68k inside from the inside (a party report shall we say)
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- ggn
When Finnish group Dekadence asks people to party with them in their home country, it's very hard to ignore their call for...
The Stockholm-based and usually more PC and Commodore centered Edison party 2026 brought a surprising release: "Tic Tac Finger" by Five Finger Punch (FFP) for Atari XL/XE with 64 KB of RAM. The demo is a very positive multipart demo supported by catchy Maze music. You will find refreshing ideas and a demo playing a bit with the Atari-Commodore rivalry.
The demo ranked first place in the oldschool demo compo.
Thanks for this lovely surprise, FFP!
đź”— Tic Tac Finger on Demozoo
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- Written by: 505
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It’s time for the next summer party!
After the small(ish) but perfectly formed Sommarhack party at the start of July, the onset of Silly Venture Summer Edition is crashing through for the end of the month.
I’m going to let the big man himself, Michal M. tell us more.
Here's the link to the main site landing page.
There is also an Atari Forum topic for the party.
Things to take note of especially.
T-Shirt ordering stops on the 22nd July at 08.00hrs. T-Shirts can be collected in person or posted later on.
The link to upload competition entries on the main site is now available, after some delays.
It looks like there is more happening this time around, than at the last summer edition, if rumours are correct?
Unfortunately I’m not going this time around, due to a combination of personal and wider issues, but we’ll see for November, eh!
CiH - For Atariscne, July 2026.
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- Written by: CiH
Mikro writes:
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When I was working on a new ScummVM release, I realised that its new features would allow users not only run ScummVM on standard TT/Falcon but also to easily play sampled music directly from a CD. So instead of the usual testing setup (Falcon with CT60) I booted into the 030 mode with intention of recording a nice video of me playing The Secret of Monkey Island off my SCSI CD drive.
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Imagine my surprise when all I got was a black screen as soon as I started the game. It took me quite a while (and dedusting many of the long forgotten memories of how to set up various CD drivers like ExtenDOS, Spin!, SCSI Tools or Egon CD...) to pinpoint the exact culprit (it would work nicely in CT60, FreeMiNT, EmuTOS, from IDE HDD drive, from USB CD drive, ...) but in the end it was a small but nasty issue in ExtenDOS CD.BOS SCSIDRV driver.
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Fortunately, Roger Burrows is still around and kind enough to take a look so I'm happy to announce that he has just released ExtenDOS 4.11 which fixes the nasty issue:Â http://www.anodynesoftware.com/e4/main.html.
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So I was able to record that Video after all.
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- Written by: Mikro
At Sommarhack earlier this month Troed of SYNC released a new tool that will be of help to many people.
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Have you ever wondered which tune plays in a demo screen or cracktro? Â Wading through dozens and dozens of SNDH-files before you finally find the correct one.
Well those days are over.Â
Send a recording of the music to Chip 'n Tell and it will identify the track in seconds, or it can even work in continuous mode to identify tracks live as they play.
Chip 'n Tell by Troed / SYNC
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- Written by: evldhs
After mikro released his updated TOS 1.03e he also bugged me to dedust my old sources.
So here is the current CT60 TOS 1.05 20260715 by tSCc.
CT60 Boot v1.05 20260715 boot screen
CT60 Boot v1.05 20260715 setup tool
Rebased on 1.03e with further 1.05 fixes merged.
mikro ist schuld!
Get it at https://insane.tscc.de/
Changelog at the github link on my page.
-insane/Rabenauge^tSCc
Â
đź”— Download at Insanes website
đź”— Sources and changelog at Github
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- Written by: Insane
Krupkaj writes:
There was not only an Atari ST demoparty this summer, but also an Atari 8-bit party in central Poland, held in Licheń Stary.
We enjoyed four great days filled with competitions, a barbecue and even two live concerts. Among the released intros, graphics and music entries was Level, an excellent new demo for the Atari 8-bit.
đź”—Â Lost Party 2026 on Demozoo
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- Written by: Krupkaj
So there's been some slow days here at the site, the editors are clearly dozing off at a beach somewhere... Or?
