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,...
Loïc Lété aka monos51 released a new game for Atari ST/E. It was coded in Devpac and is called "Hero Fantasy:The King's Sword".
As a nice surprise the title is featuring music by Dma-Sc! The requirements are 0.5 MB RAM and the game is said to work on all Atari ST/Mega/STE machines.
🔗 Read more and download Hero Fantasy: The King's Sword via itch.io
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- Written by: 505
Mega stylish Atari chiptune artist YQN/Hemoroids has been work-benching maxYMiser again and released a new song after quite a long break this year. Good to hear another of his fresh, jazzy and detail-rich and this time rather laid back compositions again. Download is possible via the Battle of the Bits page.
Along with the music video displaying a beautiful Atari SC1425 monitor this wonderful track must be a good start into the weekend!
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DML who is known for his amazing 3D engines had already shown us his progress in recreating Quake on a standard Falcon. Yet tonight another video showed what seems to be a Minecraft engine, still on a bare Falcon, no accelerator needed. At the moment there is no hint at a public release or further plans but check out the video yourself and show respect to his coding skills!
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STS : Hi Samuel, can you tell us about you in a few words?
Sam : Hi, my name is Samuel Blanchard, I am in my fifties and I am French (note of STS : the interview was originally carried in French then translated by me so that I should be blamed for any mistake). I have been a professional programmer for more than 3 decades, mostly coding C# and of course I have been working for fun on creating emulators and games since 2000 or so.
STS : what’s your own story with ATARI products? Something going back to teen years or a late revelation? What is your current setting?
Sam : It all started when I was a teenager. Back then I was lucky enough to get an Atari Ste, the computer I dreamt of. It was my 17th birthday present even though I shared it with my 16 year old brother. He was pretty unlucky however since I kept the beast to myselft and spent hours working on games, first in GFA then ASM 68K.
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Read more: An interview with Samuel Blanchard
Write comment (3 Comments)The Polish paper magazine "Atari Fan" has published issue #8 during summer. As far as I know it was sold out quickly but can be obtained again on their website. The magazine was initiated by Vulgar/Cobra (RIP) years ago and is now published by Piotr "Piter" Krużycki and a team around him. Great to have another paper based Atari magazine.
There is also an English issue (issue #1) available in the web shop at the moment. There is a rumor, that Kroll created the layout of that one entirely on real Atari hardware, but that's not fully verified.
Atari fan also offers some nice Atari related products and gimmicks in their webshop.
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Zerkman updated his new resolution enhancer for ST "Shifter Inside" to Version 1.1.
The changes are:
- Removed the horizontal extension on STE medium resolution, because it does not work on the real hardware. Therefore, horizontal resolution is back to 640 pixels. The horizontal resolution in low resolution remains 336 pixels on STE.
- Support for software that uses MFP timers A and D, such as the MaxYMiser player. It will not work if timer B is used (Shifter Inside already uses it).
- Modified the source code so it builds on Devpac (contribution by Troed/Sync).
- Deactivated the blitter for graphics display. Thanks to Nerve/Ephidrena and GGN/KÜA^D-Bug for suggesting the method.
- Use of a replacement routine for mouse cursor display on TOS 1.02. This fixes a known bug that prevented the cursor to display correctly below the 327th line. Thanks to Thomas Huth for pointing me to prior work about this.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed a bug in screen buffer allocation (Invalïd screen buffer address after a resolution change.
🔗 Information on the Update Inside on Zerkman's page
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- Written by: 505
Fujisan is a sort of user interface replacement for Atari800 emulator, available for Windows, Apple and Linux.
The author, Paulo Garcia, describes it as follows:
"A modern frontend for the Atari800 emulator, providing a native desktop experience with full keyboard support, machine configuration, and authentic Atari behavior."
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Atari, as the company, was present at last Gamescom that took place in August in Cologne, Germany. The CEO Wade Rosen shared his thoughts on Ataris latest developments and future in several interviews:
After many disappointing brand owners in the past, one can say, the current one has some respect for the history, interesting ideas, taste and even community interest, as the acquisition of AtariAge a while ago indicates. And well, we got BBQ sauce!
