(Almost) Live Report from the ADN 2025 party
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- sts
The ADN party - for Atari Days Nancy - is a small but friendly convention that has been held in France for almost 15 years. Over...
I am a bit late here, but about one week before mOdmate left us another member of the ATARI community also died from cancer. He was known as Shadow272 but we called him Georges. He was a GFA coder and also handled gfx at times but above all he was a friendly man, very peaceful and always eager to talk to anyone. I only worked once with him on Diane, a small intro in 2022 but he was also responsible for Saboteur 3 - The Egyptian Mission (2012) and PicrossST (2008). Many French ATARI lovers had the chance to meet here in various conventions, I met him several times at the summer ADN party. He will be grealty missed!
His games will be played in the March round of STOT, great idea! As a tribute and farewell present most of his ATARI friends collected money to offer this awesome ATARI flower crown!
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The Sillyventure organizers have just published the website for the coming Summer edition of the event with some really cool pixel art. The party takes place from 31.07.2025-03.08.2025 and celebrates the - hard to believe - 25th anniversary of the party series.
As illustrated, a summer time visit in Gdansk and the beautiful surrounding Baltic beaches of the of 3-City area can be highly recommended. While back in 2000 visitors were experiencing the rather post-communistic charm, Gdansk area has turned into a sophisticated touristic hot spot during the past decades. Maybe a good occasion to meet again for the average undeniably advanced aged Atariscener (giving "Triple A" a new meaning).
A long way since Sillyventure 2000 - and still connected: In fact a huge part of the Atariscne.org staff was visiting Sillyventure 2000. Good times!
🔗 Sillyventure 2025 SE website
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- Written by: 505
Back in 1990 the Thalion/Eclipse game "Wings of Death" made huge waves; finally an ST shooter worth it's name!
Created by demosceners from Gigabyte Crew, Exceptions and Carebears it features loads of sprites, great music, graphics and for once, awesome gameplay.
Songbird Productions, known for releasing Jaguar and Lynx games, recently posted a teaser of Wings of Death for the Jaguar, aimed to be released in 2025. While we have seen many ST games being ported over to Jaguar more or less 1:1 by third parties, the Wings of Death port is actually made by Eclipse and does add some improvements over the original;
- Dual soundtracks (ST and Amiga versions)
- Additional setting for difficulty
- Mode with increased colours on screen
- 60 Hz screen updates
- Extra weapon power ups and additional sound effects
Teaser video of Wings of Death on Jaguar, with Amiga soundtrack playing
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- Written by: evldhs
Tomasz "Tebe" Biela has published a new release of Mad-Pascal, a Pascal variant for Atari XL/XE computers.
The release contains following changes:
- optimizations, bugfixes
- faster code for ABSOLUTE arrays
- unit SYSTEM added array 'mem: array [0..0] of byte absolute $0000'
- optimization for CASE (tail optimize)
- INC/DEC optimization for [striped] arrays
- new unit E80, handler E: in HiRes mode, 80 columns.
- new unit RC4, encryption with RC4 algorithm
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- Written by: 505
Quite surprisingly John Zielke, the founder of an Atari 8-Bit oriented magazine project, announced the March issue of "Atari Insights" on Atari-forum.com.
The issue contains 25 pages and covers the following topics:
- Women of Atari: Dive into the stories of Dona Bailey, Carol Shaw, and others who crafted the arcade hits we still love today.
- Atari BASIC Tutorials: This month, we’re tackling Boolean logic and control structures in Atari BASIC. Can you believe it?
- Backups Made Simple: A hands-on guide to doing easy backups—because who doesn’t need a simple solution to data security?
- Pi Day Fun: What’s this all about and why are there no pies at the bakery on March 14th?
- Altirra, Profiles, FujiNet, MacOS, and You: Unlock the full potential of your Atari setup with a straightforward guide on running Altirra on your Mac, tweaking settings for the best experience, and connecting with others using FujiNet.
- And much more!
His website states that you have to register with your email address for more information and to be able to download the magazine.
