Written by: Tecer
Dwór Uphagena, Gdansk, 30 July - 2 August 2026

There is a workshop in Gdansk where people build electric guitars. Beautiful and expensive ones, current waiting time: 14 months. Mayones started there in 1982, in a family garage, and forty-four years later they are shipping custom instruments to players all over the world - but the shop still works the way it worked at the beginning. You pick the woods. Somebody's hands do the rest. Every instrument that leaves the building is a series of decisions a person made on purpose.

I went there on the Friday afternoon of Silly Venture. It cost me the Shotgun tournament and one of the Silly Talks, and I would do it again, partly because it is a remarkable place and partly because it put me in exactly the right frame of mind for what was going on across town at Silly Venture.

Because that is what a demoparty is too. Seventy-four productions came out of this one, and every one of them is somebody having decided, deliberately and at length, where each byte goes.

Let me take the weekend in order.

Thursday, July 30th

I arrived on time. My luggage took a more relaxed view of the schedule.

The route was via Amsterdam, and somewhere in the transfer my bag formed its own opinion about which plane to be on. Schiphol runs two flights a day to Gdansk; I was on the earlier one, and my bag, having weighed the options, chose the later. This is the best possible version of losing your luggage, and I say that as somebody who spent the intervening hours not entirely convinced of it. The bag turned up in the evening, intact, having seen slightly more of the Netherlands than I had.

Gdansk itself was packed with people. Peak summer, and on top of the usual tourist load the city was in the middle of St. Dominic's Fair, running late July to mid-August, the largest open-air market in Poland. Several hundred stalls of people selling things they made, threaded through the old town, for three weeks every summer, since the thirteenth century.

So consider the city this party takes place in: a centuries old market of handmade goods, a guitar workshop that has been carving instruments one at a time since 1982, and a hall full of people who spent their year hand-assembling code for computers that went out of production before some of those stallholders were born. Gdansk is extremely good at this sort of thing.

This was, after several Silly Ventures over the years, the first time I have stayed at the hotel on the same site as the venue - the party hall sits in a building directly behind it - and I can report that it is an enormous improvement on every other arrangement I have tried. My room was a floor or so below ground level, which suited me perfectly: dark, quiet, and a walk of moments from the compo screen. No thoughts on planning the trip back. You simply go to the party, and later you simply go back.

Gates opened at 16:00 for the traditional business of claiming a table, which at an Atari party means claiming a table and a mains socket, ideally one not shared with anybody running a CRT. I did none of that. I went over for a look, said hello to Grey, and spent a while doing the thing everybody does on the first evening - scanning the room for people whose faces seem familiar.

I did not find too many.

A word about the venue. Silly Venture has used this building for the last few installments and it is genuinely well chosen: two storeys, two near-identical halls sitting directly on top of each other, the big screen and the compo action downstairs, and a live feed piped to the room above. That last detail matters more than it sounds. It means you can sit out a compo block, or have an actual conversation, or take a break from the noise, without leaving the party - you are still watching, just from a quieter room. Good air, sensible temperature, no scrum around the
screen.

As usual, the video and sound were very good all weekend, upstairs and down. Productions were shown properly. On a scene where people spend a year shaving cycles off an effect, having it presented on a screen and a PA that do it justice is important.

What was thinner this year was the crowd. It felt smaller than the last Winter Edition and distinctly less international - I would put it somewhere around fifty or sixty people, though I want to be clear that this is an impression rather than a count, and no official figure has been
published. It was noticeable to me for a specific reason: both of my usual partners in crime were absent. Zoltar X and 505, with whom I made a few intros, weren't in Gdansk, and so I spent the weekend watching things with my name on them go up on the big screen without any of the people I made them with in the room. Whether the thinner turnout is a summer-edition pattern, a travel-cost pattern, or simply the shape of one particular weekend is unknown, but overall it did not feel like a party in trouble. It felt like a party with room to breathe.

Friday, July 31st

The morning ran presentations of demoscene productions, and the afternoon brought the Silly Talks and then the Shotgun tournament - the four-player ST game, run by Hospes & Piter.

I saw none of it, on account of the guitars.

The talk I sacrificed was Aragorn's session on the unknown Atari 2600 universe, which is precisely the one I would have chosen to attend if I had been in a position to choose. That is the trouble with a good side trip: it does not schedule itself around the thing you also wanted to do. A small regret, and the only one I have about the whole weekend.

What I did not miss was the concert, and the concert was the most purely enjoyable hour of my weekend. YerzmYeY on keyboards, Pinokio on drums: chiptune material originally composed on a ST, performed live by two people in a room. There is no substitute for hearing it that way.

I got an instructive second opinion afterwards. I fell into conversation with another German visitor - a first-timer at Silly Venture - who actually knew the music, and he was not entirely happy. His complaint was structural: the original tracks were running as a backing bed with the live keyboard laid on top, pitched high above it, and to his ear the two never quite met. He knew the source material, so he heard a seam.

