Scene.org Demoscene News Service

Latest news, links and releases from the active demoscene community. This week with special focus on the releases from the Deadline demoparty that took place in Berlin this past weekend.

https://youtu.be/WQcD4KOg5gQ

[Submitted by psenough]

[ Atariscne.org - News ] HighWire 0.5.0 Beta 4

A quick release, with 68000 and ColdFire builds
This is a quick release with various bug fixes. It is the first release with 68000 and ColdFire support, and those builds have not been fully tested yet. The 68000 build uses software floating point; the 68020–60 and ColdFire builds use the hardware FPU. NanoSVG, which draws SVG images, works in floating point, so SVG is slowest on the 68000. A 68000 build without SSL is also included, for local pages and for HTTP proxies such as WebOne.

New in this release: Copy and Paste for text, animated GIFs, an optional screen buffer, much more complete flexbox and grid, line-height, position: fixed, viewport units, styled buttons and text fields, live :focus styles, resumable downloads and run-time switches for SVG, WebP, HTTPS, GIF animation and the screen buffer.

The next full release will be HighWire 1.0, to avoid problems with another project.

Highwire showing the Wikipedia website, screenshot from the Highwire site

🌏 https://highwire-browser.github.io/

💾 Download Highwire 0.5.0 Beta 4

 

[ Demozoo ] Demozoo API will require an API key from 1st November

Due to an unsustainable amount of bot traffic, unauthenticated public access to the Demozoo API is being closed. From 1st November (or sooner if the bot situation escalates further), requests to the API will need to pass an API key. Maintainers of existing applications can update their code now, in advance of the switch-over - for more details of the change, and to set up your own API key, visit https://demozoo.org/account/api_keys/.

[ SceneSat upcoming shows & events ] The Chip SID Show SceneSat Edition #23 with Max Hall

25 Oct 2026, 20:00 CET – 21:00 CET

Audio · Channel: main

It's time for the twentythird episode of the SceneSat edition of the Chip SID Show!

All tracks recorded from the original 6581 and 8580 SID Chips, directly from the rear end of the Commodore 64 home computer.

Listen or watch on SceneSat · Full schedule

[ Atariscne.org - News ] The physical deep-art-ment - Side C

And Lotek Style's excursion in the realms of Atari related physical audio releases continues... enjoy!

 

Stu – Escape Return [Vinyl, 7", 45 RPM, Single, Limited Edition][Bleep Street – BLEEPST32]

https://www.discogs.com/de/release/11539404-Stu-Escape-Return-

Well known Musicmon-Wizard STU dropped another two-track bomb on 7" single in 2017. This is pure Atari chiptune madness pressed onto vinyl.

A Escape (Seven Inch Version)
B Return (Seven Inch Version)

[ Echtzeit – Digitale Kultur ] CYBERDELIA – C64 Demo Maker Weekend

On November 28-29 2026, as part of the event series CYBERDELIA, and neatly at the same time as Transmission64 demoparty, we invite you to the space of Odenwilusenz in Beringen!

You already have some programming experience, but are curious to code closer to the metal and create effects for the C64? You want to dust off your good old assembly knowledge amongst like-minded people, and dip your toe into the still-kicking Demoscene?

Or would you just like to have some fun with the C64 and try out stuff, to use your knowledge later in other hardware- or retro-projects?

Just come on over, we love to have you! Please sign up beforehand under the link below.

Program :

• Saturday, 10 am: Opening, brief introduction of participants, mentors and helpers, overview of hardware, tools and potential projects. Afterwards free tinkering with experienced mentors and resources by demosceners
• Saturday, starting 4 pm: Livestream: Transmission64 Online-Demoparty
• Sunday, starting11 am: breakfast and informal show-and-tell

Venue: Odenwilusenz, Hardmorgenweg 21, 8222 Beringen ( Directions, German)

Admission Fee: free of charge, recommended donation of 40 CHF (in advance via bank transfer, or cash on site)

Registration (mandatory): https://nextcloud.ezdk.org/index.php/apps/forms/s/gZNZsNLWJeDBD9psL7Z2FzoW

Contact: shana (at) echtzeitkultur (dot) org

Hardware/Software: Please bring your computer with you, or let us know if we will need to lend you one. We are recommending the following software to be installed in advance:

• Emulator: VICE
• Assembler: Kick Assembler (requires Java Runtime)
• Editor: VS Code + Kick Assembler Extension

We of course also help you on site in case you ran into problems with the installation.