🔗 Atari-Insights / Atari Basics website
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- Written by: 505
A little trip into the lands of demoparty legends:
Back at Outline Party 2009, D-Bug members are remembered celebrating and spreading their latest compact disk number 200 in a very special way. Together with the actual menu number 200 all the previous compact disks have been collected and put on one CD ROM, served in a very nice scene layout.
This CD was spread at the event by shady, well-known crackers from the group, sneaking around the party place and providing a number of those CDs to selected party visitors ("Hey, listen, we have got something for you here... But don't tell anyone") 😀
I was one of the happy receivers and since than have stored this glorious object carefully all the years. The CD contains all menus and patches (at that point of time) as well as webpage content and other D-Bug related material.
Now, 16 years later, D-Bug decided to publish the CD as download on their website!
🔗 News Article and Download on the D-Bug website
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- Written by: 505
It's with a sad heart we report that our long time friend and Atari demoscene extraordinaire mOdmate passed away today, March 1 of 2025. Torsten has been fightning cancer for almost a year while still being active with demoscene projects to the very end.
Our condolences go to his family, wife and children. We wish you all the strength you need.
We are losing a wonderful friend and at the same time one of the most passionate and and skilled Atari sceners of the past decades. He fell in love with the scene as a kid, shared this enthusiasm with all of us and kept on working on scene projects till the very last day.
May he live on in his beautful pictures, musics and programs and let's remember Torsten for all the good times we've had together.
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The flood of rouge-like Dungeon crawlers simply doesn't stop! Rogue is known as one of the oldest role playing games that was originally programmed at the University of Berkeley around 1980. This first version was a round-based dungeon crawler using ASCII-graphics which received numerous successors and ports to other platforms. With 'Rogue' (1986) and 'Rougue II - Return to the Dungeon' (1988), even the Atari ST got two colorful, GEM-based versions. The huge impact the game had is reflected by the fact that a whole RPG genre was named after it: 'rougue-like'. These rougue-like games recently experienced a renaissance, some would say inflation, not only in the Atari ST, but on other platforms as well. A few years ago, the Atari ST saw the release of a colorful teaser of 'Catacombs' by Shaoth and Dma-Sc, looking extremely promising. In 2024, the multi-platform 'Tenebra' and 'Tenebra 2' also received monochrome ports to our grey machines.
The latest final release of a rogue-like game for the Atari ST is called '0mira' (Nullmira). You might have heard of this before, because previews and test versions were already publicly available. However, at the end of February 2025, the maker announced that the testing phase is over and the release state has been reached.
0mira was created by a single German Atari enthusiast nicknamed 'Klaas' over a period of 7 years. It was completely coded in Omikron Basic 3.03 and only runs in high resolution. The game is completely held in German, with only a short tutorial in English language available. It needs an ST/STE/Falcon with at least 1MB to RAM.
🔗 Release Notes at AtariAge forum
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- Written by: mOdmate
You’ve just finished a nice 16 color picture, a YM chiptune or a little demo on your ST and want to present it to a broader audience, but it takes ages until the next big Atari party is being held? Or do you just want to prepare an entry on your ST, but waiting for the next Atari-only party is not an option?
Whatever your reason may be, as a small service we want to provide you with an overview of the upcoming demo parties with competitions covering Atari ST specifications, esp. demo/intro and chiptunes competitions.
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Did you miss the celebration of the many game creators who keep entertaining us in 2025? Well, it's never too late as you can see the live stream here. Many games released or being under development and for all ATARI machines, what a treat!
Full results can be found at ATARIAGE.
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The amazing traditional Swedish Atari Club SAK celebrates its 40th birthday this year. The club has been organizing many Atari events during the years. Especially the "Nordic Atari Show (NAS)" was a well-known event throughout Europe, with its first installment back in 1995, 30 years ago.
And still today there are annual meetings, such as Slaskhack 2025 in Falköping from 21st to 23rd of march 2025.
What a nice club - Congratulations!
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The 23th edition of this traditional Slovakian oldschool demoscene event is taking place from 14th-16th of March 2025 in Trnava/Sucha Nad Parnou. As usual, it focuses on 8 Bit platforms (Atari, Spectrum, Commodore) and has a topic. This time it is "Jurassic Party", probably refering to the visitors average age ;-) Currently about 50 visitors are registered.
