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,...
Maybe you remember the French Atari demo group Passion? They were active on Atari ST as well as on Falcon with their early "Arrival" demo. Cooper/Paradize has now recorded and published a comprehensive video compilation of their Atari releases in high quality. As I understand, they feature the full length scrolltexts, so 3 hours well-spent I would say!
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Vicomte, the main organizer of the now well established Gemtos convention has just sent us some last minute news about the 2025 forthcoming edition, let's have a look at what he wrote:
"Hi to all Atari fans,
The 2025 edition of the Gemtos convention is coming closer, few tickets left as the registration deadline gradually comes to an end. On the spot we will organize a great Midimaze 2 tournament on Atari computers, places running low!
Want to take part to game compos? Play Vroom, Jupiter’s masterdrive, Flight simulator 2 or Barbarian? You only need to send me a picture showing your best score (running low on room for competitors as well).
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Lotek style writes:
German coder Jonas Eschenburg is working on his Voxel-Engine for quite some time. Inspired by Comanche on MS-DOS machines he asked himself if it's possible to port an effect like this to the ST in decent speed. He posted several stages of his work on Twitter and you can find a binary on his github-site.
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- Written by: lotek style
Preview videos of a new Atari Jaguar racing game called "Neutron Drive" are circulating. It looks promising and very atmospheric. Read more on Atariage forums.
🔗 More videos on the official YT channel
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- Written by: 505
Hot on the heels of 505's party report on this very site, D-Bug and Data Airlines have created a mini site with another report, plus all entries from the cracktro showcase running on a browser (powered by tIn's hatari build)
🔗Visit the D-Bug website for the announcement, plus some bonus pictures (permalink)
🔗Visit the mini site hosted by Data Airlines
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- Written by: ggn
A file converter for Signum!2 documents called "Signum! Document Toolbox" has been published.
Back in the days Signum! was a sensational word processing applications which was unmatched regarding print quality by applying own bitmap fonts and offered professional scientific formula design. So the software was widely spread, e.g. in academic circles. In fact, it seems Application Systems Heidelberg is even still selling the software among other Atari applications as download versions.
Anyway, Xiphoseer has been working on a program that converts original SDO (Signum) files to PDF and HTML as a command line tool. Not entirely sure if such news belong here, but hey, the website layout is worth a visit by itself!
🔗 Signum! Document Toolbox Website
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- Written by: 505
If you missed out on Buxton Bytes that happened last week and you're itching to attend something similar, then you can just about make it to Slaskhack happening this weekend, organised by www.sak.nu.
We don't expect that much will come out of this gathering as it's a more laid back affair, but we do wish the attendees a grand time! Cheers!
Update: Some pictures from the party (thanks to PeP)
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While the game was unveiled last year you can now buy it on a regular cartrige from AtariAge. It was coded by Terence of Dune, with nice graphics by Mic of Dune and last but not least cool OST by DmaSc. Since Jaguar owners may not be so numerous among us, what about a lengthy video showing a lot of gameplay as well as some game modes?
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An international Atari-Party in the UK, that's not scene business as usual. The last big Atari Coding Convention probably was The Great British International ST Party (TGBISTP) back in 1992. That's 33 years ago! More recently however the UK Atari "crowd" has organised some cosy gatherings, such as Tathack 2020 or Psycho Hack 2024.
Buxton Bytes is the next round of those rather private installations, but escalated quickly as more and more scene friends declared sudden interest, so that the location was fully booked rather immediately. Seems as it was about time to fill this blind spot of having an Atari party in UK.
Can it be more UK than that?
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Everyone knows the original Missile Command game released back in 1980 and maybe you also heard about the Recharged remake done for the 40th birthday of the game but now ATARI, that is to say the current owners of our beloved brand, have just announced a sequel due to be out on PC and Playstation for a start. A trailer shows a huge bunker in which you will have to organize defences and deal with waves of ennemies attacking you. Once again ATARI strikes back, giving another life to classic games. Let's hope for the best!
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To be honest I had never heard about the original 1983 arcade game I, Robot but today I have just found out that Jeff Minter, that crazy llama and goat lover who brought us Tempest among others, has been asked to wipe off the dust from the classic game. What can you expect are you asking? Come on, don't ask, you know there'll be plenty of flashing colours, odd characters and some unharmed animals as well. The game is planned for release in April 2025 on all modern platforms, including the new VCS. Now, let's go tripping!
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Mikro writes:
The 2025 edition of FOReVER Slovak 8bit multiscene party is over. I have just uploaded all Atari & wild compo entries, C64 and ZX Spectrum ones should be online as well. See the download section.