We are looking forward to seeing you!

Continue reading (original blog post)

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Polyengine WIP

42Bastian keeps improving his Atari Jaguar engine. Another WIP showcasing video recording has been published featuring lovely Virgill Hively tracker music, so what can go wrong entering this 3D world for a moment?

 

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Updated SDL ports: OpenTyrian, HHeretic and HHexen

Back in 2010, when I released my HHeretic/HHexen for the first time (!), I had a dream: to be able to play those two games (and others: Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, ...) while listening to their great MIDI soundtracks. I knew next to nothing how MIDI works, how MIDI synthesis works, I only knew there is something called Timidity and that it is slow.

So for all those years I'd wished that somebody would create "something" to move this further.   A few years ago I purchased the great mt32-pi (which ended its development in a rather sad way...) for listening to ScummVM games' music (which I wholeheartedly recommend!) but it took me another couple of years to connect the dots: many of those SDL ports still had support for MIDI and even better, they often did it in an uniform way, via SDL_mixer! So that was only a "small" step to actually implement a native Atari MIDI driver there, link everything together and voila. HHeretic and HHexen got their music (same as did PMDoom, PMHeretic and PMHexen, btw).   OpenTyrian, that was another story: just a quick port, never heard of that game in 2010, almost a "./configure && make" job, done. Over time there were newer ports by insane/.tSCc. and medmed on AF but always from the stale sdl1 branch (2020; EDIT: In the meantime my pull request has been accepted!). So I didn't feel the need to update my own port (unlike HHeretic/HHexen which got updated in 2024).   Until now - I managed to backport all non-SDL2 commits from master back to the sdl1 branch so we've got all the cool improvements and bugfixes. I even optimised audio playback a bit, so the OPL emulation is almost usable on 68060@66 MHz (FireBee should shine). And yes, I do know about NokturnFM project, everything at the right time. :)   Those who know me are aware that I don't care very much about making quick SDL ports just for the sake of releasing something. I can promise you that these three projects have been extensively tested and thanks to them SDL contains tens of bugfixes and improvements.   So enjoy, play test and feel free to report any bugs. Currently I'm not aware of any SDL issues, the executables should fully work in GEM (window/fullscreen) and XBIOS (fullscreen), on all Atari machines with >= 8bpp output.

Open Tyrian in action in a GEM window running FreeMiNT

💾 https://github.com/mikrosk/opentyrian/releases/latest 💾 https://github.com/mikrosk/hheretic/releases/latest 💾 https://github.com/mikrosk/hhexen/releases/latest  

[ SceneSat upcoming shows & events ] Deadline

2 Oct – 4 Oct 2026

Live stream of the whole event. Showing a tropical paradise that is definitely not a banana republic.

Listen or watch on SceneSat · Full schedule

[ Echtzeit – Digitale Kultur ] Report: Graffathon 2026 – Coding becomes Art

The 2026 Bern Graffathon took place in a special atmosphere, namely in the premises of an art studio where primarily visual art is produced. «Coding goes Art» was the motto of this edition, which was very fitting for the location. The idea of bringing coding and art together in a new edition of the Bern Graffathon came up about a year ago and was enthusiastically supported by Echtzeit.

Once a good part of the 14 participants had arrived, we spent the day clarifying needs and offering technical solutions or support as they arose.

Tools available included a RaspberryPi, modern Linux laptops, a MIDI keyboard, and a graphics tablet. A curated library of books on topics such as generative art, graphics, mathematics, coding, street art, 8-bit retro culture, and more was available for all to use.

We invited people for a tour of the studio and showed the first floor and the artists who were working there in their small and larger studios, as well as their work to the interested Graffers. On the top floor, in the middle of the small urban garden, Moovie was able to set up his analogue camera to take a fun group photo.

The sunny terrace then provided a cosy spot for a relaxing lunch break. Refreshed and inspired by conversations, most people went back to their keyboards in the afternoon to continue working creatively.

