Scene.org Demoscene News Service

[ scenemarket – latest listings ] All your unwanted (audio) cassette tapes

[ Atariscne.org - News ] News on the Re-Falcon project

The Re-Falcon project has been put on display at last weekend's Indianapolis Retro Computer Expo 2026.

[ scenemarket – latest listings ] Extremely basic RISC-V VGA demo platform

[ scenemarket – latest listings ] Z80 CMOS 10 MHz (Z84C0010PEG)

[ scenemarket – latest listings ] Various microcontrollers

[ scenemarket – latest listings ] WinnerMicro W806 devboard

[ scenemarket – latest listings ] PSoC 4 devboard

[ scenemarket – latest listings ] QuickLogic EOS S3 Feather

[ scenemarket – latest listings ] Toshiba BomBeat 14 '79 Ghetto Blaster

[ scenemarket – latest listings ] tape based camcorders

hey friends! 👋

we just launched scene.market: a community marketplace for trading physical items face to face at demoparties.

what is it?
a simple platform where you can post offers and searches for retro hardware, disks, magazines, merch, and other scene-related stuff. no shipping, no payment processing - just arrange a handoff at the next party.

how it works:

• login with your SceneID
• post an offer ("i'm bringing my spare Amiga 500 to Revision") or a search ("looking for a C64 PSU, will be at Evoke")
• pick which demoparties you'll attend
• someone interested? they claim your item, you get their contact details, sort out the rest yourselves

pricing options: free, buy me a drink 🍺, fixed price, trade, or surprise me

upcoming parties synced from demozoo: Revision, Evoke, Assembly, Deadline, Edison, and 30+ more already listed.

the whole thing runs on Go + HTMX + SQLite, and is operated by Computerkunst e.V. - source will be made open soon.

we'd love your feedback. try it out and let us know what you think!

https://scene.market

greetings to everyone who still has a box of old hardware in the attic. time to find it a new home. 🖥️

[Submitted by v3nom]

[ scenemarket – latest listings ] C64 (?) to SCART cable

[ OpenMPT - Open ModPlug Tracker ] OpenMPT 1.32.08.00 released

This is a regression update to the most recent OpenMPT 1.32 release to address a single bug.

OpenMPT 1.32.07.00 contained a fix for a crash in the sample mixer, which unfortunately also caused the duration of some sample loops to be altered. This was most notable in MOD files, where chip samples could suddenly be out of tune.

OpenMPT 1.32.08.00 addresses this regression, fixing both the crash and also keeping chip samples in tune.

For a complete list of changes, have a look at the full version history. If you are upgrading from OpenMPT 1.31 or older, read the release notes to get a glimpse of the biggest changes.

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Atari Invasion 2026 is over

The 10th edition of the Dutch Atari Meeting took place past weekend and judging by the photos available this was a great event for all Atari platforms.

According to wildly circulating rumours also some Atari sceners were present, some of them meeting as ripe men, decades after their previous encounter when they were fresh and young.

🔗 Atari invasion homepage

🔗 Photos on the respective Flickr homepage

[ Atariscne.org - News ] GCC for asm Experts (and C/C++ Intermediates) - Part 2

What a Compiler Must Get Right (That You Don't)

When you write assembly, you know the context. You know which registers hold what, whether a pointer is aligned, whether the loop count fits in a word. You know because you put it there.

Consider a demo screen where you reserve a6 for the background rasters. You update the pointer in the VBL interrupt and just advance with a minimal (a6)+ in the HBL. All your other code simply does not touch a6, because you wrote all of it. Need to update a screen pointer? Just write the global. No function call, no overhead, no uncertainty.

A compiler has no such luxury. It must be correct for every possible input the language allows. It cannot "just know" that a pointer is word-aligned, or that two buffers never overlap, or that a register is free. It must prove it, or assume the worst. And not all code it calls may even have been compiled by it. Maybe it was built with an older compiler, a different language, or maybe you wrote it in assembly yourself.

A new tool for composing bytebeat has just been published: DawBeat, an experimental browser-based DAW designed to arrange bytebeat formulas on a timeline rather than writing a single monolithic expression.

https://dev.eypacha.com/dawbeat/

The idea behind DawBeat is to approach bytebeat composition more like working in a traditional DAW: formulas can be placed in clips, arranged across tracks, and modulated over time.

Current capabilities include:

• timeline with tracks and clips
• drag formulas from a library
• real-time bytebeat playback in the browser
• variable tracks and value trackers
• automation lanes for parameters
• formula effects and audio effects
• MIDI input for controlling parameters and writing automation
• MIDI clock synchronization
• phone or tablet controller via QR (automation companion)
• undo / redo and multi-clip editing
• export compositions to WAV or MP3 

The project explores a different way of working with bytebeat, focusing on composition and arrangement over time rather than a single standalone expression.

[Submitted by eypacha]

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Sopwith - A 40 Year old MS-DOS game finally comes to the Atari ST!

Some more old ‘new game’ news is heading our way.

This unexpected gift comes courtesy of Neil Rackett of Mesmotronic, who created the 3D model of an ST running in a browser window.

This time, he’s ported an ancient MS-DOS game ‘Sopwith’ to the ST. 

