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.
Here's a quick roundup of the latest ones!
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
Theme of the 2026 tipspromenad: Atari music demos over the years
Saturday evening arrives and so does the compos! We had the usual ones; demo/intro, 32k music, lowres graphics, 256-byte intro and wild. The two exclusive compos for 2026 was "Short demo" - max 33 second runtime and the traditional photo compo was limited to Falcon 256-colour TOS 4.04 GEM colour palette.
When all entries had been shown, gwEm and Crazy Q ran a DJ-show out on the veranda.
The releases are mostly available at https://demozoo.org/parties/5417/ at this point.
Winning 256 byte intro "Scroll" by Omega
Winning 32k music by Crazy Q
Winning "Short demo" by Dekadence
Winning demo by Dead Hackers Society
Black Valley 2026 (July 10-12)
Across the west border from Sommarhack, Black Valley took place the weekend after. It’s a mixed platform party with history of some Atari content.
Similar to Sommarhack, the venue is located out in the middle of nowhere. The hall is much bigger than Sommarhack, and of course there are a lot more visitors, louder main hall and more live acts. Free parking, an indian restaurant in the house. It’s all set for a nerdy weekend.
But man, the nordics was having a heatwave, around 30c outside and the party hall was noticeable hotter, likely above 35. Phew! We spent most of the evening outside trying to party code.
The steaming hot partyhall of Black Valley
In the end we managed to fiddle something together for the oldskool compo. Proteque of DHS and Skuggemannen had big presence in the music competitions while Jade/DHS (welcome!) nearly won the pixelled graphics compo, but Jok/Dreamweb eeked out the win by one point, congratulations!
Second place in the Bossanova music composition is an ACE Tracker tune by Skuggemannen
And in 7th place in the newskool music compo we find another ACE Tracker tune by Skuggemannen
And finally the winner of the oldskool demo, SURT by DHS (Falcon 030) - a fastly made demo, very much party version
That's what we got this time, more parties to come with more goodies for certain.
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