An Ancient Bird Flies Home!
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- CiH
Warning! This was expected to be a long text, and so it turned out as such. If you’re trying to read this in one go, then a...
SV 2016
It’s another Sillyventure past times report. Another one that remained hidden in the archives until now. This one was mostly made, as it happened.
It was a pretty faithful diary of my alcohol consumption and state of intestinal health during that period. Oh, and quite a few party happenings as well.
I liked my writing from that period, seemed to be livelier back then and less, tired, than more recent efforts.
CiH - April 2025
#This bit is not in realtime!#
Good morning, evening, or dead of night, whenever you are reading this new Maggie issue. This is the official CiH authored realtime party report, with non-realtime later on additions, for the eagerly anticipated Sillyventure 2016 party. (Not to be confused with the realtime article, which is an entirely separate document created by a lot of people, sometimes in co-ordination with their fingers and brains, but often not!)
So is this going to be another party of our dreams, or a never-ending silicon nightmare? Well read on and discover.
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Read more: Past Glories - A lost and re-found Sillyventure Report from 2016
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exxos has released version 3.03 of nrvpack, a free online executable compression service for Atari ST PRG/APP/TOS/TTP files. Upload a file and get five compressed variants to choose from, each with different size/speed tradeoffs.
The packer and all 68000 decompression stubs were written from the ground up using AI. Months of development went into the compression engine — including optimal parsing with dynamic programming, lit-cost sweeps, context-width tuning, and extensive testing of preprocessing transforms and encoding strategies to squeeze every last byte out of typical 68k executables.
On large real-world programs the best format achieves around 2.75:1 compression ratio. A fast-depack option is also available that decompresses in under a second on a stock 8MHz 68000. All formats support colour-cycling raster bars during decompression and run on any ST/STE/TT/Falcon.
The service is free and requires an exxos forum login.
🔗 https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/nrvpack/
🔗 https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8312
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Felice writes:
Just to let you know, there's now a new website for the Cyber Legends events held in Toddington, England.
The url is https://www.cyberlegends.co.uk
The next event will be on Saturday October 10th and we'd love to see you there. Tickets should be on sale soon.
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Last week Grawitacja 2026, an "8-bit gamejam" took place in Krakow, Poland. The event featured a 36 hours game development competition. Our friends over at Atarionline.pl have recorded and published a video from the live presentation of the entries. About 8 Atari games were shown. Results and photos are available on the event website.
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kallebl0mquist published a ChatGPT Client for the Atari ST, so also modern and hip work environments can be migrated to the Atari platform.
Dumbing down with class, using this seductive keyboard
(Picture by kallebl0mquist)
From Github:
I have been building a GEM-based LLM chat client for the Atari ST in GFA BASIC 3.5E. What if an Atari ST could talk to a modern LLM? Not a fake retro skin in a browser, no emulator (though I love Hatari!), but my actual old Atari Mega STE. GFA BASIC was developed by Frank Ostrowski in 1986 and was hugely popular among ST users at the time. So I chose it in the hope that there might be still some resources out there. Did I learn GFA Basic properly for this project? No, but i dug out all the old docs and books and forced codex to learn it. Ha,ha. Poor thing.
The setup :
- Atari Mega STE in high-res monochrome
- GFA BASIC 3.5E on the Atari side
- Raspberry Pi and python 3.12 on the other side
- Nullmodem serial cable (StarTech 30cm USB Nullmodem Seriell Adapterkabel, USB-A auf RS232 DB9)
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Zeme just finished editing and fixing the subtitles of the Fried Bits 3 recording of a videotape found in his storage. Great insights into one of the most famous Atari parties of the era and possibly the pinnacle of the Atari Falcon demoscene. Thanks for sharing this, Zeme!
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Given the current developments in the scene and the impending loss of the
host 'untergrund.net', I have decided to accept an offer from the Echtzeit
association and we have moved the entire archive to a new server.
You can now find the Fujiology archive here:
Big thanks goes to Echtzeit (Psykon and Unlock) for their fast help.
Watch out if you still have links to 'untergrund.net'... they might
be gone soon.
🔗 Echtzeit Digitale Kultur
🔗 Fujiology archive
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Krupkaj writes:
After six months, Michal has released a new version of his FreeMiNT distribution for 32-bit Atari computers.
