A handy list for people re-joining the scene
- Details
- tIn
When you're talking on a demoparty to people that left the scene for some time and they ask you with their big, sad, brown...
Zerkman/Sector One just released Shifter Inside - a tool to apply overscan mode in the GEM environment. The name of the program is certainly a reference to Zerkman's great Videl Inside resolution expansion tool for the Falcon. This one is for ST/E and allows resolutions up to 640×276 in medium resolution, or 320×276 in low resolution.
However, the stability of the overscan mode is affected by certain system activities. Anyway, nice idea and worth a try! The tool can be downloaded on Zerkman's web page and the Source code is available as well.
🔗 Shifter Inside on Zerkman's website
🔗 Shifter Inside Source Code repository
- Details
- Written by: 505
Steem SSE has seen another new version in July. This version 4.2 has received a few more updates since, the latest one just yesterday by perpetually mysterious Steven Seagal.
- Details
- Written by: 505
Read more: Steem SSE 4.2.0 released
Write comment (0 Comments)Re-post of DML's original message on Atari-forum.com:
A new release of BadMooD now available from my site:
https://www.leonik.net/dml/sec_bm.py
Mainly fixes & improvements - out of time to list them all tonight but the files are up and the .TXT files in the archives explain what to do! Will update the post soon with a bit more info as I scrape it together.
[NEW/EXTRAS]
- Doom II support added in the form of code fixes and a prepared BMC cache for download.
(note: Doom II does not make use of the BM102U resource pack - might follow at a later time).
- DFB1/DFB1X 50MHz accelerators now properly supported - two versions: one uses the DSP, one not
(only the DSP version supports shader animation). Both use lossless gametick 1:1 with original.
- 4MB 'lean' version now properly supported from the latest sources & aligned with other files in
the game directory.
[IMPROVEMENTS]
- Title screens are now shadowed/darkened when the game menu is open - easier to see/read
- Ingame music volume can be set independently of titles & other music.
- 4MB version now supports MIDI properly (for the tracks in the original IWAD) and has better
SFX audio quality & volume resolution.
- All audio settings available from config, instead of baked into the build variants.
- Optimized configs provided for each TOS executable (e.g. some platforms can afford stereo audio
and/or additional audio channels, or higher mix quaity, MIDI-only configs can afford more SFX
channels and stereo/positional SFX)
- BMC cache lanes for 14MB & 4MB versions can coexist in same BMC cache.
- Menus optimised a bit more.
[FIXES]
- Quit option works now from the game menu (i.e. game can exit now)
- A number of display-switch related problems involving statusbar have been fixed (still some
glitches remain, but minor).
- A game crash/freeze fixed.
- Stereo support fixed (was broken in previous release).
- Details
- Written by: evldhs
Recently there have been a number of rotozoom demos released in what's called truecolour or RGB screenmodes. They got quite large of 4x4 pixel blocks on screen and many of them look quite different from the others.
Atariscne.Org decided to have a look at the phenomenom a bit closer to see what's happening behind the scenes.
- Details
- Written by: evldhs
Read more: Atariscne.Org takes a look at the 4x4 truecolour rotozoom race
Write comment (13 Comments)Felice writes:
Just to let you know about the 1-day Cyber Legends 2025 event that'll be held on October 11th 2025 at Toddington Village Hall, Toddington, England. The location is close to the M1 and not far from Milton Keynes.
The event is largely about tinkering with old systems, although Atari is well represented among the group on all platforms. Organisers are involved with ExxosForum.
Opening hours are 10am until 7pm for exhibitors, and 11am until 6pm for visitors. There'll be a small fee to cover costs & tea and coffee is available.
Hope to see some of you from the Atari demoscene there :)
- Details
- Written by: Felice
While the veteran Atari party Silly Venture has been in the centre of attention for the past week, the even older party in Finland; Assembly, took place as well. Without big fanfare and drowned in the rest of the Assembly releases was a new Atari demo from Extream!
Check out some triangles and julias in the new Extream STe demo
The release is a short demo for Atari STe coded by Mace and impressive soundtrack by VonDemus.