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Last weekends Xenium party in Lódz, Poland brought a couple of remarkable Atari releases.
Foremost, the pretty active group New Generation striked back with another massive Atari Lynx demo (also in terms of storage requirements). It features several streamed soundtracks, 3D objects combined with parallax or overlay graphic effects - a watermark of New Generation releases on the Lynx. The demo ranked 1st in the oldschool demo compo. Congratulations!
It seems the Lynx platform is very suitable for these kind of "new school" demos while still having that certain "oldschool hardware" something, similar to Amiga 1200 demos.
🔗 Download and comment Unbound by New Generation on Demozoo
🔗 Download and comment Unbound by New Generation on Pouet
Furthermore MKM/Lamers surprisingly released a nice 256 byte intro for Atari XL/XE named Into the Void and ranked 2nd place.
🔗 Download an comment Into t he Void by MKM/Lamers on Demozoo
🔗 Download an comment Into t he Void by MKM/Lamers on Pouet
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Cyrano Jones patched the well-established ICD harddisk driver regarding the STE DMA bug, similar to the previous attempts with HD Driver done by Nerve/Ephidrena reported here at Atariscne.org. The beta is available for download and testing.
🔗 Read more and Download on AtariAge forum
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Our Belgian friend Lastic just put out more indepth Fujiama coverage on his website with lots of interesting views and photos. Enjoy!
🔗 Fujiama report on Lastic's website
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Too Lazy to Switch Down…
“I’m too sexy to switch down, too lazy to go oh three oh, too sexy to switch down, so lazy it hurts!”
Hi there Atariscners, this is an article of a *very* niche interest to a few people with very specific hardware. I hope I can make this sort of entertaining to more general readers on the way.
After a long time away, I’ve got a CT60 Falcon working again. This story was told here, over many words, a short while ago. You’ve all had enough of me going on about it.
I’ve been playing with it, of course. Trying to test and stretch the boundaries of what is possible. Maybe finding out something we weren’t expecting? And having lots of fun on the way of course!
For today’s textual excursion into the realms of the unfeasible, I’m looking at some selected Falcon 030 productions, which managed to run with the 68060 without (too much) complaining. It really is too much of a hassle to operate the 030/060 toggle switch on the back in this sweaty summer weather. That’s my excuse, anyway.
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Read more: Running some Falcon 030 productions directly on a Falcon 060!
Write comment (5 Comments)Electronics design veteran Suavek is working on a replica of the Falcon 030 motherboard. As a professional engineer with over 25 years of experience designing electronics for consumer and commercial products, Suavek is well positioned to complete the task and deliver a fully functional PCB. His background in working at PCB fabrication houses and performing various boards reverse engineering further increases the chances of success.
The project is being executed using industry standard tools, including Altium Designer. A full design rule check and ongoing synchronization between schematics and the printed circuit board are underway to ensure an error-free replica. The engineer estimates that the prototype board should be available within the next 2–3 months.
Suavek is also active in the retro computing scene, exhibiting annually at the VCF West shows in Mountain View, CA, where he displays rare vintage computers and his own electronics designs.
Check out the dedicated project website:
https://re-falcon.com/
The site also features Suavek’s extensive bio and is updated daily as project work progresses.
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Three people, relatively known in the Atari circles, after quite a few long discussions in chat rooms decided to record their thoughts.
According to the description of the published episodes (so far):
A bunch of nerds discussing and sharing anecdotes from a pre-internet computer subculture you might vaguely be aware of, focused on a computer platform you wish you had forgotten.
Background music by goto80.
They do not describe the format as "podcast", because it really was not conceived as such. Therefore the usual podcast tropes largely don't apply here. So far there's been one guest, and more are planned in the future, as well as episodes.
If all this sounds intriguing, the episodes are up on YouTube:
🔗"Peterbourough Cracking Crew"
🔗"Big in the youtube poop community"
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- Written by: ggn
The very faithful Defender arcade port to the ST/e/Falcon released earlier this year has been updated with a number of improvements, see the original release notes by sark02 below.
