Sillyventure Summer Edition 2025 Report.
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- CiH
Pre-amble Ramble.
We’re breathing hard on the exposed neck of an imminent departure for yet another Atari Party. A party report...
Retro books (or books about retro subjects) - everyone does it these days, you can find a ton of them around from self publishing houses. Usually good print quality and format, contents most of the times so-so, written by enthusiasts who aren't really good reporters or writers.
Instead, how about reading one of the first ones?
Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers was released back in 1997, as a bunch of HTML files in disk format, priced at $20 per copy. Its author, James Hague, an 80s programmer himself, idolised the people featured in the book, therefore he took good care in making interesting conversations which he then transcribed to the book. And, to our delight, a lot of them were using Ataris!
Adam Billyard, Danielle Berry, Chris Crawford, David Fox, Steve Hales, Archer MacLean, Jeff Minter, Philip Price. And then coin-op legends like Eugene Jarvis, Ed Rotberg. And foreward by John Romero. How many of those so called "Retro Books" can present such a lineup?
Since then James has kindly released the book for free and is hosting it on his website for quite some time now. A recommended read, head over to https://dadgum.com/halcyon/ and enjoy!
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- Written by: ggn
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Sommarhack, the legendary demo party that always felt just out of my reach. For years, I watched from the sidelines, thinking it was one of those events I’d never get the chance to attend. Then, unexpectedly earlier this year, an email from Spkr landed in my inbox. Suddenly, what once felt impossible started to feel real.
It wasn't an official invitation, but a spot on the reserve list. That was enough. I accepted immediately. Hope turned into anticipation. A few days later, another message came through. This time, it was confirmed. I had a place.
I'd heard from my Atari friends who'd attended previous Sommarhacks how amazing it was, and how much fun they'd had. Truth be told, I was always quite envious. But would it live up to my expectations? My imposter syndrome peaked, and I even had doubts about going... Ultimately, I bit the bullet and booked my tickets from London Gatwick to Stockholm, Sweden.
I was going to Sommarhack!
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- Written by: Tronic
Read more: My party report: Sommarhack 2025, Hedemora, Sweden
A quite interesting interview was recently published, where Tillmann Bubeck, the programmer of the 16 Bit home computing era classic "Rings of Medusa" is answering questions on his memories and the making of the game. Tilmann Bubeck is also known for demoscene contributions and especially the development of later Neochrome Master versions under the pseudonym Chaos Inc. of Delta Force.
Unfortunately there is no English translation. One particularly interesting story was about how he actually found a publisher:
He spent the last 1-2 school years with coding in a daily, second coding shift right after school and creating this game concept together with Gogo/Tex/Delta Force/TCB. The two in fact almost never met in person as they lived far apart and mostly relied on using phone for communication. The game idea was developed just basing on what they liked themselves and it's pretty amazing how this completely worked out in this case. When the game was finished, a publisher was to be found. The approach for them back then was not writing mails or using telephone, but simply visiting the Atari fair in Germany and go directly to the companies booths with a disk and the game on it. Quite crazy, but also very down to earth compared to todays complexity. Just imagine how a 19 year old teenager comes along a fair booth and says "hey, I have something, can I show it to you?", the publishers would load the DD disk on an ST and inspect the game. And how all this worked out in the end. In this case, it was Starbyte Software, and they were landing a hit just with that.
If you want, enjoy the whole interview in full length:
Thanks to Lotekstyle for the hint towards the interview!
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- Written by: 505
It has been quite a demoparty weekend, with Shadow Party, Lost Party and Sommarhack taking place at the same time.
The results from Lost party, an 8-Bit multi platform party that took place in Poland last weekend, are available on the respective website. There you will also find links to watch the stream in case you missed it (events and compos). Krupkaj also provides a nice set of photos from the event at his gallery page.
🔗 Lost party photos at Krupkajs photo gallery
The results of the events are available on Demozoo as well and the list of entries and contributors shows! We hope for more information soon.
🔗 Shadow Party 2025 on Demozoo
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- Written by: 505
Absolutely on the boundary of Atariscene-related content plus appreciatively taken from a post by Monsoft on the Polish Atari scene portal atariarea.krap.pl, this article might be of interest for a few. Is it? Is it not? Let us know!
And yes, apparently the good old silly season hole is kicking in. However, with Sommarhack and Sillyventure I am sure it will be not for long.