I did not know the source material, so mostly I did not. There were one or two moments where something sat oddly and I can retrospectively see what he meant, but the set as a whole worked for me. I think both of those are valid reactions to the same performance, and I think the difference between them is entirely down to previous experience. What we did not disagree about at all was Pinokio's drumming, which was really a pleasure to listen to.

Saturday, August 1st

The long day, and the one where the weather got involved.

It was a hot summer weekend, right up until a severe thunderstorm arrived at midday on Saturday and thus cancelled the plan for an outdoor group photo. The shot was moved indoors and pushed to the evening.

Two Silly Talks ran during the day. The first went after the accumulated folklore of (not only) Atari consoles and controllers - myth-busting, essentially - and it was exactly the kind of thing this party exists to host: a room full of people who have owned the hardware for forty years, arguing about which of the things everybody "knows" are actually true. I enjoyed it a great deal.

The second was a conversation about the state of the 8-bit and ST demoscenes, held in Polish, and I skipped it for the obvious reason. I mention this not as a complaint but as a fair reminder of the fact that it is, in its heart, a Polish party. Welcoming: yes. International: also yes. But still local, at the same time.
And although I do not speak the language, I feel strangely at home, not only at Silly Venture, but in Poland - it is the country my grandmother was born in, and the language she was fluent in.

Now, from pure nostalgia on to the compo blocks, running into the evening: graphics and wild first, then games, intros and demos from 17:30.

And here I have to hand out some credit, because my luggage was not the only thing at this party with a history of taking a relaxed view of the schedule. A Silly Venture timetable has traditionally been less a plan than a statement of intent - a rough indication of what might happen at, or within a few hours of, the time printed next to it. Veterans of past editions know exactly what I mean.

Not so much this year. The second compo block went up about half an hour behind schedule and that was the worst of it. For this party, on this circuit, that counts as running like a Swiss railway, so hat tipped to the organisers!

The compos

Twenty-nine competitions. Seventy-four finished productions. That is the number I would put in front of anyone who tells you the Atari scene is winding down.

The highest marks of the weekend went to the painters, and specifically to Jok, who won both graphics compos: Vampire on ST/STE at 8.393, the top score awarded anywhere at the party, and Dreamscape on Falcon at 7.833. The ST/STE graphics compo was one of the two biggest fields of the event, with six entries, and the only result that felt genuinely uncertain while it was happening - Captain NAH! by .misha. at 8.211 and A Silent Gaze by Vasyl at 8.035 were both close enough to have taken it on a different evening.

On the ST/STE code side, Saint / Retro HQ won the 4K compo with 4K Mega Spreadpoint (8.321), the highest-scoring executable of the party by a clear margin. Paradox took the 96K compo with MUltiCOlorROtoZOomer, ahead of Hemoroids' Quicktro, out of a healthy six entries - the other of those two biggest fields. Marquee Design won the 128-byte compo with Forest Gunk and also placed second in XL/XE 256b with Forward - a good weekend for people who count their work in individual bytes. The main ST/STE demo compo went to Hemoroids with A Tribute To AD.

The 8-bit intro compos were where the entry count really concentrated: four each in 1K, 256b and 16K, plus a separate 256-byte game compo won by Krzyś with Robotron 256. The 1K category is new - neither the 2024 Summer Edition nor last year's Winter Edition had one, where 256b was the smallest size on offer for XL/XE - and it filled up immediately. Kermit83 took it with Geometry (7.736), ahead of three entries from Misza / PTODT. Seban / Slight won 256b with The Message! and took third in the same compo with It Grows!. The ATASCII compo fielded four entries and went to Neurotic's 8bit3io.

Music was strong across the board. X-Ray / Slight won Pokey with Beat The Beam! at 8.241, one of the highest scores of the party in any category. The YM2149 compo went to 505 for The Starfish's Favourite Chiptune, about a tenth of a point ahead of AD's Let My Keygen Run - and if that starfish tune sounded familiar during the intro compo, it is the same one we used in Lago, the ST/STE 96K intro, where a timer problem on my end left it running slightly off in places. It was a pleasure to finally hear it played properly. And there was a Lynx music compo at all, won by Tobikomi with Ralph! On Vacation - a single entry, but the category exists, which on a handheld this obscure is most of the battle.

Games were spread over six platforms. KtZ of the Retro Blitter Team took first and second in the ST/STE game compo - Ugh at 7.763, then Robbo Funky at 7.305 with Hospes - which is a good weekend by any measure. XL/XE went to C.E.T.A.S. by Krzysztof 'XXL' Dudek, Rafal Dudek and Maro Szczerski. Kikems / AtariWave won the Lynx compo with a 40th-anniversary ZombiLynx, and Mik Javalonde won both the Falcon game compo (Silver Knight) and the 7800 demo compo. The Portfolio - a palmtop that nobody has ever seriously accused of being a demo machine - fielded three productions across two compos, led by One Thousand Horse Power by Misza & Kaz / PTODT at 7.980, which was the thing I was most curious about (having my first - and probably last, this machine and I will probably never become close friends - own pofo production in the same compo) and did not regret waiting for.