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One could think Atari ST gaming is on the rise. Upcoming Gemtos Party in France is advertising a new gaming competition featuring 4 games: Vroom, Jupiters Masterdrive, Flight Simulator II and Barbarian II. Party visitors can send in screenshots of their score until April 6th and then the finals will be played on stage at the event.
Generally the website of the party is worth a look, there are photos and videos from previous editions and the party seems pretty cool! :-)
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STOT - the ST Offline Tournament is a nice web based competition for Atari ST gamers. Each month another game is played and scores are trustfully documented on Atari-forum. Winner and thus entitled the " best Atari ST gamer" of the 2024 round was spkr/smfx with some amazing scores. Late congratulations!
good old STOT logo by sh3
The previous gaming rounds were big fun. Beside game classics as Rolling Ronny also some recently released ST titles like Faster or Chroma Grid have been played to quite some quite some extend. A nice side effect of the format is gameplay hints are shared and playing "together" adds a lot to the motivation. Please feel invited to join the STOT anytime!
Steve Gregory, author of the "Atari Crypt" ST gaming blog has recently published an interesting interview with the hosts of the tournament, Thorn, ChrisTOS and SSB which is a really nice read.
🔗 Read the full interview on AtariCypt's blog
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- Written by: 505
Mr. Paint is a tool to create ATASCII texts (40x24) on Atari XL/XE that comes with a number of practical features such as drawing lines and center elements and easy to remember keyboard shortcuts. The archive on Github also contains a comprehensive user guide in PDF format.
🔗 Mr. Paint on Ripjetski's Github page
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The 2024 edition of the Poland-centered game development event Fujicup is about to take place. There are 40(!) submissions with games of different kind and quality. The motivation to contribute is obviously pushed by prize money over 4.000 Euro.
🔗 Fujicup 2024 website (Polish language, check menu point "Lista Gier" for the list of games)
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The nominees for the yearly awards for homebrew Atari games have been decided.
For the ST/e category we see a bunch of well-known Demoscene games;
🔗 PHF Rally 2 - Zero Bitplane by Psycho Hacking Force
🔗 Chroma Grid by T.O.Y.S.
🔗 Tony - Montezuma's Gold by GGN & Monochrome Productions
🔗 Faster by Chicane
The awards are brought by Atari, ZeroPage Homebrew and AtariAge.
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Past weekend Lovebyte Online Party took place and quite a number of small size Bytros has been released.
There have been entries for Atari ST, XL/XE, Atari VCS 2600 and some very remarkable ones on Atari Jaguar and Lynx.
42Bastian won the 512 Byte Oldschool with a nice Lynx entry.
On Atari ST we got "The Cube is A Lie" by Orz and another ST entry called Solid Air was submitted by Tom.
🔗 Download Lovebyte entries on Demozoo
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Zerkman of Sector One just released a new version of his Atari ST clone machine running on cheap Zynq FPGA boards.
The machine is very much compatible with a real ST, and if you have been following GGNs demo streams on Twitch, that's all being run on the zeST computer.
New stuff in todays release includes CRT scanline emulation in the scandoubler part, improved reset, network support for easy uploading of data and bluetooth mouse/joystick support. Furthermore the colour conversion from ST 9-bit to 24-bit have been improved to use the full colour scale (earlier it was a bit dim at peak colour values).
Scandoubler comparison - standard vs scanline emulation
🔗 Read the full release information from Zerkmans zeST site
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- Written by: evldhs
Awards are always a controversial topic. How was the selection done? Was it a fair process? Are productions who "are worth it" included? Or the opposite?
The discussions about this will never end, but the fact remains that two wonderful productions for the Atari ST from 2024 have been nominated for the Meteoriks 2025 awards:
- A series of raster effects by SMFX (Demozoo, Pouet) in Best midschool production category
- Ika I Compofylla by Newline (Demozoo, Pouet) in Outstanding technical achievement category
Hearty congratulations to all people involved and wishes for winning! (If it means anything to them, or the people!)
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- Written by: ggn