🔗 6502 Illegal Opcodes in the Siemens PC 100 Assembly Manual (1980)
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- Written by: 505
This one has passed me by for some reason. Guilliame Tello has quietly continued work on his very useful MPlayer movie player for various flavours of Atari compatible hardware.
As of the 29.11.2023, he has released a new version of MPlayer, now at 4.3 beta. It’s a movie player, screen capture application, movie converter and more.
Apart from steady improvements and bugfixes, Guilliame has provided support for Apollo Vampire super-enhanced hardware. Needless to say it remains friendly to anything with a Fuji badge with a 68030 processor or above.
Some more features have been added as below:
Enhanced support for Psound card
Apollo Vampire Standelone V4+ supported !
Albums of videos
Tool to compute the real DMA frequencies
Enhanced files to add subtitles/comments
Internal tool to record Enhanced files
Pause available (Alt+Control)
There is a new revamped menu as well.
So if you like playing or disassembling movies on your Atari, head on over to Guilliame’s website at
http://gtello.free.fr/mplayere.htm
Written by CiH - 29.6.25.
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- Written by: CiH
zeST, the open source FPGA re-creation of the Atari ST was updated today with several new features and fixes.
The major new features are a 50 MHz mode for a much faster ST and MIDI support. Other improvements include shifter and MFP fixes as well as improvements to the UI.
ZyncBerry, one of several boards supported by zeST
🔗 Read the full release-update on Zerkmans zeST site
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- Written by: evldhs
When looking at the Avena listings on Pouet or Demozoo one could be forgiven for thinking the crew is more or less inactive compared to its late 1990s heyday.
In fact, nothing can be further from the truth and I wanted to draw Atariscne's attention to some of the latest under-the-radar content. Of course, we all remember Tat from landmark Falcon productions such as Sonolumineszenz or more recently the goalpost moving 44 (chapeau Tat!). In between his day job at Sony's elite advanced technology group Tat has been actively working on a number of Atari projects.
News and deep technical dives on these projects is available on what appears to be an anonymous blog, but is actually a gold mine of "the good stuff": results of his bleeding edge experiments.
Here are some particularly juicy articles which we'd like to draw your attention to:
A massive project Tat has been working on is an add-on for the Hatari emulator which adds features similar to the old Steem debugger. Sadly not officially part of Hatari, the debugger is almost a requirement for fixing certain bugs when developing under Hatari.
As someone who is fond of looking at disassemblies of other people's YM drivers, this is a very good starting point for understanding what you may see in Easy Rider when looking at YM drivers. It could even be some inspiration for writing your own!
I can say from personal experience that these notes describe 90% of the challenges you face if you want to create a multi-part 4K demo with music on the ST, or any platform. Tat takes things to another level though, in particular with his knowledge of packing.
Here Tat shares more of his coding articles and source code, including Falcon must-see Sonolumineszenz.
A covid lockdown project Tat worked on after being inspired by some chats with Damo and I. This is really low-level information and explains how and why you can get the YM and 68K to synchronise on a cycle level, essential for the sync square effect.
The fashions in ST demos have unfortunately returned to minimising CPU time used for the music. Using a dump of register writes to the soundchip might be a way to claw back some precious CPU cycles. On the other hand, such a register dump can be quite big. Tat presents a novel solution to this problem.
gwEm/PHF June 2025
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- Written by: gwEm
A huge project of re-creating the Atari Falcon custom chips has been going on for a while. Today Mikro with crew (including the veteran ST customchip decapper Ijor) released a presentation of the work done so far. For a noob like the article author this seems like black magic and absolutely impossible, truly fascinating!
The process of decapping and delayering the chips together with making very high-resolution photograps is quite expensive, and so far Mikro have funded the entire operation. Now it's possible to help the project by donating, which in the long run could help reproduce the Falcon chips to repair broken computers and building new ones from newly manufacturered motherboards.
Lowres photograph of a decapped Atari Falcon Videl custom chip
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- Written by: evldhs
As reported before, Rajah Lone's P2SM sprite editing tool is in development. Recently another update was published:
Changes in 1.3F version:
add: encapsulate several images in one GIF as containor.
mod: preference ‘Save’ moved from menu to new button in preferences window.
add: in the menu: ‘Open tools folder’ (if AVSERVER is available).
mod: images list export parameters moved to Tool attributes panel.
add: images list export new method: append to selected file (copy to clipboard method still available).
add: store tools attributes choices in preferences file (except Surfaces which is specific image setting).
fix: correct local variables in load GIF function.