The Portfolio compo also quietly produced the most consequential piece of news of the weekend, and it was not a production. Portfolio entries have always been shown as video, because you cannot put a palmtop LCD on a projector, and that video has historically meant somebody filming the real hardware as best they can - I have submitted one of those awkward recordings myself, and it is not a flattering way to see anybody's work. This year the compo video was generated with a brand-new and still unreleased Portfolio emulator, the Pofulator.

For anyone outside this corner of the scene that will sound like a footnote. It is not. There is at present no emulator for this machine that you can seriously develop against. MAME has a Portfolio driver, but I have never once got the graphics mode to run - no combination of firmware ROMs and settings I tried ever produced a working screen, and I tried a lot of them. DOSBox does better, in the sense that things run at all, but everything is subtly wrong: the timings are off, the display looks nothing like the real LCD, and the sound is a different animal entirely. For a platform where the whole craft is in squeezing an effect out of a specific screen at a specific speed, "subtly wrong" is not a development target. It means you build, copy to hardware, and find out.

Word at the party was that the Pofulator comes from the PTODT camp, which - if the legend holds - would mean the people who won the Portfolio demo compo also wrote the tool that showed it. I have no confirmation of that and it remains unreleased, so treat it as scene rumour for now.

Either way, an emulator that genuinely behaves like the machine changes the economics of the whole platform. It will not make Portfolio demos easy; nothing makes a 4.something MHz palmtop easy. It will make them a great deal less painful to write and test, and that is usually what decides whether anybody bothers at all.

Wild went to Carlos for Atari Is Everywhere!, and it deserves more than a line in a results table. It is a video of several minutes, and it is not a joke entry or a hardware showcase - it is a genuinely personal, openly emotional piece about what Atari and this scene have meant to the person who made it. Wild compos usually collect the things that fit nowhere else. This one collected somebody saying out loud, at some length and without irony, why any of us are in that room at all.
It won, and it should have.

And the Jaguar demo compo was won by Mystic Bytes with the invitation to Silly Venture 2k26 Winter Edition - the organisers' traditional method of announcing that you have roughly four months to finish the thing you did not finish this time.

New in the rules this year, and worth a footnote: AI assistance is barred from the standalone graphics and music compos, and permitted in the others provided the info file says how it was used.
A few productions went further and carried a "no AI" badge of their own accord. Everyone seems to be finding their own footing with it, which at this stage seems about right. We'll find out how this evolves, especially now that the whole software development landscape changes so rapidly.

(Briefly, and for the record: I had five entries in under Tecer - two in the ST/STE 96K compo, one in 4K, one 128-byter and one on Portfolio, and creating them was something I enjoyed tremendously. Ok, maybe with the exception of the Portfolio screen, this one was a pain.)

Sunday, August 2nd

Results and prizegiving at 11:00 - which, in keeping with the weekend's unusual discipline, happened at more or less 11:00, give or take the same half hour. Then out.

The prize table had real period hardware on it, donated by GreenCloud Computing - an Atari 1010 tape drive, a Koala Pad, a SIO2SD. Not merchandise; the actual objects - at least I believe so, I did not actually check if all of that was really there.

Which brings me to the guest who, in the sense that matters at a party like this, was the guest of honour: Andrew Dickinson, author of Plastron, published on XL/XE by Harlequin Software back in 1990. Every Strong Support ticket came with the game on cassette - a reproduction pressed by Retronics - and the man who wrote it was standing in the building. That is a very particular kind of celebrity: almost nobody outside that room has heard of him, and almost everybody inside it has played the thing. A single-platform party is one of the few venues on earth where such a thing happens, and it is one of the reasons single-platform parties are still worth holding. (Adam Gilmore of Zeppelin Games had been announced in advance but was not there, I remember seeing him on one of the past SV installments.)

Afterwards

The instruments in that Gdansk workshop cost more than a used car, and are worth it to the people who buy them for a reason that has nothing to do with specifications: somebody decided exactly where every part of that thing goes. A 128-byte intro is the same argument at a different scale. Nobody needs one. It exists because a person sat down and decided where all 128 of those bytes go, and then showed it to a room of people who could tell the difference.

Seventy-four times over, in one building in Gdansk, over a long weekend in July.

Thanks to Grey and the whole Silly Venture crew for putting it on again, and to everybody who fed a finished production into the compos. The Winter Edition invitation is already out. Same city, November 12-15 2026 - see you there!

🔗 Silly Venture 2k26SE on Demozoo
🔗 official results.txt
🔗 sillyventure.eu