Their Story: The Atari ST, James Norris' Timeless Passion for Retro Computing and Music Production
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- Tronic
In a world dominated by the latest technology, there’s something uniquely captivating about the machines of the past,...
I've been very busy lately with the development of a generic chiptune player for our beloved Atari ST. And when I say develop, I don't mean that I developed it like I did in the old days. Actually, all the code was written by Opus 5 under my 'guidance'.
Now, does that make me feel proud? How does this actually make me feel? But more importantly, how does that make you feel? I know that there are sceners out there who don't want to touch AI, or anything that is 'tainted' by it. Or at least, they draw the line right at retro computing. I hope you still want to speak to me.
What's the point in using AI, some say: the whole fun of retro computing is living it like the good old days, you know, by writing all the code yourself.
Yes, writing code is great fun - I get that - but I also happen to like chiptunes. But I suck at writing chiptunes.
Don't get me wrong though, code can be a beautiful thing in itself. But nobody cares to see my beautifully crafted code (or wants to). They also cannot hear my code, or feel it, or anything like that. I've also had managers in the past say hurtful things about my work. Like, who cares about code? If it works, ship it! (for some definition of 'it works')
Does code really matter? Did it ever? Does it matter now?
I do strongly believe code does matter. Actually, I deeply care about it - as a means to an end.
Here is a bit of an anecdote: some of you sceners may know me as Rapido. I am the author of the so-called '3D delta polygon' routines. I had this idea when I was waiting for the last train that never came, so I had a lot of thinking time. But as they say, ideas are cheap, execution is what matters. And oh boy, the development of delta polygons was a real time sink.
Looking back, I've done maybe six productions in my entire demo 'career', and that's not a lot. I did have a lot of ideas (really!) that never came to fruition, because... wait... this idea is a three-month project - let's just drop it.
But now, with AI, I can finally execute all those ideas cheaply! And that is great, right?
Right? (AI psychosis kicking in.)
OK, which ideas should I spend my precious tokens on? And does it actually matter? Because nobody cares, nobody cares about code.
And then it hit me. What if I put my skills (and +200 hours of 'prompting') to good use? And by good use I mean: create tools for artists, so they can create their beautiful art.
The bottom line:
Are you a chiptune artist? Then you may like what I've built. Coming soon....
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- Written by: Odipar
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Written by Samoteph at the Itch.io site for Miracle Boy in Dragon Land:
After being unavailable for a few months—so as not to disadvantage early adopters—the game is once again available for download, this time for free for all retro gaming fans (which, by definition, excludes members of the Wonder Boy Universe group who just don't get it :D) I also want to thank those who supported us by purchasing the digital or physical versions of the game. A huge thank you as well to the "Miracle Boy In Dragon Land" Facebook community for their support throughout the four years of development. To everyone else: have fun, and feel free to buy us a coffee or a beer to support retro game development! Long live the Atari ST!
PS: Downloading from a source other than this site is not permitted.
Full playthrough of Miracle Boy in Dragon Land (spoiler alert!)
💾 Get the full game at Itch.io
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- Written by: evldhs
After quite a long hiatus, a new version of the Atari webbrowser Highwire has been released in version 0.5.0.
The release notes from their website:
This is the first HighWire in a very long time, and it carries roughly a year of work. The headline is SSL/TLS support through Mbed TLS (TLS 1.2 and 1.3), so you can finally reach the secure HTTPS web from your Atari. Alongside it: tabbed browsing, a single modern toolbar in place of the old GEM navigation, settings, fonts and cache moved out of dialog boxes into real pages you can read and edit, a proper DOM tree underpinning layout, CSS Grid and Flexbox, downloadable web fonts, and SVG and WebP images.
System requirements for Highwire 0.5.0 (snipped from Highwire website as well):
- 68030 or faster CPU; a 68060 is strongly suggested.
- A Speedo-capable GDOS — SpeedoGDOS, NVDI 3+, or fVDI.
- A MiNT-net or STiK/STinG stack (modules included).
- Plenty of free ST and TT RAM — modern pages are large.
Highwire 0.5.0 in Falcon standard 640*480 VGA resolution, Atariscne want more pixels!
🌎 Read more and download at the Highwire site
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- Written by: evldhs
There is a video in English of the Atari fans meetup in Sunnyvale on Friday, October 9 at 11 a.m. Manu has been organizing this meeting since three years now, the big day is coming.
Manu writes: "Come in large numbers. There is a little surprise at the end of the video."
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- Written by: Manu
The replacement event for the Fujiama party is taking place this week in Western Germanys Sauerland region, a rather low populated and nature rich hilly region. Five days of full blown Atari purist excellence in a lovely surrounding.
More than 30 Atari machines have been spotted yesterday, and people are still arriving. There are mostly XL/XE machines in various shapes and modifications, a couple of Amiga 600, CPC (displaying Prodatrons impressive SymbOS), consoles and other exotic machines as well. There is quite an amount of Fujinet devices and also the Mister is in place in heavily modded form.