💾 Download and comment on Demozoo
💾 Download and comment on Pouet
🔗 Run the demo in Atariaviary (Hatari in your browser)
- Details
- Written by: evldhs
Pre-amble Ramble.
We’re breathing hard on the exposed neck of an imminent departure for yet another Atari Party. A party report has been recklessly and publicly promised and will need to be delivered.
To get this ill-advised enterprise underway, I’m reviving a very old pre-party tradition. The collection of random, possibly party-related thoughts in the period before we set off. Yes, the stale nerdy stench of Maggie reports past erupts, with the latest Pre-amble Ramble!
It is Wednesday, 30th July 2025, the evening before departure. These things used to start days before, with breathless reportage of minor but party related events and chores. I’ve limited myself to the night before, so I’ll try to offer some random thoughts and insights.
- Details
- Written by: CiH
Read more: Sillyventure Summer Edition 2025 Report.
Write comment (17 Comments)The ADN party - for Atari Days Nancy - is a small but friendly convention that has been held in France for almost 15 years. Over a weekend about thirty ATARI fans will gather in a small and hot room to share their love and passion for a wide range of machines. To speak the truth I now feel a bit out of the demoscene for various reasons yet I am still fond of ATARI and I enjoy meeting cool people once a year so let’s go again! This year the event takes place from July 26th to 27th even though as usual you can be here on Friday night. As I write this I know that this time we will all think about our dear friend Shadow272 who passed away earlier this year. Our thoughts fly to his wife and family.
- Details
- Written by: sts
Read more: (Almost) Live Report from the ADN 2025 party
Write comment (4 Comments)When you're talking on a demoparty to people that left the scene for some time and they ask you with their big, sad, brown eyes "If I'd be about to restart development, what's new on the ST regarding hardware and tools and what of those things is available and supported?" you nowadays have to take a deep breath and start talking for hours. Apparently it's a really good time to restart ST scening* now, because we have quite a boatload of supported projects that help developing... things for our beloved machine.
To make those future endeavors easier, I replied to the aforementioned question and the aforementioned people (let's call them "the other Avenas" for now, and, as we all know, you can't say "no" to those Avena eyes) - "Okay, I'll make a list, but you have to bare with being the opener of an atariscne.org article". They incautiously agreed, and now we got a list. And this sad excuse of an intro.
- Details
- Written by: tIn
Read more: A handy list for people re-joining the scene
Write comment (15 Comments)Here we are in 2025 and this is the second (third?) of my unseen Sillyventure reports from times past. It finally gets its chance to shine on the hallowed pages of Atariscne. (How do you hallow web pages?)
Apart from the painstakingly time-stamped in-party alcohol consumption, this edition “enjoyed” a more dramatic journey home than usual. Want to find out more? Then read on! - CiH - April 2025.
DAY 1 - 12.36hrs, Friday 8th December.
Scene setting vignette from inside the party piece
We're at the party place, I've had coffee, there is Slivovitz and wine for later on. We've got front row seats, there's power there, and the Cuddly Demos are playing on the big screen on stage. Sitting on the left hand side is the Germanic presence of Front 6 and Samurai and the less Germanic presence of John 'Tronic' Cove. To the right sits my usual travelling companion and joint sharer of various (mis)adventures, Felice.
Right now, the party is in its early stages, with new arrivals trickling in. We've spotted Wiztom and various Finns, Rob Cowell, gWEm and shared a hotel breakfast room with Fready, of the Dutch Atari 8-bit cult. As all hotel made ‘eat until you burst’ style feats go, it was delicious.
- Details
- Written by: CiH
Read more: Missing and Found Department - The Sillyventure 2017 Report.
Write comment (1 Comment)Back in the late 80's and early 90's the first versions of the Atari STe machines carried the same DMA-chip as the previous ST computers. However, changes in the new machines made timings extremely close. Sometimes so close that the DMA-chip would fail writing data correctly. Atari recognized the issue and made an updated DMA-chip with larger toleranses for timing, which fixed the issue. Still there were a lot of previously sold machines with the old DMA-chip out there.
