Scene.org Demoscene News Service

[ Atariscne.org - News ] nrvpack 3.03 — Atari ST executable compressor

exxos has released version 3.03 of nrvpack, a free online executable compression service for Atari ST PRG/APP/TOS/TTP files. Upload a file and get five compressed variants to choose from, each with different size/speed tradeoffs. 

The packer and all 68000 decompression stubs were written from the ground up. Months of development went into the compression engine — including optimal parsing with dynamic programming, lit-cost sweeps, context-width tuning, and extensive testing of preprocessing transforms and encoding strategies to squeeze every last byte out of typical 68k executables. 

On large real-world programs the best format achieves around 2.75:1 compression ratio. A fast-depack option is also available that decompresses in under a second on a stock 8MHz 68000. All formats support colour-cycling raster bars during decompression and run on any ST/STE/TT/Falcon.

The service is free and requires an exxos forum login.

🔗 https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/nrvpack/
🔗 https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8312

All the latest news, links and releases from the active demoscene community of digital artists and event organizers. This week in particular we cover a few remnants from our Revision 2026 coverage and a deep look at the highlights from the creative competitions at The Gathering 2026. Watch on youtube!

[Submitted by psenough]

[ scenemarket – latest listings ] EVOKE Shirt (2017?) male XL

[Offer] Merchandise · Buy me a drink (by SiR) good used condition, size EUR XL – but it is more like L, it won't fit me anymore anyway ;) --- Interested? Claim this item at https://scene.market/listings/41 — or list your own stuff for free at https://scene.market

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Cyber Legends 2026 website

Felice writes:   Just to let you know, there's now a new website for the Cyber Legends events held in Toddington, England.   The url is https://www.cyberlegends.co.uk   The next event will be on Saturday October 10th and we'd love to see you there. Tickets should be on sale soon.  

[ Demozoo ] Replay 2 (featuring demozoo database)

There was a seminar by emoon at Revision this year talking about the (in development) Replay 2. The Replay 2 is an FPGA board with a built-in frontend. Part of that frontend is a demoscene browser and launcher built on top of the Demozoo database. Always cool to see our database being used for other projects. Want to know more about it? Watch the seminar on youtube.

Composed in true Amiga Spirit!

Jogeir Liljedahl , Markus Klein (Lman) , Romeo Knight , Martin Wall (Mantronix) , Erika Wittmann (Ziona) and many more! Enjoy folks! Download the MP3 album here!

https://nahkolor.c64.page/Encore500_V2-MP3.7z

[Submitted by magic]

Impure 1940 have just released their #92 artpack, full of text mode art goodies by Boheme, Dipswitch, H7, h8o4, Hellbeard, lmn, Prismate, tonelocc and Venam. View the pack online in its full glory at 16colo.rs!

[Submitted by dipswitch]

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Grawitacja 2026 results and photos

Last week Grawitacja 2026, an "8-bit gamejam" took place in Krakow, Poland. The event featured a 36 hours game development competition. Our friends over at Atarionline.pl have recorded and published a video from the live presentation of the entries. About 8 Atari games were shown. Results and photos are available on the event website.

🔗 Grawitacja website

All of the latest news, links and releases from the active demoscene community. This week in particular the second part of deep dive into the releases from Revision 2026. Watch on youtube.

[Submitted by psenough]

[ Atariscne.org - News ] ChatGPT Client for Atari ST

kallebl0mquist published a ChatGPT Client for the Atari ST, so also modern and hip work environments can be migrated to the Atari platform.

Dumbing down with class, using this seductive keyboard
(Picture by kallebl0mquist)

From Github:

I have been building a GEM-based LLM chat client for the Atari ST in GFA BASIC 3.5E. What if an Atari ST could talk to a modern LLM? Not a fake retro skin in a browser, no emulator (though I love Hatari!), but my actual old Atari Mega STE. GFA BASIC was developed by Frank Ostrowski in 1986 and was hugely popular among ST users at the time. So I chose it in the hope that there might be still some resources out there. Did I learn GFA Basic properly for this project? No, but i dug out all the old docs and books and forced codex to learn it. Ha,ha. Poor thing.