In the afternoon, it was time to take a look at the exciting Xenium demoparty in Łódź, Poland, while working. A deadline was set for 7 p.m., but we were distracted from the final sprint by the welcome and delicious pizzas.

After all the demos were completed, there was a short review round and the audience favourites were determined by voting. Among them was an artist from the studio who looked at our demos from her perspective and was able to ask some unexpected questions to the hackers.

Unfortunately, the voting was not spared from glitches. Nevertheless, here are the final winners who were able to claim a sponsored prize:

Continue reading (original blog post)

[ Echtzeit – Digitale Kultur ] GRADE in Paris: An event co-organised by Echtzeit, the Cookie Collective and DOC Paris

Research meets Art meets Free Knowledge meets Activism meets Institutions

Too often our different groups work in silos, follow completely different ways of working and still all have the same goal: make space for digital art and culture, generate visibility, respect, acceptance and resources. We could achieve so much more, if we would exchange more and invite each other into our words.

Given that, we’ve been excited about the request by the COST-Action GRADE (Grassroots of Digital Europe) whether we would like to organise one of their network meetings in 2026 with a strong community focus. After having had the pleasure of taking part in their network and several conferences, we found a lack of francophone exposure (honestly, similar to Echtzeit itself). And after our previous great experience working with the Cookie Collective, we knew exactly who our dream partner for this event would be!

Thanks to Baya’s (Azertype) contacts to the cultural centres and artist scene of Paris and his experience in event tech, we were able to provide a unique programme of frontal presentations, artistic installations, workshops and exchange opportunities between our different worlds.

The presentations included anything from the work of GRADE, Open Science, -Software and -Knowledge topics, Community organising until background information on current artistic projects by the Cookie Collective, for example different live coding platforms, XR (Extended Reality) and Hard- and Software Hacking.

Additionally visitors had tons of fun with the Incontrolab installations by Emilie Breslavetz and Leon Denise ( https://playful-machines.com/), Crashboard 2000 and Orbital, as well as a live act in the evening by Azertype with his amazing body-extension for live coding!

Continue reading (original blog post)

[ Echtzeit – Digitale Kultur ] Report: Demoshow at chaos.jetzt #14 in Bern, August 8th, Chaostreff Bern

chaos.jetzt is the community platform for young hackers between 18 and 25 – so it was rather exciting to be invited to talk a little about the demoscene!

But... How would one go about presenting the demoscene to a younger audience without being either detached or cringe? It may come as a surprise to some of our Assembler-luminaries: evermore impressive high-end effects for evermore powerful PC-graphics cards tend to receive respectful nods instead of loud cheering these days.

In the shadow of Big Tech and accessible tutorials and communities, the past years have seen a resurgence of playing grounds like Neocities, cyberdecks and low-level programming languages particularly amongst young people.

To start of, a brilliant (and amusing) ressource to start building the talk was the archive of Atlantis Prophecy. This formed a bit of an excursion and illustration into the times when teenagers first made computing technologies their own, leading to a journey through the different platforms and technolgies arising thereafter, cummulating (for now) in the higher focus on creative style and self-restriction through sizecoding on the PC.

We showed demos that should not only present different platforms, but are also some fantastic inspiration for own experimentation, strive for perfection or also simply joy when exploring a platform:

• Area 5150 by CRTC + Hornet (2022) - https://demozoo.org/productions/311767/
• Eon by The Black Lotus (2019) - https://demozoo.org/productions/202831/
• A Statement on The Platform Wars by Moonbase Allstars (2019) - https://demozoo.org/productions/342318/
• Razor1911 by Razor 1911 (2026) - https://demozoo.org/productions/390060/

The presentation slides (in German) are available on Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2026-08_Demoszene-Intro-chaosjetzt.pdf

Continue reading (original blog post)

[ Amiga online magazines ] Born 50 years too late? An interview with Vasyl

All graphics and the picture © by Vasyl of Joker, Nah Kolor, TRSI. Introduction and questions by...

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 167. What's hot on the demo scene?

The demoscene is delivering hot, new tracker music and the parties are plentiful right now. DJ Daemon tells you what you need to know about the "AI demo-productions" debate, the new login feature for radio.ericade.net and how SceneSat is giving the scene a brand new feature: Shazam for your chiptunes.