Along with the progress we find a nice video explaining the features and use cases of the tool.
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- Written by: 505
An remake of the Atari Transputer Workstation was recently announced and sold out very quickly. This device seems to be a major inspiration for many as proven by at least two highly active forum threads in renowned Atari internet sources:
ATW800/2 owners thread on atari-forum.com (English)
ATW800/2 user thread on atari-home.de (German)
For the interested - Enjoy! :-)
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- Written by: 505
The cross platform Atari ST, Mega ST, STe, Mega STe, TT and Falcon emulator Hatari is out in version 2.6.0.
Hatari 2.6.0 emulating a Falcon 060
Snapped from the Hatari 2.6.0 release notes:
Emulation improvements:
- 030+MMU:
- Workaround to correct prefetch data after bus errors
- DSP:
- Fix: JMP can also form a long interrupt instruction
- VME/SCU:
- TT / MegaSTE SCU registers and interrupts implemented
- Falcon Videl:
- Refresh rate of monochrome monitor is now correctly detected with 71 Hz
- MegaSTE:
- Add support for CPU Freq / Cache control at $FF8E21 when running in cycle accurate mode. This gives cycle exact memory accesses when running at 16 MHz, as well as emulation of the external 16 KB cache
- SCSI:
- Fix REQUEST SENSE for SCSI v2
- Serial Ports:
- Update values of DCD and CTS signals for the RS232 port connected to the MFP (as reported by the underlying OS)
- Add support for using TCCLK as RTxCB clock for the Atari TT's SCC
- Video:
- Improve support for 4 pixel hardscroll by stopping shifter with $FF8260=3. Also handle $FF8261.
- MFP:
- Fix counter when timer is stopped/restarted while counting from 1 to 0
Emulator improvements:
- SDL-GUI (and config options):
- Improvements to GUI font characters
- Add separate option for enabling/disabling >=030 CPU data cache
- Fix: file selector exit with keyboard
- Windows:
- Open console window for error and help output, so that Windows users can actually see them
- Keyboard / TOS localization:
- Symbolic key mapping improved for different TOS language versions
- Made it possible to use a mapping file with fallback to scancode mapping
- New "--fast-forward-key-repeat" option for key repeat
- (EmuTOS v1.4) Catalan country code support
- Memory snapshots:
- Fix: re/store all relevant YM2149 & MMU state variables
- Joysticks:
- Fix: segfault with negative joystick indexes
- GEMDOS HD:
- Fix: Fattrib() call on a directory
- Fix: Return correct attrib for volume labels in FsFirst()
- Fix: Fsnext() calls with DTAs having different attribs, when DTA is not from preceding Fsfirst() but earlier one
- Fix: Handle additional '*' chars at end of file mask
- Fix: Dfree() total/free on really large disk, free on Mac/BSD
- SCC:
- Fix: invalid channel B file close on uninit
- SCSI:
- Add CLI + config file option for (per ID) SCSI version
- Command FIFO:
- Fix crash when FIFO gets command right at Hatari start
- Debugger:
- Fix: DSP RESET instruction tracing
- Similarly to Atari program symbols override, load TOS symbols on TOS load, if autoloading is enabled and .sym file is present
- Add "find" command for searching CPU memory contents
- Add "struct" command to better show contents of program's structures
- Variable & debug symbol names can be given directly also to load, save, memwrite and register commands in addition to numeric values
- File name completion for commands having optional file name args
- Symbol name completion for "loadbin", "savebin" & "dspsymbols" commands
- Align "memdump" character representation also when line is not full
- Show also non-ASCII Atari chars in debugger memory content output
- Add 'c' (character) argument type support for "memwrite" command
- CPU disassembly shows resulting relative branch addresses
- "dspreg" command shows also stack contents
- When disassembling, translate logical addresses to physical ones if MMU is enabled
- Tracing:
- GEMDOS Dsetpath() + Frename() calls included to "os_base" traces
- PC value added to more traces
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- Written by: evldhs
GEMTOS 2025 made it possible. No more words needed.
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- Written by: 505
rmac, the assembler for all Ataris, supporting 68k, DSP 56k, 6502 and Jaguar chips has just been updated.