This version includes an overscan test page in the setup menu, so you can adjust your monitor to ensure you're seeing the full height of the screen.
Some other little graphical tweaks, the noticeable ones being:
- Make sure the thrust plume is erased when the player explodes.
- Remove a little graphical artifact whenever the screen is cleared.
- Make the blue color channel a little brighter to match the game.
- Start the RAM test with an authentic blue background.
Two files: ST is a floppy image. ZIP can be extracted to a hard drive.
Defender ST-port in action
📄 Check out the source repository
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- Written by: evldhs
Few weeks ago Atari programmer Vincent Rivière has updated the UltraSatan firmware, so now it is more compatible with more SD cards, especially recent 32 GB (SDHC) and 64 GB (SDXC) cards.
Always good to see the Atariscene adapting properly to the international storage market :-)
The firmware can be downloaded on the Jookie's website (the UltraSatan mastermind and creator).
Speaking of Vincent Riviére: in case you are capable of French language and interested in learning Atari ST Assembler programming or programming basics generally we recommend his Vetrocomputing youtube channel.
🔗 Download Ultrasatan Firmware 1.30 on Jookie's website
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- Written by: 505
Mr. Styckx/1984 just announced that Hatari version 2.6.1 is out, mainly a bugfix release after the recent 2.6.0 version.
Original release notes pasted below.
Hatari 2.6.1 has been released !
This is a small bugfix release for Hatari 2.6.0
Emulation improvements:
- MegaSTE:
- When using cache, only compare 24 lowest bits of address
- Don't update cache after a bus/address error - Falcon:
- Create a fast ram buffer (_FRB) cookie when running with TT RAM to fix a problem with floppy disk access - Video:
- Add support for STE 224 bytes overscan in medium resolution
- Set correct resolution in Shifter when accessing $FF8260 as word (fix regression in Hatari 2.6.0) - VME for MegaSTE / TT:
- VME memory regions should return bus error when no VME board is present
Emulator improvements:
- Windows:
- Fix: late locale init messes debugger readline history handling - GEMDOS HD:
- Fix: caches were not always flushed on writing to emulated memory - Debugger:
- Fix: show DEL character as non-printable in memdumps - CPU/FPU settings:
- Disallow 68881/68882 FPU in 040/060 mode - Config / SDL GUI:
- Default screenshot save directory override option
- SDL GUI asks for file name when starting AVI recording
- Fit Hatari screen dialog to smallest required size and log errors on invalid dialog sizes - CLI options:
- GEMDOS HD & screenshot dir options accept only existing directories
Fixed demos:
- A Letter To Sommarhack by Effect (write word at $FF8260)
- Partial fix for Double Rez Trouble by DHS (med res overscan lines)
Fixed programs:
- Spectre 3.0 (Hatari v2.6 regression, MegaSTE cache)
See release-notes.txt for the full changelog
Thanks to all people involved in this release !
Hatari V2.6.1 running Devpac 3.1 in Atari TT mode using extended VDI resolution
💾 Download sources as well as binaries for Windows and macOS
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Only days from the release om Shifter Inside v1.0, Zerkman is back with a new version of his Atari ST FPGA clone, zeST.
The below release notes taken from Zerkmans zeST site:
Turbo mode optimisation
There has been a pass of optimisations in the memory accesses in Turbo mode.
The two wait cycles on reads are gone, and read burst management has had its latency reduced by a few cycles. Performance has therefore improved, as you ca
n see on the new results:
GEMBench showing stats above 400% in average, relative to a standard ST
The average peformance is now 540% of that of a real ST, which is 28% faster than the previous release of zeST (420%). We are still not at full 50 MHz because of some read cache misses, but also because of wait cycles on memory writes which still write to DDR every time and have wait cycles (this is a write-through cache).
ACSI improvements
I have improved the hard disk “firmware code”, so now it supports most standard ACSI/SCSI commands and error codes.
Now partitioning tools work; you can configure new drives from the running Atari without the need of an emulator on PC.
zeST is also now ready to support multiple drives. Hard disk configuration is now on a separate submenu so you can configure the 8 ACSI IDs independently.