Top left to botton right: Party time table, Game Compo (Rasters old and really fun game "Head on") and an Atari XE with Fujinet on the display behind allowing to use the ABBUC forum on the old machine, Party-Shirts at the ABBUC shop stand with a sweet and clear message, donation and give away corner with a bulk of ST hardware.
Today part one of an 6502 Assembly course was held by Dr. Irata and JAC! and the new ABBUC website was discussed. Dr. Irata also just won the game compo tonight, followed by Yellow-man.
Demoscene-wise we also have Insane/.tSCc. and Krill/Plush in place, Beetle and NO are here and Deyta just came over more or less directly from Evoke after quickly swapping some clothes at home.
Insane is working on the next version of insaneOS featuring an extremely fast boot time, 50/60 hz runtime switch support among other features. The OS has been in practical use for watching Atari 800 and ST demos during the event.
NO is experimenting with SymbOS/Genode integration and improving a Forth toolchain on Atari 8-Bit. Henne from Abyss connection is here, working on some Amiga demo effects and The Paranoid arrived just a few hours ago. Also always great to meet Bern/Bodenständig 2000, who was also involved in the early Falcon years, pioneering the 16-bit tracker software Mjuzak.
Apple is a forbidden fruit in the main hall, but bananas are obviously welcome.
Right in front of the room is the mysterious Sally 1 CP/M machine, carefully handled by a circle of ABBUC enthusiasts. Below, on the picture is Mauricios dream of a setup. The original Atari 1030 modem rarely made it over to European market, it works and also has been expanded with a modern networking device. Mauricio also modified the SF314 floppy in a way that he can now connect it to his 600 XL. This connoisseurs collage came the longest way to the party, all the way from United States!
The imaginary prize for the most freshly unpacked looking hardware clearly goes to Yellow-man, with a perfect Amiga 600 and Atari XE case. The XE keyboard has been replaced with a mint one for aesthetic reasons recently.
Beetle has brought his unique black Atari midi studio with various midi devices. It is run by a Raspberry Pi hub and he can quickly switch between a Hatari based TT mode or a colorful Aranym/mint setup. Cubase looks great on that setup. All the cases and mods are self designed, created and have a very polished look, surface and feel. Well, it's Beetle, after all..
Here is lot of ongoing Atari development, showcasing, gaming and talking as you would expect. Time to return to that and wrap up this little live report!
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- Written by: 505
The actual files of the Sillyventure 2026 Summer Edition compos are now available for download and comes in three parts (for size reasons).
As one would suppose, some party versions have been exchanged by finals.
🔗 Sillyventure 2026 SE file download page
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- Written by: 505
Ahem!
It’s been a while since I’ve been on here in any meaningful capacity. A massively overdue catching up session is about to land.
Some ‘real life’, or more accurately’, family’ issues have stolen my focus in a big way, and continue to do so. Some of you will already know what happened and are kindly bearing with me.
Still, quite a lot has taken place in the world of the fuji symbol computers and consoles over the past weeks and months. None of it being reflected in the pages of Atariscne.org - It might be time to redress that failure, so here I go again. There is quite a lot to cover.
This is mostly from a games and demos perspective. There have been other exciting developments in the world of utilities and especially hardware, but those topics will need to be addressed elsewhere.
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- Written by: CiH
Following Rapido's return to the Atari scene with the 2 releases at Sommarhack, he recently published his latest experiments in packing; https://github.com/odipar/ST1. Coded by Claude, directed by Rapido.
ST1 is a modified version of the well-known ZX1 packer by Emmanuel Marty, that incorporates a parameterized (fixed) window size for backreferences; which means that not the complete unpacked file requires to be available for depacking. ST1 provides both a packer (java/c# runtimes) and depacker (m68k). General usecase is (de)packing streams, which characteristic is that only a part of the compressed data is used per time; instead of the whole decompressed dataset.
I held a talk at Sommarhack this year about YM with timer playback using compressed streams; it has my interest and Im trying to find a somewhat generalized solution. I use (a slightly modified version of) tat's minymiser (https://github.com/tattlemuss/minymiser) to pack the bytestreams. Afterwards Rapido asked me for the sheets I presented. And a few weeks later (now), it with the release of ST1 there is an alternative choice for (de)compressing bytestreams. ST1 explicitly states it is inspired by minimyser.
Looking at the code; the main difference seems that ST1's context is a single, general purpose bytestream depacker, whereas minymiser is a complete solution interleaving depacking the different YM bytestreams into a single playback frame. So to use ST1 for YM playback, one should implement their own. So I did; 14 YM register streams, each individually packed. Depack 14 frames of complete YM data at init and then 14 bytes per frame for a single stream, cycling through the compressed streams each frame. Needless to say; it works :).
For a quick comparison purposes I ran 2 measurements, using the (timerless) YM3! dumps of Motus and Darwin's Dilemma end tune. On average, ST1 with ~1.08-1.21% cpu (~3.6 scanlines) per frame vs minymisers ~1.9-~2% cpu (~6.1 scanline).
spkr out.
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- Written by: spkr
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.
