Category Archives: retro computers

The Rise of the Atari ST Demo Scene

Posted on by

In March 1986 I heard about this really cool, powerful and affordable new computer, the Atari ST. At the time I was an enthusiastic Commodore 64 owner, and around me many people intended to make the switch to the Amiga. This machine was still in the (albeit relatively near) future, and its price tag was predicted to be substantial.

Then my best ’64 friend, Frank “Antiware” Lemmen found out about an Amsterdam company, Kafka Computers, that “grey” imported UK Atari ST systems, making a switch to the ST much more affordable and, to my pubescent mind, desirably instant. So I got the 512 Kb system with TOS on disk (no!) and a separate single-sided disk drive (double no!) with monochrome monitor (hell no!) and my first box of ten 3.5” single-sided (!) floppy disks (which at the time set me back about the equivalent of € 45). I had flogged my ’64 and this was basically all I could afford. It is a testament to the low price tag of an ST system, though, that I could buy it for what was, essentially, the value of a secondhand ’64 with monitor and disk drive. That day was 29 March 1986, exactly 40 years ago on the day I am posting this.

The first few months were cognitive dissonance galore. In hindsight those months were full of disappointments: Except for “Brattacas”, no games worked on monochrome (“But look how incredibly sharp that mono screen is!”). “ST Basic” was a steaming pile of poo (“But it allows you do really cool things with, like…GEM and stuff!”). Once TOS was loaded you didn’t have a lot of those 512 Kb of memory left (“But you have at least 10 Kb more basic bytes free than on that old ’64!”). And, most of all, after the SID-suffused sound bliss of the ’64, I missed Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Ben Daglish, David Whittaker… remember, this was an interminably long time before Mad Max hit the scene and possibly a quarter of a century before gwEm.

I made do with what I had. Obviously I saved up all my birthday-and pocket money to get a double-sided drive. And a colour monitor. And TOS in ROM. And 512 Kb of extra RAM. And we gradually built up a network of friends with whom to swap games and information. From July 1986, “ST NEWS” kickstarted the size and efficiency of that network. I remember there was a lot of childish hate towards Amiga users. I went around saying stuff like “we have 8 Mhz and you only have 7.09 Mhz”. Of course, they had superior sound, a 4096-colour palette, and “Defender of the Crown”. Bitter times.

After a little over a year of “making do” and constantly (deep, deep down) wondering if perhaps I should have gone for the much reviled A-word instead, the door to satisfaction was put ajar. It was April 1987 when Microdeal sent me one of their latest games to review for “ST NEWS”, “Goldrunner”. In it sat one of the tunes I knew back from the ’64 times, converted to the ST by its original composer – none other than SID legend Rob Hubbard. Rob. Effing. Hubbard! And the game itself was nothing to be sniffed at, either – a Steve Bak masterpiece with great Pete Lyon graphics to boot. Certainly, only the sky could be the limit now?

Barely a few months later one of my swapping contacts, Markus “Bitstopper” Herfort, sent me “Little Sound Demo” by a group of Germans who called themselves “The Exceptions”, or “TEX” for short. This was a really neat little demo which, apart from being visually quite pleasing, offered a quality of music that had not been heard on the ST before. Their sound programmer, one Mad Max, had managed to write a superior sound player routine. It played conversions of some fan-favourite Rob Hubbard tunes, including that of “International Karate”. I cried like, well, like a little girl. I am not ashamed to admit it. If there were people around who sought to push the envelope with regard to the ST’s arguably limited hardware specs like that, the switch to the ST had maybe been the right choice to make after all.

It would perhaps be prudent to remind you of the fact that the only way to get more out of a machine like the ST was to become a better, more efficient, perhaps more sneaky programmer. There was no replacement graphics card to wait for, no CPU to overclock, no custom chip replacement’s availability to hope for. And, boy, were there people prepared to get better and a whole lot sneakier to push the hardware to its huffing and puffing limits!

Demo crews like the aforementioned TEX popped up all over Europe and started a friendly competition of trying to outperform each other’s demos. In fact, creating demos became an objective in and of itself. Dozens or hundreds of colours were used simultaneously, ever bigger fonts were smoothly scrolled, ever huger numbers of shapes were moved in ever more intricate patterns.

The world of demos was being – quite literally – blown open with the release of “Super Neo Slideshow” (by Alyssa and TEX). This was a slideshow of “NeoChrome” format pictures with a scrolling message underneath them. A scrolling message underneath them? Yes. Graphics in the actual lower border, which allowed for extra usable screen space below the regular 320×200 pixel normally visible area.