This release uses the HDDriver demo as its disk driver, with Uwe providing a special version specifically for the distribution.
A notable new addition is stool, a MiNT tool that replaces the uiptool utility known from TOS. It provides web-based access to Atari disks.
All included GEM/TOS tools are now stored on the GEMDOS C: partition. The distribution also features an experimental 060 kernel, improved SCSI write support, RAW access through devfs, and plenty of other improvements.
The image is available on GitHub.
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← Register Allocation and the Cost Model
Fixing Post-Increment Addressing
Some years after high school, me and AiO worked at the same company for a while. I spent a lot of time at his apartment in Vimmerby, watching demos on my Falcon030 and his accelerated Amiga, playing Elite Frontier, and making grand plans for projects that mostly never shipped. I was going to write a Worms clone called Grubs, built around fractal-generated terrain and a neat paralax scrolling trick. In the end the only game released from that apartment was DB Phone Home, a 4K side-scrolling platformer for the Falcon. But the thing I remember most is reading AiO's copy of the MC68060 User's Manual.
The 68060 can not only do a multiply in two clockcycles, but execute two instructions at once!? Motorola called it superscalar, and I thought it was the most exciting thing in the world. I imagined what an Atari with this beast could do, and where the 68070 would take this — even wider issue, more parallelism, the same trajectory the industry was already on with the Pentium and the PowerPC. Of course, the 68070 never came. ColdFire does not quite count for me. Our beloved CPU family ended with the 68060, and the dream of wider superscalar m68k died with it.
But the industry kept going. GCC optimizes for that dream-made-real on other architectures: x86-64, ARM, RISC-V. Independent instructions that hardware can overlap or even reorder to execute over half a dozen instructions per cycle on for example an Apple Silicon M3/M4. This all works, as long as there are no data dependencies between consecutive operations. And this is where it goes wrong for us.
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Read more: GCC for asm Experts (and C/C++ Intermediates) - Part 5
So you’re thinking that at the big multi-format Revision Easter party, there isn’t anything of compelling interest for us Atari fans? That amongst the system smashing Amiga and PC releases, there simply isn’t anything there for *our* platform?
A first glance may make you leap to that conclusion, but a slower and more considered examination reveals there are traces of Atari and Atarians. We can be found in all sorts of unexpected places!
This is what we discovered for Easter 2026.
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The website for Sillyventure 2026 SE is online, featuring a new layout and several interesting new items and photos.
So far about 30 people have registered. The party itself will take place from 30.07 - 02.08.2026.
🔗 Sillyventure 2026 SE website
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YesCrew has released a bugfixed ST/TT version of their "Whack a Virus" game, fixing some minor issues (clean return to desktop).
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Anima aka Percy/Light, proven specialist for Atari image online conversion tools also published "Spectrum 512 painter", a painting and conversion tool for Spectrum 512 pictures in a nice GEM appearance.
GEM layout in your browser (and yes, I know, the dull screenshot doesn't cover the colorfulness possible with this tool)
🔗 Spectrum 512 Painter on Github
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Register Allocation and the Cost Model
The m68k has 15 usable registers: d0-d7 and a0-a6 (a7 is the stack pointer, and sometimes a6 is also reserved as a frame pointer). For a CPU from 1979, this is actually quite generous; the 6502 has three, the Z80 and 8086 have seven or eight. So 15 should be plenty, right?
Not so fast. We have two register files with different capabilities. A pointer must be in an address register to dereference it. Most arithmetic must happen in data registers. For many use cases, we effectively have 7 or 8 registers to choose from, not 15. And if our function calls others, the ABI reserves the caller-clobbered registers, effectively leaving only ten registers: d3-d7/a2-a6 for free use with fastcall. When we run out, the allocator spills to the stack: on 68000, each 16-bit spill costs at least 16 cycles (8 to read, 8 to write back), and 32-bit values adds another 8. In a tight loop, it adds up fast.
When you write assembly, register allocation is intuition. You look at a routine and think: I need this value for the next three instructions, then I can reuse the register for something else. You juggle lifetimes in your head, naturally overlapping short-lived values. Teaching a computer this intuition is the fundamental challenge. The answer is to build a graph of which pseudo-registers are live simultaneously; two pseudos that overlap in lifetime interfere and cannot share a register. Then color the graph with K colors, one per available register, starting with the cheap caller-clobbered regs. When 19 pseudos from put_pixel compete for 15 registers, some will not fit — especially once you account for the data/address split — and those get spilled.