Changes in version 2.4.3 (copy/pasted from the release notice)
- Harden movem/fmovem parsing by checking the whole line has been parsed
- Promote “missing .endifs” warning to error
-sswitch now warns about potential optimisations when +o0 to +o9 optimisation switches are disabled- Line numbers of errors inside macros are now reported precisely
- Switched macro error reporting to save the line number during macro expansion
- Introduced a symbol named
_RMAC_that contains the version number in BCD format in order to be detectable during assembly time - Added HiSoft line number format when outputting ST .prg executables and -g is enabled
- Jaguar OP: Fix XPOS masking
- BSD stabs output code cleanup, adding custom word swap commands for ELF
- Fixed
+Oallcorrupting branch instructions - Fixed mingw build
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- Written by: evldhs
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 large mug of your favourite beverage may be recommended, along with the optimum most comfortable and least disturbed sitting position. Anyway, enjoy!
The long and winding story of CiH’s Falcon and some of the places it has been to.
Preamble:- Once upon a time, back in 1992, there were a lot of excited words poured out about a new and transformative computer coming from Atari. This was the near mythical Atari Falcon 030. Quite a lot of these words came from me, as the Maggie Diskmag editor cheerleader.
The Falcon 030 was Atari’s attempt to bring the next generation of home computing to life after the long saga of the ST series. The new buzzword, multimedia, was bandied about freely, unironically. There was a lot of excited near magical thinking about the specification of such a wunder-machine. As we all realise now, it required some serious cognitive input from the very best people to get the most from it. Also that there was the looming tsunami of beige commodity Wintel boxes, crashing down and swamping all hopes and dreams of a long happy commercial lifespan for the Falcon.
Some of the advertising from Atari was a bit off and hard to understand.
Still, this article is not for regrets and recriminations, but is the story of one long-lived bird in particular.
Mine…
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- Written by: CiH
The legendary US-based company Wizztronics is stepping forward in making an Atari Falcon rebuild.
"The entire team that Wizztronics is dedicated to getting this project done. We will release information as to the progress when it becomes available, we thank you for your patience.
Steve Cohen CEO"
Apparently the layout is progressing.
🔗 Read more on Wizztronic's Atari Falcon rebuild page
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- Written by: 505
There are some news regarding upcoming Sillyventure Sommer Edition: A little invitro was released on Atari 8-Bit created by Foster and PPS.
🔗 Download and comment the SV 2025 SE invitro by Foster and PPS on Demozoo
🔗 Download and comment the SV 2025 SE invitro by Foster and PPS on Pouet
Additionally, the compo rules have been updated taking into account the handling of AI generated content and other bits. You can read the new compo rules on the SV compo pages.
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- Written by: 505
Olivier Landemarre has published MyAES 0.99 Beta 8.
with following changes:
Bug fix:
- Snapshot under video format X1R5G5B5 wrong color fixed
- Some debug message on screen could appear during snapshot removed
- Fix appl_control(APC_TOP)
- Some edit field could be corrupted (1 char too far)
- Object with SHADOW flag was 1 pixel too large
- Fix some popup and object redraw with buggy object tree in Papyrus 5
- Fix MU_TIMER that have 20ms too much if value request was different of 0
Improvement:
- MU_TIMER enhancement at the level of other modern AES
- Remove uneed bitmap format conversion that not exist
- Better display of popup
- Add new message for application list update at request (throw appl_control) to not all the time update list for nothing (interesting for task bar like)
- Update Yopla for new feature just above.
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- Written by: 505
Not to be overlooked: P01/Ribbon strikes back on Atari ST with this "dot record" released at recent Outline, accompanied by a stomping Dubmood track. Record or not? Judge yourself!
P01 has surprised on Atari ST before at Outline parties, particularly with these amazing zoom and voxel bootsectors roughly a decade ago. Great to have him back on Atari!
🔗 Download and comment Ellipsis on Pouet
🔗 Download and comment Ellipsis on Demozoo
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- Written by: 505
This time we move our spotlight over to someone who's work is only know by far too few people in the Atari scene. He deconstructed, reengineered, documented and gathered schematics and information for a lot of hardware for our beloved 16 bit systems - so that it ultimately is preserved and can be reconstructed by people like us. The person we are talking about here is...
Olivier Gossuin.
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- Written by: tIn
Read more: In the spotlight: Réalisations Olivier - a hardware (re)engineer par excellence