Demo crews went from strength to strength. TEX released the “B.I.G. Demo” in January 1988, which featured all kinds of cool eye candy atop 113 excellent sounding conversions of just about every Rob Hubbard tune ever done on the ‘64. Mad Max’ sound player routine only got better and better. In March TEX released the “Amiga Demo” which boasted an overscan screen that even managed to remove part of the right border. The TNT Crew did the very impressive “FNIL (Fantastic New Interactive Largest) Demo”, which was possibly the first megademo, including a total of 7 different screens that were impressive to the very last of ‘em. Most hardware-groaningly impressive was the whole-screen scroller it featured.

The then climax of demo-ism, by dint of the multiple impressive screens as well as its overal smooth design, was the “Union Demo”. This demo was created by a joining of forces of The Exceptions, The CareBears, Level 16 and the TNT Crew. The groundbreaker was Level 16’s first overscan (i.e. full screen, no borders) screen, but it also featured a smooth solid 3D vector screen (by the TNT Crew), and what some people cite as the best scroller screen ever, TCB’s 3D-sinus-and-a-whollottamore scroller.

Things could have, but didn’t, end there. Milestone upon milestone was released: “Swedish New Year Demo” (in which Swedish crews Sync, Omega and The CareBears bundled their talents) was next in January 1989, followed on its heels by the first UK megademo, “DEF Demo” (by a bunch of 15-year-olds and an 18-year-old who called themselves The Lost Boys). Up next was the “Whattaheck Demo” (May 1989) which was the first to feature full-screen (overscan) scrolling (which later became known as sync scrolling, which later was used in Thalion’s game “Enchanted Land”). The Netherlands saw the release of their first megademo in August of 1989 with the “Genesys” demo by Aenigmatica. The year ended with TCB releasing their “Cuddly Demos”, a gargantuan effort which became the reference point of sync scrolling madness, all made by their four members (Nic, Tanis, An Cool and Jas).

After “Swedish New Years Demo 1990” kicked off the new year, attention shifted to the other side of the North Sea when The Lost Boys released their “Mindbomb” demo, made entirely by the Lost Boys themselves (Spaz, Manikin and Digital Insanity) with one screen by the Bad Brew Crew. This demo lifted friendly competition to the next (and a smidge more bloody) level with a “CareBear Bashing” intro screen. All in good-natured fun, of course – no matter how you look at it, the ST demo scene was full of friendly camaraderie. Awesome.

During the swelteringly stuffy summer of 1990, The Lost Boys were finishing up the “A Prehistoric Tale” game for Thalion in Gütersloh while The CareBears’ Nic was finishing up “Enchanted Land” back in Sweden. One intoxicated weekend was spent sending reams and reams of faxes to and fro Gütersloh and Stockholm that featured GremlBears, CareBear Slaughtering, Lost Boy impalements and various other sadistic feats of torture, drawn out in great detail by their talented graphics artists Dave “Spaz” Moss and Niclas “Tanis” Malmqvist respectively. Wish I’d have kept those fax rolls. That summer saw members of TEX, Delta Force (DF) and Unlimited Matricks (ULM) contributing on some games, rounding it off with the September Düsseldorf Atari Messe release of the “Life’s a Bitch” demo that included the infamous “Bittner Rap” (quite unlike the version on the “Give it a Try” CD and a lot funnier).

A huge climax of Atari ST scene friendship happened in December 1990 when the STNICCC (“ST NEWS International Christmas Coding Convention”) took place. Just about every European demo coder, including everyone mentioned above as well as most Thalion employees, attended. It turned out to be four awesome days of competitions in various categories (pixel graphics, 3½ Kb “VIC 20 Times Revisited” demo, etc.). Several megademos were also released in that pre-Christmas weekend – “Syntax Terror” by Delta Force, the two-disk “European Demos” by Overlanders and friends, and the full-screen-with-digital-music smørgåsbörd “Dark Side of the Spoon” by ULM.

Summer 1991 saw the release of The Lost Boys’ swansong effort, “Ooh Crikey Wot a Scorcher”. Among cool hardware-pushing things, it boasted a screen where a Lost Boy bloodily sawed a CareBear in half. Sadly, this challenge was never answered, let alone topped, by its intended audience. The last megademo of 1991 was the two-disk “Punish Your Machine” by Delta Force of November 1991.

