 MHz 030 as well as the DFB1 030/50 accelerator.
Together with DMLs recent SVO 30 release, it's starting to feel like the early 90's again when the Falcon seemed to be invincible, thanks Doug for these incredible masterclass showcases!
Falcon 030 Quake 2 sample video from DML
🌏 Get the Quake 2 BSP Explorer from DMLs site!
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- Written by: evldhs
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Centscreen shenanigans! - Sharing a few custom screen modes from my assorted Falconry.
It’s your (least?) favourite writer on atariscne.org, back to torment, or possibly entertain you, with some more thoughts formed into words on a topic of (hopeful) interest.
This time, I have spent some time on the quest to increase my screen real-estate area from the lowly Atari official offerings for VGA on both my CT60 and Centurbo 2 Falcons. The tool to accomplish this is the screen booster, Centscreen, from Rodolphe Czuba, the creator of the famous accelerator boards mentioned just above.
I won’t go into the long history of Falcon developers deciding the original ‘baked in’ screen mode options provided by Atari Corp were somewhat lacking and creating their own third party solutions to un-hobble the mighty Videl. It’s a bit like CPU accelerator cards and overclocking boosters, which also seemed to be available almost from day one.
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- Written by: CiH
DML just made a demo version of SVO 30, a Minecraft-like program for the Falcon, available for download.
Photo by DrTypo at Atari-forum.com
The requirements are a 16 MHz 030 Falcon with FPU and 14 MB memory. Versions for other setups (060 et all) will follow later. DML recommends reading the notes in the included readme file before trying it out.
Teaser video of SVO 30 released a while back
🌎 Get it from DML's SVO 30 webpage
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- Written by: evldhs
Cyber Legends- Saturday 11th October 2025 - Toddington
Cyber Legends has been organised by various people close to the Exxos forum. As opposed to other kind of meets, such as demo parties or more gaming inspired retro computing events, Cyber Legends focuses more on the hardware side of things. The rare and old do often feature here. Not just Atari related either. Also cutting edge add-ons, faithful replicas of old hardware and prototypes and motherboards are likely to be found here. There is a bring and buy/barter element for people wishing to get rid of surplus items. I had a buyer for my defunct Mac Mini to bring with me.
The very first one was somewhere on the South Coast of England, so it was not practical for me to get to. The second event however, was very much closer to home, about 10 to 15 minutes away in fact. So I went to it. The third and current editions were held at a village hall in a place called Toddington about an hour away. The place name is better known for a motorway service station nearby, but not otherwise connected to it.
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- Written by: CiH
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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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!
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- Written by: Tronic
Read more: Their story: Cyberpunks (UK), a forgotten demo, unreleased for 33 years!
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.
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- 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
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- Written by: evldhs