The setup :

• Atari Mega STE in high-res monochrome
• GFA BASIC 3.5E on the Atari side
• Raspberry Pi and python 3.12 on the other side
• Nullmodem serial cable (StarTech 30cm USB Nullmodem Seriell Adapterkabel, USB-A auf RS232 DB9)

🔗 ChatST on Github

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Fried Bits 3 video footage from VHS

Zeme hat  finished editing and fixing the subtitles of the Fried Bits 3 recording of a videotape found in his storage. Great insights into one of the most famous Atari parties of the era and possibly the pinnacle of the Atari Falcon demoscene. Thanks for sharing this, Zeme!

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Fujiology archive server announcement

Given the current developments in the scene and the impending loss of the 
host 'untergrund.net', I have decided to accept an offer from the Echtzeit 
association and we have moved the entire archive to a new server.

You can now find the Fujiology archive here: 

https://fujiology.org/

Big thanks goes to Echtzeit (Psykon and Unlock) for their fast help. 

Watch out if you still have links to 'untergrund.net'... they might
be gone soon.

🔗 Echtzeit– Digitale Kultur 
🔗 Fujiology archive

Latest news, links and releases from the active demoscene community. This week in particular covering part of the activities that took place at Revision 2026, the largest pure demoscene gathering of demoscene enthusiasts in the world that took place in Saarbrucken Germany during easter.

Watch Demoscene Report 14 April 2026 on youtube.

[Submitted by psenough]

[ Atariscne.org - News ] New version of FreeMiNT distro

Krupkaj writes:

After six months, Michal has released a new version of his FreeMiNT distribution for 32-bit Atari computers.

This release uses the HDDriver demo as its disk driver, with Uwe providing a special version specifically for the distribution.

A notable new addition is stool, a MiNT tool that replaces the uiptool utility known from TOS. It provides web-based access to Atari disks.

All included GEM/TOS tools are now stored on the GEMDOS C: partition. The distribution also features an experimental 060 kernel, improved SCSI write support, RAW access through devfs, and plenty of other improvements.

The image is available on GitHub.

🔗 FreeMint distro on Github

[ Demozoo ] Demozoo Archaeology W15/26: Classic Mac Demos

Last week Ramses shared with us the filebase of his old BBS, Uphold the Law. Being a pure demoscene board and running from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, it hosted many releases that have since then disappeared from the Internet. This includes 37 forgotten demos and intros for classical Macintosh machines from the second half of the 1990s which we now added to Demozoo, as well as a number of previously known Mac productions that were tagged as "lost". As we are not particularly versed in classic Mac emulation, we would highly welcome volunteers to screenshot these newly discovered productions.

[ scenemarket – latest listings ] PCMCIA Flash cards, 8-16MB

[Search] Storage Media · 20€ (by Saga Musix) I'm looking for PCMCIA Flash cards for my Alesis QSR synthesizer. They need to be at least 8MB, bigger also works but the extra capacity will just be wasted. Unfortunately these synthesizers are a bit picky in terms of card compatibility (see https://benweaver.info/alesis/) - I have tried several cards that were simply not recognized at all, other cards were recognized but resulted in some data not being read correctly. Just offer me anything that might be a fit and we'll figure out if it's worth a try. --- Interested? Claim this item at https://scene.market/listings/40 — or list your own stuff for free at https://scene.market

[ scenemarket – latest listings ] PCMCIA Flash cards, 8MB

[Offer] Storage Media · 37€/card (by Saga Musix) Nokia-branded PCMCIA Flash memory cards, 8MB MLC. They don't work for my use case so I'm reselling them for the price that I originally got them for. Price is per card, I have three of them. Also willing to trade them for memory cards that I can actually use (I can explain the details if needed) :) --- Interested? Claim this item at https://scene.market/listings/39 — or list your own stuff for free at https://scene.market