Nah, we've been busy going to demo parties, of course.
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Here's a quick roundup of the latest ones!
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Sommarhack 2026 (July 3-5)
The only remaining Atari-exclusive demoparty in the nordics (as we know of) had it's 18th edition in Grådö, Dalarna, Sweden happen at the usual venue, Malmgården.
For once we were blessed by the weather gods and had a glorious Saturday where the visitors could enjoy the barbecue without being soaked and come back from the Tipspromenad with dry shoes. Amazingly the mosquitos had mostly gone on vacation as well.
Sommarhack late at night
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Nearly exactly a year ago, Nerve / Ephidrena released DMA Bliss v0.1 to address the infamous STE DMA problem: https://atariscne.org/news/index.php/ste-bad-dma-atariscne-org-testing-a-software-fix.
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Around that time I was playing with the idea of creating something similar for a separate list of issues I had found in HD Driver. Seeing Nerve's work being open sourced was the push in the right direction however I was very busy and additionally, around that time HD Driver 12.70 was released which fixed most of the issues, taking steam from my motivation to look at it again.
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Well, one year later still seeing the IDE I/O rate crippled I decided to take a look after all:Â https://github.com/mikrosk/hddriver-patch/releases/tag/v0.2.
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This patch dramatically improves HD Driver's I/O on Atari IDE, adds missing cache flush after SCSI transfers on Falcon with 040/060 CPU and finally, updates the STE DMA fix for recent (12.70+) versions as the original one wouldn't work anymore.
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Use at your own risk, as I do. ;)
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P.S. I cordially invite HD Driver's author to take my code and adapt them into the official product. New routines are provided in the source code comments, free for grabs.
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Juli 3rd, 2026
17:01, The Paranoid:
After a very relaxed start on Thursday evening with take-away food and involving primarily the organizers and the few guests that already made it to Grädo, the party officially started today at 14:00.
People keep coming in, with Doclands of Overlanders, Rapido of Synergy and (potentially) Mr. Pink of the Reservoir Gods making a long awaited comeback. With the game compo already running and people busy preparing their compo entries, the heat is building up - which is much appreciated as its only 16 degrees outside and raining every now and then.
18:49, The Paranoid:Â
Breaking news from Sommarhack! Due to the unexpected and heavy rain, the barbequeue, that had been started already, is being cancelled. Instead, soup will be served soon...".
22:28, cG: no comment
Juli 4th, 2026
12:07, The Paranoid:
Update from Sommarhack 2026:
This year's Game Compo was about taking revenge on all mosquitos having harrased Sommarhack visitors over all these years by having the player kill dozends of coloured mosquitos in the world's best Galaga-inspired game named "Xenowings" on the Atari Jaguar. Besides this, Mr. Pink of the Reservoir Gods fame did make the much awaited return but has not yet released the almost finished
game "Republic" yet.
"Tipspromenad" is about to start under a crystal blue sky in front of a crystal blue lake (not to be mistaken unless you want to get very wet).
19:46, Nerve and spkr provide info on Compo Stream! Enjoy!
20:27 PM, The Paranoid:
The crystal blue sky was as persistent as the ghost virus on early PD disks so that the attendants of Sommarhack gave the term "The real party is outside" a completely new meaning. Unlike yesterday, when Havoc was suspected of having frozen stiff as he was not coming inside. The crowd is now gathering in front of the big screen for the first series of competitions and eagerly typing in
4 digit votekeys into Partyman for purely digital voting.
July 5th, 2026
00:21, The Paranoid:
After a beautiful mid-summerish sun(almost)down, Sommarhack is enjoying a lively DJ set by gwEm and Crazy Q, attracting the party people while completely failing to scare the mosquitos away. Before that, competitions were plentiful with the Sommarhack-themed categories such as "32KB music", "640x480 256 colour GEM palette Photos" or "33 seconds short demos" and, of course, the usual wild, music, graphics and demo competition of which especially the latter caused havoc (no offense intended) - borders were being broken (again), emulators were being sabotaged and more colours were poured over the screen than the regular SC1224 was designed to show. In a similar fashion, the legacy soundchip was pushed to produce sounds unheard of (in its very original meaning). The results of this competition are being awaited shortly, so this is The Paranoid signing off.
