Missing and Found Department - The Sillyventure 2017 Report.
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- CiH
Here we are in 2025 and this is the second (third?) of my unseen Sillyventure reports from times past. It finally gets its...
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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- Written by: CiH
Read more: Running some Falcon 030 productions directly on a Falcon 060!
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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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- Written by: Suavek
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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- Written by: evldhs
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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- Written by: 505
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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- Written by: 505
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
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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.
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- Written by: 505
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).
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- 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.
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Read more: Atariscne.Org takes a look at the 4x4 truecolour rotozoom race
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 :)
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- 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)
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- 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.
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- Written by: CiH
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.
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- Written by: sts
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.
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- Written by: tIn
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.
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Read more: Missing and Found Department - The Sillyventure 2017 Report.
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)
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- Written by: evldhs