As 1992 dawned, most of the spiders in the web of the “first generation” of demo creation had wandered off to pastures new (and likely green), many of them actually in the games industry. As for me, I directed my “ST NEWS” efforts ever more towards the multimedia side of things. In September 1993, Overlanders/ST Connexion /Legacy/Poltergeist released “Froggies over the Fence”, perhaps The Last Of The Big Megademos. After that, I myself drifted out of the ST demo scene. The Falcon happened, but I was not really in touch with the “second generation” demo crews. Although not sufficiently in the spotlight here, I knew crews like The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, Avena, Reservoir Gods, Checkpoint, Electra and Cream were all legendary in their own right.

One would be in error, however, to assume the ST demo scene is dead. This fact is attested by various partly or entirely ST-centric coding parties/conventions such as Silly Venture, OutLine, GEMTOS and reunions of the STNICCC (in 2000, 2015 and, the gods willing, 2032) still taking place. Rather than these events just being nostalgia happenings, with old farts reminiscing over the good old times and cracking dad jokes, they actually witness competition on genuine Atari hardware, with boundaries and borders still being pushed (and, more often than not, removed), even on monochrome screens.

The Atari scene is made by the people that are in it. And that’s why it is AMAZING.

Atari Aviary – a site to browse and view (!) Atari ST demos on, being emulated right in the browser (no HTTPS site, but it’s safe)
Atariscne – (no typo) a more serious Atari Scene repository and community
Atari ST Demo Scene – group on Facebook, quite active!
DemoBase ST – Windows-based database of virtually all Atari ST demos, viewable, filterable, super-de-luxe, entirely offline
DemoZoo – the ultimate online multi-platform demo database reference
Microzeit (publisher of Atari/Amiga/C64 books)
ST NEWS – the site where all “ST NEWS  issues can be read, and its subculture witnessed
STNICCC – Official ST NEWS International Christmas Coding Convention site, covering the 1990, 2000, 2015 and (potentially) 2032 events
Thalion Discord – where former Thalion employees also regularly post

Batocera Linux

Posted on by

A while ago I heard about a free Linux distribution called Batocera via a Youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EVAKRC0mUY – video in German). I piqued my interest, because I had grown up with the C64 and Atari ST, and always had an affinity with playing games. This particular Linux distribution, you see, allowed emulation of just about any retro computer/console within an easily configurable, visually attractive user interface. All you needed to do was install it on a sufficiently sized USB or SSD drive and Bob’s your uncle. Oh, and populate it with the appropriate ROMs and game files.

By the time I had discovered Batocera (named after a beetle, incidentally) it was at distribution 37. It was indeed very easy to install, although I was disconcerted for a bit when I saw most of the external SSD somehow losing its storage space after installation. This turned out to be the result of there being a big Linux-format partition that is invisible to us Windows n00bs. After installing I reset my system. Luckily, I didn’t even have to go into the BIOS because my system has a ‘boot from’ hotkey allowing the selection of which device to boot from – including the external SSD.

Please allow for me, at this point, to write a bit about the magic of mass storage evolution, told from the perspective of someone whose first hard disk (the Atari SH204) was 20 Mb (no typo), with sturdy metal housing, having the size of a shoe box, weighing about 3 kilos (according to current internet sources, though I don’t remember it weighing that much), and setting me back the 1988 equivalent of about € 440 (1000 Dutch guilders, which may even have been the second-hand price as I got it from a friend). Back then I threw every application that I owned on it, and I still had many megabytes to spare. It was lighting fast (compared to a floppy disk, obviously) and incredibly, well, spacious. Inside of it was a 3.5 inch (Tandon TM262) or 5.25 inch (Seagate ST225) drive with ST506 interface (though I never opened it, as I was too shit-scared I would lose data). I also remember I sometimes needed to defragment it in order to speed it up, which would take one or more hours and was one of the scariest things I had ever done to, literally, all my data and apps. Ever since, adhering to what is known as Kryder’s Law, mass storage has become denser, more compact yet allowing for bigger storage, and let’s not forget oodles cheaper. I now have 512 Gb USB drives barely bigger than twice the width of a USB-A socket, costing a bit over € 40 (roughly 25600 times the storage at 1/10th of the price). I guess it’s a sure sign of belonging to the 40+ (or even 50+) demographic when this still truly boggles one’s mind. At any rate, I put Batocera on a 2 Tb Samsung SSD that is available for a bit over € 130 (roughly 102400 times the storage at less than 1/3rd of the price). It is the size of a credit card and 0,8 cm thick. Belonging to the age bracket I mentioned before, colour me impressed.
Enough now of this stuff that makes me sound positively geriatric. Well….maybe. Hopefully.

