The weekly Atari party heartbeat continues. This weekend 68k Inside took place in the woods of Finland, rather Amiga focused, but still brought three new Atari ST/E releases as well.
Marquee Design released a stunning 256 Byte intro named "Ground Zero" for ST.
Amazing what Superogue did there again.
For those interesting in the magic behind the intro, Superogue just published a writeup about the making of this entry on his blog.
Also PO1/Ribbon is back which is always a reason for excitement. This time he teamed up with HOffman who contributed music sample sequences for the little production "Maximum Joker". This is yet another episode of the cross platform Batman/Joker/Rotozoom battle. In the Atari realm this challenge has been massively pushed by Django the Bastard and here we find another interesting variant. As to expect, the music sounds great, very great actually, and also the new zoomer looks good. But the technical finesse has to be judged elsewhere. The demo ranked a proud second place in the demo compo.
There is a little aftertaste to "Maximum Joker", as the demo is reported to only work on emulators and not work on real hardware (yet).
Furthermore DHS, smfx and Paradox teamed up for a quick Atari STE Sommarhack 2026 reminder featuring a nice new oscilloscope 3D effect. So, if time between BBQ and beergardening allows, sharpen your Atari tools and get ready to bake something for Sommarhack 2026 in July 2026!
Similarly to "Maximum Joker", this is one of these kind of screens that make your STE feel more confident.
Finally, as an honorable mention, a remarkable piece of pixelart has been published on 68k Inside.ย This both expressive and mysterious picture by Jok/Dreamweb just hit.
"No Rest for the Wicked", great pixelart by Jok/Dreamweb
๐ย 68K Inside 2026 on Demozoo
๐ 68K Inside website, including results and links to the livestream recording
Comments
This party is being rested next year. Hopefully comes back in 2028.
I think we should encourage emulator only productions; in its own category, or wild.
It could be interesting with "what if" productions. What if a the Atari STe had a 020 at 16mHz? What if the bus contention on Jaguar was not as bad?
On that point, there is more interest in hardware addition and acceleration for the ST/STE these days. So it may not be quite so 'What-if' now.
Plus it should be easier to factor in running on naturally higher end hardware such as TT or Falcon.
My most sincere apologies for the party version of MAXIMUM JOKER not working on real hardware.
I don't have the equipment to hook up my STe, and that slows down the debugging by hours or days.
The technique(s) I use is nothing that hasn't been done before, and there is no reason preventing our little rotozoom demo from working on real hardware except a bit more time to find exactly where I need to move things a few NOPs before/after.
I will publish a final version of MAXIMUM JOKER that works on real hardware as soon as possible
and why do people use some convuluted nrv2* packers when upx does it all by running it with "upx --best --nrv2e --small --small" ?
- when it comes to compos being a bit heavy on the amiga side, it's a case of "it is what it is". we're a small finnish party, and finland has historically been a commodore country, and we didn't really have that many foreign visitors this time
- i spoke with p01 about maximum joker before the compo, and britelite and i decided to allow it to be shown on an emulator since we didn't have that many entries to begin with (see the previous note). i did make a point of announcing the exception on mic before showing it. again, it is what it is. it was still good!
see y'all around
Late to the party here. But such a category already exist in "Fantasy Console". Popular platforms being Pico-8 and TIC-80.
Sadly the Meteoriks Awards bundles it with "Midskool", which to me is bonkers.