Wi-Fi support
Wi-Fi now works for the embedded Linux OS that runs on the Zynq’s ARM core. Support is still experimental for now.
Since none of the boards zeST supports has an integrated Wi-Fi device, Wi-Fi only works through the use of a USB Wi-Fi dongle.
Only a few USB Wi-Fi drivers are currently integrated in zeST. They are RTL87xx and RTL88xx drivers for some Realtek-based devices. If you would like support for another device, please contact me.
Other improvements
- Some disk management toolkits have been installed: parted, dosfstools, mtools.
- There’s a script making use of the above to easily create a new hard disk image file with multiple partitions.
- The documentation has had important updates to take all the latest changes into account.
🔗 Check out the full article at the zeST site and download the update
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Cosmos Amiga aka CosmosAtari opened a new blog on his PAK88/3-030 related hardware projects and pcbs. The background information is a bit sparse, but apparently the the French vegetarian and 68k-gourmet created the empty boards and one can buy them there. Also have a look at his other blog pages, it might be of interest!
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Legend has it there is an annual Atari event each summer somewhere in the pitoresque East German mountain range named "Vogtland" - to add cream on top, this year's event is taking place for a full week Monday to Sunday this year. What? We are speaking of a heatwave with 34 degrees outside and a big hall full of more or less middle aged men and not much younger oldschool hardware running hot! And guess what, the party is crowded since day one! So let's go there before it's over - like a true hero, starting my ride at 10:40 am!
The LCC Lengenfeld carneval club is kindly providing the location for the Atari event since more than two decades. And no, it's less hot than expected.Thanks to LCC for making his little piece of Fuji paradise possible since so many years.
The annual Fujiama Atari party is taking place in Lengenfeld, Vogtland, just like the past two decades on the top of a mountain in the wonderful location "Schützenhaus". Lot's of tinkering, coding, soldering, 3d printing, gaming and talking is going on. Many highly specialized XL/XE legends are here, in case someone needs a helping hand. The Atari 8-Bit scene definitely has a special vibe, a mix of helpfulness and friendliness and professionalism and engineering mindset at the same time. We find less of a demoparty, no demo compos, rules and so on, more a friendly and intense gathering to properly get into the common Atarizone. Also few 16/32 bit demosceners are in place (Beetle, Insane, Deyta, Lastic, No, JAC! have been spotted and a few more are expected).
top left: the Atari acronym car plates are all over the parking lot (1050, 6502, 800XL, 600XL, you name it)
top center: finally - Insane instructed me on how to actually start Cream's awesome STay forever demo on real hardware!
top right: today's fun schedule
bottom: party place overview, my rough estimate is about 50 people and we are at Wednesday right now - well and there is loooooots of oldschool hardware - fantastic!
But this year is also special, as the Fujiama overlord, Helmut Weidner, is giving his final performance as a host. He has been involved in Atari 8-bit events since 1996 when he organized the famous Schreiersgrün Atari fairs and continued through the 2000 and 2010 years till today (except one year due to Covid obviously). The participants know the kind character of the 65 year old local, arranging the party in a very cosy and easy going way. He is taking care of everything so intensely in many ways, that it was always a big joy to come here. So no wonder Fujiama won more and more traction and became the main attraction of the ABBUC events. This big German Atari 8-Bit club "Atari Bit Byter User Club e.V." is celebrating its 40th birthday this year, and also here at the party - what an institution with it's about 540 members all over the world.
The Fujiama party itself has become more international, too, now with visitors from Belgium, Poland, Netherlands, Czech Republic and with Mauricio there is even a regular visitor all the way from USA (for the fourth time!). However, age pays it's tribute and always charming Helmut Weidner decided to step down from his main organizer role. Well deserved, no way to thank him enough at this point.
Currently there is one option: enjoy the event as much as possible. So let's celebrate this final of Helmut's Fujiama and hope for the best the event in the Vogtland highlands will continue in the future under a different organization team. The ABBUC is a performant club after all.
🔗 ABBUC forum thread with photos by Mathy
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