11:55, The Paranoid:
As a side note: Famous Psycho Hacker Grazey actually won a round trip through major cities of europe! Even though he cannot remember having entered any contest, his flight operator has decided he has and cancelled his original flight. We congratulate Grazey and wish him a good and safe trip - wherever it might lead him.
đź”— Sommarhack 2026 Results and releases on Demozoo
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- Written by: Various Sommarhackers
Diego from the SidecarTridge project realised a couple of tech demos, showcasing how a video stream generated on the respective Rapsberry Pi Pico is displayed on the Atari ST video output.Â
Who is the master and who the slave here?
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- Written by: 505
The Atari emulator Atari800 is catching up with real hardware (Fujinet) and now offers built-in Internet downloads for OS/BASIC ROMs as well as zipped disk images.
đź”— Atari800 Emulator webpage
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- Written by: 505
Anima/Light has published a work-in-progress video of a number of classic arcade ports for the Atari Falcon, both basing on Anima's previous code framework and applying AI assistance.
The video clip shows the early stage of a "The King of Dragons" port running on an 68060 processor. Another clip is presenting an early stage of Street Fighter II.
Â
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- Written by: 505
Back in the day, Floppyshop was one of the largest and best-known public domain libraries (PDLs) in the UK - a mail-order institution that supplied Atari ST and Falcon users with disk after disk of games, demos, utilities, music, fonts and art, long before broadband made everything a click away. For countless Atari owners, the Floppyshop catalogue was how you discovered new software.
Collections like this usually meet a sad end: boxed up, shelved, turned into shelf-ornaments and slowly forgotten. I didn't want that to happen here. So my girlfriend and I spent many days painstakingly reorganising the entire Floppyshop Gold series into a fully online, searchable database - every disk catalogued, every file downloadable, and all of it completely free to browse and grab. Thousands of programs and PD titles, preserved and back within reach.
It's all sorted into easy-to-browse sections: Art and Graphics, Astrology, Clip Art, Communication, Demos, Disk Magazines, Educational, Fonts, Games, Programming, MIDI, Music, Product Demos, Sound, Utilities and Word Processing. Buried in among it are plenty of "lost" programs - tools and titles that are still genuinely useful today, not just curiosities.
The originals weren't perfect, and neither were the catalogues. There were many discrepancies between what the Gold collection listed and the disks themselves, and I've corrected as many as I could find - including a few disks that never made it into the supplied (and probably older) catalogue at all. The separate ST and Falcon catalogues have been merged into single sections to keep things simple, with Falcon disks clearly renamed FALC-xxx so they're never confused with their ST counterparts.
Search it, browse it, download it - all free. And if you'd rather grab the whole lot in one go, the complete archives are available over on the exxos forum.
đź”— Browse the Floppyshop libary
Â
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- Written by: Exxos
This came out of nowhere: a printed Atari magazine in English language, written and layouted on an Atari Falcon 060 with PCI-graphics card using Calamus.
Kroll strikes back, even more professional than before with this surprising piece of Atari press which will be available worldwide and also in some Polish shops (the famous Empik stores). The content seems very interesting, covering games, demoscene and obviously including some deeper research, e.g. "The History of the Polish Demoscene on 8-Bit Atari - It didn’t begin with crackers. It began at the computer markets of 1980s Poland."
This seems to be fascinating work!
đź”—Â Atari Legacy magazine
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- Written by: 505
After more than 30 years, STOS BASIC has been rebuilt from its original 1989 V2.06 sources and brought to modern Atari hardware. STOS BASIC V5.5 ALPHA is out now as a free download.
The original STOS was written for an 8MHz 520ST and tends to break or corrupt graphics on anything newer. V5.5 fixes that: it now runs correctly on the Falcon, EmuTOS, 68030 accelerators and fast emulators, all proven across EmuTOS, TOS 1.04, 2.06 and Falcon TOS 4.04.