Playlist:
00:00 ericade.radio - Time for Flashback, tracks from the past - with your host DJ Daemon
00:06 DJ Daemon introduces a brand new track that competed in Evoke 2026.
00:35 Bacter and Jeenio and Saga musix - Upwards
04:07 ericade.radio - Flashback, tracks from the past - here is a medley of nice tunes
04:13 DJ Daemon presents the first medley of today. Some really nice tunes comes your way.
04:31 Trough - Wip 11
05:35 ericade.radio - Flashback, tracks from the past jingle 1
05:41 Clearwater - Rise and shine
06:41 Enacostione - missing you
08:07 ericade.radio - Flashback, tracks from the past jingle 2
08:12 s32k - Peachs castle midi
09:25 DJ Daemon wonders in which castle the princess is hidden and talks about the new cool waveforms of the songs on the website.
10:28 JustOrb - Pollen eller nektar
14:39 DJ Daemon explains the debate about AI in demo productions and the controversy.
15:40 Falcon - Cosmic outflow
20:06 DJ Daemon lets you in about a thing that might be coming to SceneSat soon - Shazam for chiptunes.
21:06 dr. Snuggles - It's a booty time
24:09 ericade.radio - Flashback, tracks from the past - here is another medley of nice tunes
24:15 DJ Daemon presents the second medley of today.
24:57 Amaryllis97226 - Rain (Remake)
26:12 C20g - The risky rescue
27:44 Lord Louvre - Wasp kg19 remix
29:17 Lord Louvre - In87 sundays
30:59 DJ Daemon brags about ericade.radio's new comment and login features.
31:58 C512w - The real one
34:17 DJ Daemon thinks we should talk more about the new cool tools that have come available recently.
35:07 C20g - Inside my world
39:07 DJ Daemon and Coreus are going to Revision 2027.
39:56 River - Cavern
42:19 DJ Daemon thanks Ziphoid for the guest status on SceneSat.
43:11 C20g - Inside my world
47:35 DJ Daemon notes that more "Voice of the demo scene" episodes coming up.
48:29 Zabutom - How not do a co-op
50:59 DJ Daemon tells you to tell us what you think about the station.
51:40 BenxarPaq - Merged feelings
54:04 DJ Daemon leads you into the good night with the last two tunes.
54:39 Cerreur - Crack 06
57:03 Slinx92 - Purple sky
01:00:41 ericade.radio - We love the demo scene.

Production notes:
The latest from the demo scene autumn 2025.

Tags: 2026, Host: DJ Daemon, Just playing the music

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [News] Share your thoughts on your favorite demo scene songs and artists

Comment and engage with ericade. We now support the Scene ID or you can create your own account and then tell us about your favorite tunes or artists. We look forward to hear from you.

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [News] New feature: play our tunes directly in VLC as M3u-playlists. We show you how.

Ready-made M3U playlists for ERICADE Radio: every episode of the podcast Flashback, tracks from the past, the station's tracked music, and the demoscene modules behind it - cut by tag and by tracker format, playable in VLC and any other player that reads M3U.

[ scenemarket – latest listings ] Rockwell 2400 Baud Modem C1901 (1989) + Lemmings Sticker

[Offer] Peripherals · Trade (by nightmareNCE)

The Rockwell C1901 is a dial-up modem with an RJ11 connector, manufactured in the USA in 1989 and featuring an original "Lemmings" sticker. It has a maximum downstream data rate of 2400 bps, off coz. It is in well-maintained condition with only minor signs of use; please see the photos. The package includes the original box, the modem, and the manual; a power cable is not included.
─
MEET ME @ COMPARADE/MUNICH (6th-8th November 2026)
─
The sale does not include any warranty, guarantee, or right of return!

Interested? Claim this item — or list your own stuff for free.

[ scenemarket – latest listings ] Netgear Router RP614 (4-PORT)

[Offer] Peripherals · Trade (by nightmareNCE)

The Netgear RP614 router is a high-quality, robust device featuring four LAN ports and a maximum LAN data transfer rate of 100 Mbps. It is in like-new condition; please see the photos. The package includes the original box, router, stand, manual, CD, and power cable.
─
MEET ME @ COMPARADE/MUNICH (6th-8th November 2026)
─
The sale does not include any warranty, guarantee, or right of return!