In modern times when you buy a used Atari STe, it's a gamble. Sometimes you get the new DMA-chip which works well. But more often than not, you get the old chip. Sometimes the old chip will work, sometimes not. The error might not show up directly, but the machine need to warm up for 15-30 minutes. To test the problem, simply save desktop settings, the partition will be screwed up after if the chip is bad. Remember to always use a spare drive that has no data!
Over 30 years later, after countless of speculation and various fixes; all from heatsinks, fans, patching of the DMA-chip and even replacing the processor, Christian Zietz of CHZ-Soft had enough and started a comprehensive investgation. In 2023 he presented the results and finally we knew what was wrong. There's no magic, no noise, no bad processors, just borderline timing that can differ from machine to machine. Atari knew the cause already back in the day and made the updated chip accordingly.
More amazingly, Christian dug even deeper and found out that Ataris programming recommendations for the DMA-chip might be another culprit that trigger the error. Atari recommends that two DMA-chip registers should be set with a single move.l instruction (for the pre-production ST DMA-chips). However, by setting these two registers separately with two move.w, the timings get slightly less tight and thus could perhaps help the bad STe DMA? Christian tested the theory on the open source EmuTOS that contains it's own harddisk driver with positive results.
From there, it's been sort of silent for a couple of years, no official EmuTOS with the software fix and no word from the best and most common driver (Hddriver) about implementing the improvement.
Until Sommarhack 2025 that is. Nerve of Ephidrena released the dmapatch.ttp program together with the DMA Bliss intro/cracktro. What the dmapatch.ttp does is reading the Hddriver binary, patching the move.l DMA-register access with two move.w instead and writes out a new driver.
Atariscne.Org was intrigued and made our own tests with Nerves patch program.
Check out the quite lengthy video below where we take an Atari STe with a bad DMA-chip, partition a disk with Hddriver 12 and see it fail!
Then run Nerves patch and try again, will it work?
Atariscne.Org fiddling with bad-DMA and dangerous demoscene patch programs
🔗 Nerve/Ephidrena Hddriver patch sourcecode
🔗 DMA Bliss cracktro (featuring dmapatch.ttp)
🔗 YMSE by Ephidrena (music from the video)
- Details
- Written by: evldhs
The Atari ST demo "Motus" was released in 2019 by SMFX. Back then it required 2 MB of RAM to run the demo.
spkr has reworked the code and memory handling so the demo is now working on a bog-standard Atari ST with 1 MB of RAM from a floppy disk.
Rumours say a couple of floppy disks with the demo on it are available on demand.
🔗 Download Motus final version
🔗 Download and comment on Pouet
- Details
- Written by: 505
The mysterious faulty DMA-chip in Atari STE has been matter of research from different sides. While many investigations resulted in the advice, to replace the DMA-chip by a "good" one, e.g. Czietz (chzsoft) has investigated into another direction and found that the problem may be solved in software instead. Further analysis of the different chips showed, that if the software driver part handles some edge cases differently, the chip works as it should!
Some nebulous guys picked up the theory and patched the famous and still developed HD driver by Dr. Uwe Seimet. The patch is not related to the product and to be used at own risk, obviously. However, if this proves to be true, we could see an end to the unfortunate "bad DMA-chip" tragedies resulting in massive data loss (talking straight from the horse's mouth).
The patch is accompanied by a lovely STE intro released at last Sommarhack.
🔗 Download and comment at Pouet
🔗 Dowload and comment at Demozoo
- Details
- Written by: 505
Lotek style writes:
A pretty unexpected sign of life comes from long lasting company THALAMUS. Surprisingly they are are still alive and it seems they are also focusing the retro-market.
It seems that original author Colin Porch was working on a sequel to 'Head over Heels' for years and it is coming to Amiga and Atari ST in 2025.