So how does GCC make the best of a difficult situation?
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Read more: GCC for asm Experts (and C/C++ Intermediates) - Part 4
Here are a few snapshots from Revision, provided by Lotek Style and Samurai. Thanks for sending those in!
Atarisceners spotted (from top left to down right): Havoc, Samurai, Havoc again (there can never be enough Havoc), NebulaH, Gunstick, Sgt Slayer (Atrocity!), JAC!, Lotek Style - not on the photo: Spiny and Havoc's friend with the sun glasses from last year ;p
A classy group photo from the Revision 2026 photo wall:
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The Outline Party 2026 will take place from May 14th to 17th! The freshly baked website is now available, so better get out your remote controls!
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Why is Atariscne.org reporting on a release of a new Amiga diskmag eh, CiH?
Well, yours truly offered to help out a friend, a little side-project, as it were.
‘Adventures in Retro’ is a long term project, created by a very good friend known as ‘Woodycool’ or Duncan, in civilian life. He’s a UK based retro-fan, primarily Amiga, but he also takes in a wide range of 8-bit interests, such as Commodore C16/Plus 4 and Amstrad CPC. He also owns and enjoys an Atari ST or two, so he’s living up to the ‘cool’ part of his nom-de-scene.
Anyway, I’ve been tempted to add a few articles, the sort of thing that wouldn’t fit easily in to atariscene.org. There is the future possibility that this mag could be released in other formats, including Atari.
If you have one of the other 16 bit machines, here’s a link to the home page, with a download of the first issue. - https://www.adv-in-retro.uk/ - It’s pretty compatible with most Amiga’s.
I do have an Amiga 600 waiting to be resurrected and slightly upgraded. I’ve been using the OSZX Online Amiga emulator in the meantime - OSZX Online Emulator
Anyway, enjoy!
CiH - Atariscne.org - April 2026.
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It's Easter time - and of course Revision party is taking place. A few Atari sceners will be present. Maybe we can share some impressions from the party later.
Here is an Atarian's management summary of the timetable:
Saturday
- 6 pm - compo block including oldschool music compo and ASCII compo
- 10 pm - compo block including Amiga intro, 256 byte and oldschool demo
Sunday
- 4 pm - compo block including oldschool graphics
- 6 pm - compo block with oldschool 4k intro and game compo
- 9:30 pm - compo marathon for the fittest, including Amiga demo compo
🔗 Official Revision time table
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The one and only Exocet has published an interesting résumé about his demoscene activities during the past 30 years on his blog 16 coleurs in French language.
In this summary you will find some interesting statistics, views, production examples and demo party photos.
"Vroum Paf" - a hidden gem, first place at Outline 2007, 16 colors
According to the visualized statistics Exocet had two major phases of activity, which might be typical for many sceners. One longer and rather normally distributed episode around the year 2000, when many graphics for demos like Odd stuff, many contributions to other groups like Alive team, YM-Rockerz, DHS, JFF, MJJ etc. were created. This period also originated many of the (bitter-)sweet character pictures in unique Exocet style.
Exocet's "Lapinots" - a classic and editor's all time favorite, among many!
And after a longer multi-year break around the year 2010 we witnessed a less excessive, but highly appreciated constant comeback on many different platforms until today.
"Enemy At The Gate Array" - winning picture at Shadow party 2025 oldschool graphics compo (Thomson T08 16 colors) - as Exocet puts it in the related text file, this one was "rushed with Grafx2 in a single day at the party place"
"Rate my ride" - That cat knows how to chose number plates.
🔗 30 years of demoscene on Exocet's blog "16 coleurs"
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Peter Kaczorowski published a tool for accessing and modifying Atari 8-Bit floppy disk images (ATR). This can be very handy for extracting, adding, updating or removing files from ATR images, directly via command line. The tool supports different kinds of Atari file systems and can be integrated in Midnight commander as well.
The functionality of atrfs reminds a bit to Krystone's extremely practical online disk image extractor for the bigger brother, the Atari ST with its ST/MSA-images. A similar browser based tool for visually investigate ATR images can be found here.
While the preference of a graphical or command line interface may be a matter of taste, the command line approach could turn out more sustainable regarding availability on the long term?
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- Written by: 505