It features intense biplane action through charmingly retro vector style graphics and arcade style gameplay, with characteristic MS-DOS beepy early PC sound. Interestingly, this game was going to get a dedicated ST version back in the day, but this did not happen, until now.

It can be downloaded from his Github repository. Good luck figuring out the controls!

CiH - 22.3.26.

[ OpenMPT - Open ModPlug Tracker ] OpenMPT 1.32.07.00 released

This small update to OpenMPT 1.32 is mostly a bugfix release.

Here's a list of the most notable changes in this version:

• Plugin editors can now receive SysEx messages from OpenMPT's MIDI recording.
• Choosing "Copy Pattern" from the order list context menu always copied the currently displayed pattern, not the one on which the context menu was invoked.
• Work around apparently broken channel negotiation in MaxSynths DR-910 plugin.
• Small playback fixes for MOD and ULT files.
• On recent versions of Windows 11, MIDI recording stopped working after receiving a SysEx message.
• MIDI export from MOD or S3M did not correctly export implicit note-offs when playing a new note on the same channel.
• The instrument note map category was missing in keyboard settings.

For a complete list of changes, have a look at the full version history. If you are upgrading from OpenMPT 1.31 or older, read the release notes to get a glimpse of the biggest changes.

Encore 500 Volume 2 - The Album! has been released.

16 new tracks are giving tribute to some of the Amiga 500 finest music by amongst others Jogeir Liljedahl, Firefox, Mantronix, Romeo Knight, LMan, Ziona, Base Cadet and many more!

Download the whole album here:

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

[Submitted by magic]

[Submitted by dipswitch]

With a massive delay: we present recordings of the Evoke 2025 Seminars. Unfortunately we had a issue with the sound of the seminar by Bodo / Rabenauge. This is why we present only two recordings:

The Art of Coding Lightning talks

GRADE-Panel - Digital Subcultures in Times of Crisis

[Submitted by dipswitch]

[Submitted by psenough]

[ Atariscne.org - News ] GCC for asm Experts (and C/C++ Intermediates) - Part 1

This is a brain dump of what I have learned working with the GCC m68k backend, and maybe an attempt to convince someone else to try. This is the first of an unknown number of posts. No promises for how many there will be; I will continue as long as I have something to say and I find it fun.

I got my start with STOS Basic on an Atari 520STfm around 1990. Me and my classmate Tam formed T.O.Y.S. (Terror on Your ST) and I dubbed myself PeyloW. But in the scene, elite sceners wrote assembly; only lamers used STOS or GFA, every scroll text was clear about this. So we bought DevPac 2 and taught ourselves 68000 assembly, starting with snippets embedded in STOS and eventually graduating to full demo screens. The pattern that would follow me for decades was established early: high-level languages for tooling, assembly for anything that had to be fast. STOS gave way to PurePascal in the late '90s, but assembly remained the language that mattered — right through to the Falcon030 demo "Wait", released at EIL 2001.

My active participation in the scene waned, but I never lost sight of it. For years I stayed as an observer, following releases and discussions from the sidelines. Then around 2021 I had an itch, maybe a mid-life crisis: get back to the simpler machines (the kind a single person can keep entirely in their head) and realize a teenage dream of publishing a completed game. C and C++ had become my main languages through University and work, and modern cross-development tools meant I could use them for Atari too. Not just for tooling, but as the scaffolding of the entire project, dipping into assembly only for the bottlenecks. And as my friend AiO likes to joke: C is just a really powerful macro assembler.

The m68k was one of GCC's first backends, present alongside VAX in the 1987 GCC-1.0 release. For a long time it was a first-class citizen. But the world moved on, and the backend fell into disrepair, barely in maintenance mode, with no one actively working on it.

To be fair, the great strides made in modern compiler optimization are what keep the m68k backend limping along. For most codebases the result is on par with yesteryear, even if it completely fails at many of the specifics. Even a 68060 fitted into a Falcon with a CT63 is ancient by modern CPU standards. The optimizations that GCC's middle-end applies (instruction scheduling, loop transformations, register heuristics and reordering) are tuned for modern highly parallel superscalar CPUs, and when they miss on m68k, they miss badly.

Take the inner loop of a simple memory copy (mikro will recognize this one), in C:

Any experienced m68k programmer would expect (a0)+ and (a1)+, post-increment addressing, the most natural idiom on our architecture. The compiler should be able to generate this just as-is — it is how the code reads. Here is what stock GCC-15.2 produces at -O2:

The perfectly fine inner loop gets butchered in the name of scheduling for superscalar execution. Instructions get reordered, pointer increments get separated from their memory accesses, and the fourth copy ends up using a negative offset because the lea was hoisted above it. The result is slower and larger than what GCC-2.95 would have produced, and not even close to what an elite scener would have written. For command-line tools and utilities this is tolerable. For realtime demos and games, it is not.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Just finished AmiParty 35.

https://demozoo.org/parties/5587/

[Submitted by stefkos]

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Forever 2026 live stream

The live stream of this weekend's FOReVER  party in Suchá nad Parnou, Slovakia can be found here. As it might be of relevance to understand what you see, this year's topic is "8bit winter games".