It's faster, too. Every trap-based inter-library call has been replaced with direct dispatch (125 sprite and 20 music traps removed) and the compiler emits tighter arithmetic and IF code — around 14% average speedup across the 54-test benchmark suite, with FILL, COPY, sprites, CLS BACK and IF gaining 30–50%. The editor has been patched as well (LIST scroll, file-selector and SYSTEM fixes). Best of all, it's 100% source-compatible with V2.06 — your existing STOS listings compile unchanged.
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đź’ľ Download
đź”— Release page & older STOS packs
đź”— The STOS Time Tunnel (games, demos, source, extensions, diskzines and manuals)
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- Written by: Chris
Mikro writes:
Â
I'm no fan of cross-posting news but with the current atari-forum.com issues where many people can't reach it properly I guess I can make an exception. :)
Â
So yeah, I have published a new version of CT60 TOS, the "firmware" for all CT60, CT63 and CT60e accelerators. It has been on my TODO list since forever. Sometimes I was really close, then lost motivation / got stuck, then discovered new bugs, postponed again etc etc... so I'm really relieved and happy to announce a modest update to our beloved CT60 TOS: https://github.com/mikrosk/ct60tos/releases/tag/1.03e
Everything is explained in the release notes, and this time (unlike 1.03d), the release is "real", built from source codes, no binary patching whatsoever. So finally we can start fixing bugs without too much hassle (well, for CT60 TOS image creation one still needs to boot into EasyMiNT 1.70 with its old gcc and mintlib ... a decade ago I had this fixed but that was for a later version and I haven't backported the build scripts back yet).
I encourage you to try it out, if something doesn't work, there's always the easy way to reflash it back to 1.03c.
Opening issues on github is appreciated, too.
Â
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- Written by: Mikro
When dealing with hardware like the ST, one of the most valued currencies back in the day were the so-called "hardware tricks"1. The limitations of the ST were so severe, that everything that helped mitigate that, even a little, was very, very welcome. May this be bigger 800k floppy disk formats, mixed resolutions, buzzer/digi-/SID-sound, the various overscan types and of course the king of the playground - hardware scrolling. Especially the last one was very shushed about by the people in the know and if one managed to catch a glimpse of how that specific magic machinery worked - oh boy, it was mind-boggling.
I am sure we all remember seeing the TCB Fullscreen, the ULM Scroller Fullscreen or hearing the buzzer or even YM-SID-sounds for the first time - this sense of the world expanding, like literally, is hard to explain - let alone to reproduce. The fact that this machine still produces new hardware tricks up to this day - like various new YM effects, generalized 4-bit hardware-scrolling, new screen resolutions just to name a few, is simply astonishing and keeps the platform interesting and challenging at the same time.
That's why the idea came up to take you, dear reader, on a small journey to where a new hardware trick gets discovered - and then even further down into it's ultimate culmination in... failure.
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- Written by: tIn
And Lotek Style's excursion in the realms of Atari related physical audio releases continues... enjoy!
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gadestRing SYNERGY [CD] - Retronics – PL-99A
https://www.discogs.com/de/release/17420488-gadestRing-gadestRing-gadestRing-SYNERGY
This came into my possession by accident as a prize from Silly Venture. What we have here is an interesting concept album where two different musicians interpreting the same songs in their own way.
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- Written by: Lotek Style
Inspired by https://krystone.pl/st/disktools/ and https://github.com/ggnkua/Jacknife, I always wanted a simple proper native macOS tool to open, modify, extract files from, and create new .st and .msa disk images.
Â
So I vibe-coded my own version. Feel free to use it – and please let me know if you find any bugs!
Â
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have fun
Bandit / CLiMATiCS
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Bob_er writes:
There was a party last weekend in Opole, Poland called 'Moonshine dragons' (https://demozoo.org/parties/5427/). That was a Commodore related event, but what was unusual, two entries were made by Atari crews:Â
https://demozoo.org/productions/392084/
https://demozoo.org/productions/392144/
On atarionline.pl you can find technical description of both.
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- Written by: Bob_er