Interested? Claim this item — or list your own stuff for free.

[ scenemarket – latest listings ] 3,5" Complete Collection (AMIGA/PC)

[Offer] Storage Media · Trade (by nightmareNCE)

I am selling my private, complete 3,5" collection from my swapping days on the AMIGA(aaa) and PC(suxXx). The condition ranges from like-new to used; please refer to the description and photos.

3x Empty floppy disk boxes (USED)
1x Floppy disk drive without cable (USED)
1x Floppy disk box with floppy disks (USED)
1x Pack of 10 blank floppy disks (NEW/OVP)
2x Floppy disk boxes with accessories (NEW/OVP)
─
MEET ME @ COMPARADE/MUNICH (6th-8th November 2026)
─
The sale does not include any warranty, guarantee, or right of return!

Interested? Claim this item — or list your own stuff for free.

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Reservoir Gods bring you a new Atari 680x0 binary dis-assembler.

rg-dis is a companion to our recent rg-asm; the McCartney to its Lennon; the Sporty Spice to its, err, Ginger Spice. Whilst rg-asm puts things together, rg-dis pulls them apart.

The unique thing about rg-dis is its deep knowledge of Atari hardware. It understands the full memory map of the machine; all the hardware registers, system vectors and operating system variables. It has full understanding of all the GEMDOS, BIOS and XBIOS calls. It knows all about AES and VDI and their data structures.

With this knowledge, it can annotate all operating system calls; input arguments and outputs.

And as it also understands assembly language, it can track how registers are stored and loaded, and assign contextually aware names to functions, making the disassembly far more readable.

It can also detect strings; both raw strings and VT52 enhanced ones (which it annotates), and gives them meaningful labels too.

Based on the same library that powers rg-asm, it can also show you cycle timing for instructions.

rg-dis has convenience functionality that allows you to disassemble files directly from containers like ZIP files without unzipping them. It also understands common Atari disk image formats, and you can disassemble files directly from them.

Another useful disk based feature - it can disassemble bootsectors directly, or full raw disk images, or any range of tracks and sectors you specify. Very handy for working with raw disk images.

rg-dis is a single binary with no dependencies - just unzip and run.

This is the second in our range of tools for Atari developers. More to come.

🔗 https://rg.atari.org/tools/rg-dis/index.html 

[ Atariscne.org - News ] SuperVidel gets the much deserved software treatment

... perhaps 10 years late but hey, it does. ;)   I don't remember how long it actually took me to convince / exhaust him, but one day in Spring 2019 PeP gave me access to his sv_drivers git repository. Naturally, I jumped right onto it let it sit on my disk for another seven years. :-)   A couple of months ago, while working on a totally unrelated project, I remembered about this repo and out of curiosity (the famous first words ;)) I tried to compile at least sv_xbios.prg (unfortunately, there was no history, just a random dump of its 2019 state). Of course there were a ton of errors, referencing an ancient mintlib, requiring native Atari tools and gcc etc. And most likely I would have given up if it weren't for Claude -- I let it fix them, one by one, every time with a careful code review.   It took Claude maybe 15 minutes to get me into a proper cross-compilation friendly state (of course, with my previous verification that I can produce 1:1 identical builds as the last official release). And after that... I was hooked. One bugfix after another, with Claude disassembling NVDI drivers, comparing code paths for different bit depths, relentlessly searching for stuff which would have taken me weeks to find and analyse. Then I could design a fix, verify it and move onto the next bug (yeah, there were quite a few!)   When I was done (after ~2 weeks) I got this crazy idea: how hard would it be to actually include SV_XBIOS.PRG into CT60 TOS itself? As it turned out, not very. Literally less than 100 lines of code.   Parallel to that (what are you supposed to do while waiting for Claude's responses, right?) I got an even crazier idea: first I let Claude design a SVEthLANa driver for Linux. I was blown away to see that the whole "driver" was basically just a few configuration settings because the OpenCore MAC unit, which Nature used in the FPGA, has Linux support already (which actually makes sense, how else would have the OpenCore authors tested it, right?)   Seeing that its transfer rate was much better than FreeMiNT's, what about porting the whole driver from Linux to FreeMiNT to see whether its (presumably) cleaner design wouldn't help here? At first, the numbers weren't very encouraging but it got better very quickly (upload = sending from Atari to PC, download = receiving from PC to Atari):