The party steadily maintains the count of slightly less than 100 visitors from several countries each year which seems to be just about right to not feel overcrowded. For me personally this has been my 3rd year in the role of organiser of the Atari section, after passing -Xi- / Satantronic in 2022, and for a while it will be my last as I'm going to live in another country. But don't worry, there will surely be an Atari organiser in my place!
Forever 2025 party in Slovakia (photo by krupkaj)
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Just a little hello from Buxton, UK. Visitors having a good time in the most lovely surrounding, being served with hot, Adam Gilmore roasted sausages and a million of Atari sauces which got delivered just in time directly to the partyplace, kudos to gwEm! The party is still ongoing and soon there will be another round of showcasing the fantasy cracktros. The session might be streamed, or not.
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gwEm of the Pyscho Hacking Force released a new version of the maxYMiser FM chiptracker during the Buxton Bytes weekend.
The updates maxYMiser gets a few smaller new features as well as welcome bugfixes (thanks!).
maxYMiser FM v1.67
Here follows gwEms list of changes:
- added "fast save" keyboard shortcut
(505/YM Rockerz request) - modified behaviour of tilde and right shift pattern play/record
(505/YM Rockerz request) - fixed 020+ SID effect setup
(Evil/DHS bug report) - fixed sync square / FM conflict
- fixed 020+ sync square routine
(Evil/DHS bug report) (with help from Tat/Avena) - allow buzzer frequency precision on squarewave
- Make shift+return combination alike to Amiga ProTracker.
- fixed manual note replay
(GGN/Kua bug report) - changes to open source the driver
(with help from GGN/Kua) - added PWM sequence to MYI file format.
(Modmate/SFMX bug report)
🔗 Download maxYMiser FM v1.67 from the maxYMiser site
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- Written by: evldhs
We are happy to welcome you to Atariscne.org, a portal for Atariscene related news. The page goes online officially on 15th of March 2025. As a little teaser we celebrate the opening with a little cracktro, released at Buxton Bytes Party 2025 in UK today.
For the interested, let us sketch the idea behind the page:
Background
As you probably realized the historic and beloved webpage DHS.nu went into sleep mode since a few years for various reasons. Over are the times, when one would visit the Dead Hackers Society pages more often than brush your teeth. Along with the decline of DHS.nu, Atariscene news sources are very splintered these days and it is difficult to stay up to date and keep an overview. At the same time interesting things happen but have no outreach, for example in forums, chat or facebook groups. Sometimes it is a pity to observe how comprehensive articles are just overlooked while much of the major news content available is rather superficial or of a copy-paste character.
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Atari-Fontmaker is a tool to create and edit Atari fonts and font-based graphics for Atari XL/XE/5200. It has a comfortable interface and has been massively refactored and updated by Matosimi.
🔗 Matosimi's FontMaker website
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Insane of .tSCc. abd Rabenauge just released Version 2.0 of his DSP Cross Tools for 56k coding on unix systems. He states "There's cldlod, lod2p56 and a disassembly to C port of the ASM56000 v4.1.1 assembler."
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The Terminal program SyncTerm has been updated and now supports Atari ST compatible VT-52 emulation. So you can connect correctly display a BBS provided by an Atari ST using this emulation mode. Apparently, this feature has been requested about 14 years ago and the implementation was just released with version 1.6, right in time for the nostalgic revival of the Atari BBS scene, as proven by the Dark Force BBS or Lastic's amazing The Cell.ar BBS (Lastics article on the Mega STE setup of the BBS is hightly recommended).
SyncTerm is written by Stephen Hurd (aka Deuce) and is available for Linux, Windows, OS X and other systems.
🔗 Break Into Chat blog with additional information
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During its 40 years long lifespan, Atari ST programmers invented several truely outstanding demo coding techniques.
In early 1989, Ilja from Germany or the Swedish guys from Omega managed to show graphics in all four borders of the screen, a groundbreaking technique now known as fullscreen or overscan. Only a few months later, legendary Swedish Carebears coder Nic invented the so called 'sync scrolling' technique which enabled fine scrolling on a simple Atari ST - despite the missing video low byte in the video hardware.
Who's that girl?
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It is I, CiH. I’ve been invited to contribute to the new Atariscne site. Probably not so much in the way of news from me, as other people seem to be quicker at that. But there may be more long-form articles, party reports and that kind of thing coming from my direction.
Anyway, here’s some news.
Following closely upon the arrival of the Sillyventure Summer Edition website, Grey has announced the dates for the Winter Edition of the Gdansk based Atari party.
This is taking place a bit earlier than usual, on the dates from Thursday 20th November, to Sunday 23rd November. There has been a precedent as some earlier editions have also taken place in November. At least there is no clash with Christmas.
There are, as yet, no further announcements regarding location, special events etc. Be fair to Grey, he’s still putting the summer edition together. But I’m sure there will be plenty of hardcore thrills and releases to come for both parties.
CiH - 8.3.25.
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