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- Written by: Tecer
Yes, you read that correct - emulators as in plural. Both emulators runs on all three major platforms (Linux, Windows, macOS) and are available for download.
First up is Atari System Emulator, or ASE, an open-source Atari ST emulator written in C#, using Moira, the excellent Motorola 68000 emulator written in C++.
At the moment, it can emulate an Atari STf/fm quite efficiently, with partial support for the STe. It supports .ST and .MSA disk images, as well as .STX images with copy-protection schemes. You can also manage your game and software library using a screenscraper.fr account and retrieve cover artwork and descriptions for your collection, including GameMenus such as those by Pompey Pirates, DBUG, Medway Boys, and others.
The emulator is currently under active development, and future releases will include compatibility improvements and new features.
Youtube video about ASE, and thanks to The Bit Culture for submitting the text.
🔗 Check out Atari System Emulator (ASE) at Github
Then we got NeoST, which just had its first release nicknamed "Newborn".
NeoST is an Atari ST emulator built as a teaching "hack box": instead of a black box that just runs games, it is a transparent motherboard where every chip is modelled separately and wired onto a Bus that is the memory map.
Hardware — Four machine profiles: ST, Mega ST, STE, Mega STE, from 256 KB to 4 MB of ST-RAM, with the optional hardware correctly present or absent per model (8/16 MHz 68000 cache and an MC68881 FPU socket on the Mega STE). Cycle-exact Moira 68000 core. Shifter + Glue (borders, overscan, resolution tricks, Spectrum 512, STE fine scrolling), MFP 68901, ACIA 6850 + IKBD, WD1772 FDC (writable .st/.msa/.dim, Pasti .stx), DMA/ACSI, blitter, YM2149 + STE DMA sound + Microwire/LMC1992, RTC.
Using it — GEMDOS hard disk (a host folder mounted as C:) and ACSI images; full save-states; a built-in debugger (breakpoints, watchpoints, symbols, instruction stepping, disassembly, hex view, registers); a full-screen kiosk mode driven entirely from a gamepad; opt-in CRT effects; and a deterministic neost-headless (MAME-style traces, PPM captures, RAM/audio/serial dumps) that doubles as the diagnostic tool and the regression bench.
Running titles: Enchanted Land, Super Hang-On, Lethal Xcess, The Cuddly Demos, No Cooper.
Live demo: https://habib256.github.io/neost/wasm/
NeoST is released under the GNU GPL v3. Its hardware behaviour is largely inspired from MAME & Hatari (GPLv2+), to which NeoST owes a great deal.
NeoST 0.5.2 Newborn (webAsm version) in action showing a fullscreen ST picture by Templeton. Description text nicked from the Githib page.
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- Written by: evldhs
The Falcon remake clone called Re-Falcon (earlier report from this spring: News on the Re-Falcon project) is now officially released on Github.
Anyone wishing to build their own Falcon from scratch are now theoretically able to do so. There are 820 components to mount and sourcing all of them is in itself quite a project, not to mention the big technical work to assemble it.
Re-Falcon populated board. Photo by Suavek.
Prototypes of Re-Falcon have proven to work well, running Falcon demos, games and other software. The Re-Falcon board is refined and does not need clock patches like many original Atari boards do. The machine is tested with CT63 and runs well without the mentioned clock patch.
Re-Falcon in traditional Falcon case and new translucent case. Photo by Suavek.
🔗 Check out the Re-Falcon schematics at Github
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- Written by: evldhs
Reservoir Gods bring you a brand new cross platform host assembler and linker for Atari 680x0 development.
rg-asm is a universal assembler, supporting the entire 68k family from 68000 to 68060, 68881/68882 FPUs and all Coldfire CPUs.
Compatible with a huge range of existing atari assemblers (Devpac, vasm, rmac & more) your existing code will just work, no changes needed:
Output includes GEMDOS PRG executables, linkable objects for C toolchains, and raw binaries.
Symbol tables can be embedded (DRI, GST) or written as extern sidecars.
rg-asm v0.7.0 output
Built on a full 680x0 emulation core, rg-asm reports per-instruction cycle costs on each CPU, understands 68000/010 pipeline pairing, and can not only optimisze for size but also peephole optimise and reorder instructions to be more efficient.
Metrics include per instruction diagnostics of CPU costs, function and application level sizes and cycle costs.
All the metrics can optionally be output to JSON for processing by other tools.
It's a single binary with no dependencies. Just unzip and run.
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- Written by: Mr Pink
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!
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- Written by: 505
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:
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.
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.
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: http://www.anodynesoftware.com/e4/main.html.
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.
Have you ever wondered which tune plays in a demo screen or cracktro? Wading through dozens and dozens of SNDH-files before you finally find the correct one.
Well those days are over.
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
🔗 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.
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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.
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
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- Written by: evldhs
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.
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.
Well, one year later still seeing the IDE I/O rate crippled I decided to take a look after all: https://github.com/mikrosk/hddriver-patch/releases/tag/v0.2.
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.
Use at your own risk, as I do. ;)
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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- Written by: Mikro