1. Baseline (Linux-m68k current kernel's driver for FW010): upload 700 KB/s, download 1.4 MB/s
2. FW009 driver: upload 3274 KB/s, download 710 KB/s (that 710 KB/s was actually a driver limit, due to a bug in its implementation)
3. FW010 driver by Nature: upload 135 KB/s (!), download 1.6 MB/s (here we can see that download more or less matched but upload was totally broken)
4. Ported driver: upload 42 KB/s (!!!), download 3 MB/s
5. After discovering and working around four hardware issues with Svethlana's DMA: upload 4 MB/s, download 3 MB/s (huh!)

Yup, you read it correctly, FreeMiNT now beats Linux by a factor of 2-4 and surprisingly, it isn't because the Linux driver doesn't contain the workarounds (it uses a different way of preparing packets so the bugs are not so visible there).   An interesting fact: 32bpp resolutions, at least the 1920x1080 I have been using, seems to upset Svethlana's DMA in a much more visible way. My fixes are almost useless in 16bpp but in 32bpp I can see all of them working their ass off to keep the packets flowing (that also means that there is a slight performance decrease, about 200 KB/s in both directions due to retransmissions).   Where to get all this great stuff you ask?

• grab Linux 7.3 when released, (almost) everything has been pushed upstream (yeah, I also added some framebuffer fixes; of course, with Linux being Linux and m68k being a totally obscure platform, you are most likely going to end up with compiling everything by yourself... not so hard with docker and debian's multiarch support but still, nothing for newbies)
• SuperVidel Drivers 1.00 (unpack & replace your existing files)
• CT60 TOS 3.00 (built-in SV XBIOS, with a few fixes/additions inherited from CT60 TOS 1.03f which has been released today, too)
• New SVEthLANa driver is now part of FreeMiNT snapshots

Look at my hastily filled desktop with random utilities to see this in action! :-)  

[ Atariscne.org - News ] TECHPUBS archives finally readable by everyone

Hi everyone,   this was on my TODO for a very long time. I'm sure that you are aware of the existence of Atari HQ CD-ROM and various leaked source code and documents available at Lonny Pursell's fantastic Atari Document Archive.   On one rainy afternoon I went through all of the folders and noticed a lot of interesting files there, related to the area I'm heavily invested in: Sparrow, Falcon030, Falcon040, Microbox. But they were all those ancient formats, as Christian Zietz had already found out. Since the schematics were already decoded, what about the rest?   Namely: what I had saved (frankly, I can't vouch that I had saved *all* of the files, maybe I skipped some, I don't remember anymore) is 710 files:

• PageStream 2: 209
• Plain text, incl. 68000 assembler source: 148
• GEM Metafile: 104
• DynaCADD 2.0: 91
• AutoCAD DXF: 78
• WordPerfect 4.1 for Atari ST: 26
• CorelDRAW 2 (pre-3.0 format): 21
• Microsoft Write for Atari ST (Mac Word 1.x format): 12
• WordPerfect 5.0/5.1 for DOS: 11
• 1st Word Plus: 4
• AutoSketch, HP-GL: 3

Initially I planned to obtain each program (usually an Atari application) , open the file, read it and in the best case convert it into something readable (like print to PDF via Hatari or so), in the worst case at least document my findings. As you can imagine, this is a really time-consuming job and every time I started I also quitted very soon afterwards.   However since I have gotten accustomed to using Claude for various boring tasks, it was just a matter of time to find this TODO and let throw Claude at it. To be honest, I didn't expect much: maybe some summary which Claude decodes from the proprietary formats using brute force or something like that. Its output (Claude Opus 5 1M context + xhigh thinking) blew me away. It converted every single file into a perfectly readable output, using a custom-made python script harness!   So that uncovered a whole new world: weekly status reports, memos and faxes, service guides, hardware specs, manufacturing orders and even 245 drawings exposing assembly views, PCB silkscreens, pinouts, flowcharts, diagrams and even the nice logo you see above.   Since it is not in my power to read through all of it now (I'd rather code, you know...) I asked Claude for one more favour: to create a story from all of this data. And again, I was blown away. See for your self!   My updated Sparrow page with the story about Falcon origins: https://mikrosk.github.io/sparrow   Complete converted archive: https://mikrosk.github.io/sparrow/techpubs (each SVG has a text version for easy grep'ing)   I'm pretty sure there's a lot to explore, Claude is infamous for skipping / not understanding the whole context so don't rely on its generated Falcon history!