[ Atariscne.org - News ] GCC for asm Experts (and C/C++ Intermediates) - Part 5

← Register Allocation and the Cost Model

Fixing Post-Increment Addressing

Some years after high school, me and AiO worked at the same company for a while. I spent a lot of time at his apartment in Vimmerby, watching demos on my Falcon030 and his accelerated Amiga, playing Elite Frontier, and making grand plans for projects that mostly never shipped. I was going to write a Worms clone called Grubs, built around fractal-generated terrain and a neat paralax scrolling trick. In the end the only game released from that apartment was DB Phone Home, a 4K side-scrolling platformer for the Falcon. But the thing I remember most is reading AiO's copy of the MC68060 User's Manual.

The 68060 can not only do a multiply in two clockcycles, but execute two instructions at once!? Motorola called it superscalar, and I thought it was the most exciting thing in the world. I imagined what an Atari with this beast could do, and where the 68070 would take this — even wider issue, more parallelism, the same trajectory the industry was already on with the Pentium and the PowerPC. Of course, the 68070 never came. ColdFire does not quite count for me. Our beloved CPU family ended with the 68060, and the dream of wider superscalar m68k died with it.

But the industry kept going. GCC optimizes for that dream-made-real on other architectures: x86-64, ARM, RISC-V. Independent instructions that hardware can overlap or even reorder to execute over half a dozen instructions per cycle on for example an Apple Silicon M3/M4. This all works, as long as there are no data dependencies between consecutive operations. And this is where it goes wrong for us.

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Atari at the Revision Party?

So you’re thinking that at the big multi-format Revision Easter party, there isn’t anything of compelling interest for us Atari fans? That amongst the system smashing Amiga and PC releases, there simply isn’t anything there for *our* platform?

A first glance may make you leap to that conclusion, but a slower and more considered examination reveals there are traces of Atari and Atarians. We can be found in all sorts of unexpected places!

This is what we discovered for Easter 2026.

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Sillyventure 2026 SE website is online

The website for Sillyventure 2026 SE is online, featuring a new layout and several interesting new items and photos. 

So far about 30 people have registered. The party itself will take place from 30.07 - 02.08.2026.

🔗 Sillyventure 2026 SE website

You are all cordially invited to the 5th Black Valley. For the big 5, we're bringing you a bossa-nov'ing kickass invite!

So start doing that springtime checking of your tents and sleeping bags, plan your travels and start poking at your entries. See you 10-12 July in Blaker, Norway!

Get your tickets!

[Submitted by susencrusen]

Amiga Pack and Magazine for you to enjoy! Including bonusdisk!

Download here: https://nahkolor.c64.page/Speed75Revision.zip

[Submitted by magic]

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Whack a Virus - bug fix

YesCrew has released a bugfixed ST/TT version of their "Whack a Virus" game, fixing some minor issues (clean return to desktop).

🔗 Whack a Virus website

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Spectrum 512 Painter

Anima aka Percy/Light, proven specialist for Atari image online conversion tools also published "Spectrum 512 painter", a painting and conversion tool for Spectrum 512 pictures in a nice GEM appearance.

GEM layout in your browser (and yes, I know, the dull screenshot doesn't cover the colorfulness possible with this tool)

🔗 Spectrum 512 Painter

🔗 Spectrum 512 Painter on Github

[ Wanted! ] Support organizers wanted for Network & Partymeister / Compo Team / Infodesk @ NORDLICHT 2026

Nordlicht 2026 is cancelled - or is it?? Unexpected real world events forced us to give up our initial schedule for Nordlicht Demoparty in July 2026. The location owner has since offered us an alternative date to host the party, just one weekend after the one we had originally aimed for. This would be Thursday 30th July to August 2nd 2026. While the current orga staff cast their votes to decide whether or not to go forward with planning Nordlicht for this year or skip until 2027, we're also...