🔗 News on head over heels sequel on timextension.com
- Details
- Written by: lotek style
The new Atari ST version of the wonderful classic "Yoomp" by Dekadence is now subject to the current round of the "ST Offline Tournament" (STOT) - a monthly gaming competition being held on a monthly base on Atari-forum.com. The tournament rules can be summarized simply as: use your beloved ST (or emulator for the bad boys) to play a selected ST game in a fair but competitive surrounding, take photos of your CRT with the highscore and post them in the respective forum thread. The game is played for a month and the STOT organizer, Thorn, is managing the score table in the forum thread. Thanks for all this at this point! :-)
STOT is running since 2007 but fell in a slight winter sleep the past years. It's really refreshing to see a revival of the tournament with up to 11 participants in the last rounds. Sometimes game developers themselves adopt their games for the tournament or take part playing even (e.g. with Randominer, Faster or Chroma Grid). But no worries, if they are too good, they get disqualified ;) However, the format is a really nice opportunity to test and play new games and unknown classics and enjoy using the real hardware with others. Feel free to join the common experience of STOT anytime!
Currently chronicthehedhog leads the Yoomp excess with crazy 3.471 points, followed by wietze with 3.115 points. But we still have about two weeks to go.
🔗 STOT: Yoomp thread at Atari-forum.com
🔗 Download and comment Yoomp at Pouet
- Details
- Written by: 505
Those of us that have not been present at last Sommarhack party might have missed Ggn's new Friday night show.
But you can still enjoy it online 2 Fridays later!
In the video a number of Atari games are presented that were actually written by Atari demosceners, great idea! The video has been recorded on real hardware (Mega ST, Mega STE and Falcon) and features slides with additional information on the games. Be prepared for some surprises!
- Details
- Written by: 505
Hard to believe, but the FPGA-based Suska-board project is running for 20 years now. Feels like yesterday, that news on the project was spread the first time. I find it impressive, how Wolfgang Förster kept on working more or less continuously on it all the time and apparently, there are still new developments being made:
"The Suska-IV-B hardware is, of course, only as good as its FPGA core – the modeling within the FPGA. And we had something special in mind: it was meant to be a Falcon, and it became a Falcon+. Unlike the original, however, it features 48MB ALTRAM, 14MB RAM, a 32-bit data bus, a USB subsystem, Wi-Fi capability via PicoWIFI, an HDMI video interface, and various expansion options."
State of the Suska presented on their website
As shown, the Falcon modelling is advanced. However the DSP is still missing, but is being worked on, according to the Suska creators.
While we can expect that the final product will be for sale, there is also Zerkman's free and open source zeST project offering a ST clone on very cheap low end FPGA-hardware.
- Details
- Written by: 505
GliGli has created a patch for gwEm's well-established ymVST plugin for Digital Audio Workstations. Apparently a special feature has been asked for (well, by GliGli himself) so he just implemented it straight away. The author describes:
"it takes a MIDI file (exported from the DAW, from a project where ymVST was solely used), and a bunch of patch exports from ymVST, and makes a VGM or SNDH file out of it."
🔗 GliGli's ymVST midi + ymVST patch to VGM / SNDH converter
- Details
- Written by: 505
A new point and click adventure game was released today for the Atari ST.
Features of the game (snipped from the games website):
- A no-budget Lucasarts style point&click gameplay
- NOT a Sierra style point&click: no death, no softlock (hopefully)
- 2 languages (english or french)
- A little more than 100 screens!
- A little less than 20 different musics!
- Precisely 26 digitized sound effects (STE or F030 required)
- Only one ending
Animated gif image from the itch.io site
The game works on a regular Atari 520 ST, but requires a harddrive with at least 2.5 MB free space. STe and Falcon users get to enjoy digitized audio as well.
💾 Visit itch.io for more info and download
- Details
- Written by: evldhs
As you may have noticed Tat/Avena and Damo/RG have released a new demo last weekend.
There are many things to say about this wonderwork. But even better when the creators themselves speak up and explain what they did there! Tat just published an article about the technical background of the production and his take on the "curl-noise" on his blog.
🔗 Read more about "Short and Curly" on Tat's blog
🔗Download and comment "Short and Curly" on Pouet
🔗 Download and comment "Short and Curly" on Demozoo
- Details
- Written by: Tat and 505