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Atari System Emulator v1.12

Hi!

I've just released ASE v1.12 with a bunch of emulation fixes and a few new features I think are pretty cool.

The biggest one is probably the new ST display settings. I've added several shaders for a more retro look or cleaner image, but there's one I've been working on especially for ST emulation: Colorize Dithering.

It detects common dithering patterns, like checkerboards, and turns them into solid colors and gradients. That means some games and images can appear to show colors well beyond the original ST palette, in some cases even tens of thousands of colors. Combined with Anti-Aliasing, it can make some 3D games look surprisingly different.

I've published a video in my youtube channel showing how those features works:

Drive B is now emulated too. Adding it also fixed quite a few compatibility issues with games that tried to detect or access a second floppy drive.

There's also a new Bitmap Explorer under the Debug tab. It lets you browse ST RAM graphically and extract things like sprites, tiles and screens from games. Every game stores graphics differently, so it won't work perfectly everywhere, but it's already usable with a lot of games. I have more improvements planned for future versions.

Thank you!
Best regards

💾 Get the emulator and the sources on GitHub

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Interview with Vasyl/Joker

A**** online magazines have published an interview with Vasyl/Joker, who was showing an impressive presence in form of skillful pixel graphic entries at various Atari parties during the last years.

Vasyl's Atari ST graphics entry for Sillyventure 2026 summer edition

Read more about his views on the Polish scene, platforms, motivations and (drumroll) AI in the interview.

🔗 Interview with Vasyl

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Chiptunes and AI

I've been very busy lately with the development of a generic chiptune player for our beloved Atari ST. And when I say develop, I don't mean that I developed it like I did in the old days. Actually, all the code was written by Opus 5 under my 'guidance'.

Now, does that make me feel proud? How does this actually make me feel? But more importantly, how does that make you feel? I know that there are sceners out there who don't want to touch AI, or anything that is 'tainted' by it. Or at least, they draw the line right at retro computing. I hope you still want to speak to me.

What's the point in using AI, some say: the whole fun of retro computing is living it like the good old days, you know, by writing all the code yourself.

Yes, writing code is great fun - I get that - but I also happen to like chiptunes. But I suck at writing chiptunes.

Don't get me wrong though, code can be a beautiful thing in itself. But nobody cares to see my beautifully crafted code (or wants to). They also cannot hear my code, or feel it, or anything like that. I've also had managers in the past say hurtful things about my work. Like, who cares about code? If it works, ship it! (for some definition of 'it works')

Does code really matter? Did it ever? Does it matter now?

I do strongly believe code does matter. Actually, I deeply care about it - as a means to an end.

Here is a bit of an anecdote: some of you sceners may know me as Rapido. I am the author of the so-called '3D delta polygon' routines. I had this idea when I was waiting for the last train that never came, so I had a lot of thinking time. But as they say, ideas are cheap, execution is what matters. And oh boy, the development of delta polygons was a real time sink.

Looking back, I've done maybe six productions in my entire demo 'career', and that's not a lot. I did have a lot of ideas (really!) that never came to fruition, because... wait... this idea is a three-month project - let's just drop it.

But now, with AI, I can finally execute all those ideas cheaply! And that is great, right?

Right? (AI psychosis kicking in.)

OK, which ideas should I spend my precious tokens on? And does it actually matter? Because nobody cares, nobody cares about code.

And then it hit me. What if I put my skills (and +200 hours of 'prompting') to good use? And by good use I mean: create tools for artists, so they can create their beautiful art.

The bottom line:
Are you a chiptune artist? Then you may like what I've built. Coming soon....