So I booted into Batocera and was, rather quickly, met by the splash screen and a menu where I could select literally any system I had ever heard of…as well as plenty I never knew existed. All of this was presented, like mentioned before, in a visually rather pleasing user interface. Most systems, obviously, had no games to play. Some of them did – freeware ports of some popular titles, as well as the odd other free game. Batocera will make use of your computer’s hardware but none of its internal storage, which means you can make use of the controller, mouse, keyboard and network card, but need an external USB drive to copy files to/from it. You have no access to the Windows file system, and can’t even access it using your network because Windows is simply not active the moment Batocera runs on your system. Thankfully, it has a file organiser available for the task of copying files from an external USB drive.
My first step involved discovering just which systems it supported. There were Atari ST and C64, of course, but also other systems from before, during and after that era. I spotted the Vectrex (a very cool vector-based system that had a built-in monitor, that I used to drool at when I gazed into the window of a local toy store in the early 80s), the Philips Videopac (from that same era, on which I played hours of “Pick Axe Pete” at a friend’s place), obviously the various Atari game consoles of the past (2600, 5200, and 7800), ancient Nintendo “Game & Watch” titles, the Atari Lynx, and the various incarnations of the Game Boy, Apple, Commodore Amiga and Sinclair computers (though I sort of missed the QL). Most impressively, I also found literally all the gaming consoles I remember having heard from, but not having been able to afford due to monetary or location constraints – Panasonic 3DO, Philips CD-i, ColecoVision, Dreamcast, Game Gear, Master System, Mega Drive, Nintendo 64, SNES, PC Engine, Playstation (including Vita, PSP, PS2 and PS3), Sega Saturn, Wii, Wii U, Xbox and Xbox 360. That, as well as some pretty damn obscure systems such as the RISC-architecture Acorn Archimedes and the failed Atari Jaguar, and many others even more obscure. Then there’s emulation of genuine arcade cabinets such as the ones you’d find in gaming halls of the 70s and later, including some really awesome platform, shoot-em-up and beat-em-up games. In total there are nearly 200 systems that can be selected.
My second step of discovery was experimenting with the various elements that make Batocera truly unique, make it better than just having a bunch of individual emulators, each with their own configuration, run on your system. There’s the Themes, for starters, which are ways of presenting all this information in variety a ways. They can all be loaded, installed, selected and configured from within the system. My current fave is Ckau-Book, which combines a spinning-wheel selector with extended info about the current system and reminders of which controller buttons to use for which menu functions. Next there’s the Scraper, which allows the system to download box art, description, screenshots and often even gameplay videos belonging to just about every game on every system you’d care to download. I think that’s a really awesome and atmospheric feature. Then there’s Retroachievements, which allow for certain achievements to be unlocked for retro games that never used to have them. To be honest, I have not played any games that support this yet, but it seems very cool. In the same category (not used myself, but sounds cool) is the Netplay feature, where you can play certain multi-player games across the internet. These things are the icing on the cake, really.

Before the fun really starts, you need to find and download games and Operating System ROM files. When you hunt for these, you will find out they are in a legal grey area. Theoretically these files are not legally available, but copyright is not upheld much (although I’ve heard of Nintendo shutting down ROM download sites, even for systems they no longer produce or sell). In principle, if you own a physical copy of the game you may use ‘ripped’ cartridge files on emulators. I think it’s safe to say most people just download complete ROM packs with all games for these systems from Torrent sites. Some of these collections are incredibly compact – all Gameboy games are 400 Mb, Nintendo Entertainment System 143 Mb, C64 less than 700 Mb, Atari ST less than 1.5 Gb, Sega Megadrive 1.7 Gb, Vectrex 300 Kb(!), Atari Lynx 34 Mb, etc. Countless years of software development available in an incredibly small form factor. It isn’t until the advent of more advanced systems featured games on CD or DVD that individual titles get (much) bigger.

Getting the games isn’t the problem. Getting the proper Operating System ROM files is. A few systems need no OS ROM files, but many do. I’ve fumbled around with Batocera for about 2 months now, and I am still not very comfortable knowing which ROMs are needed and what for. This is not helped by the legal grey area mentioned above. If only Batocera came with all this stuff built in! But that will never happen. I got most of the classic systems to work, but I am as yet grappling in the dark when it comes to determining which TOS version for Atari ST to run for which games, and how to permanently configure certain games to run with a certain version. And MAME (the arcade games emulator) seems, to me, an unpredictable mess. Some games work like a charm (love “R-Type II” and “Metal Slug”) but many other classics (“Bubble Bobble”, for example) simply refuse to run. The Future Pinball pinball machine emulator also freezes after loading a table. I cannot get the Jaguar to work (either that, or it’s super duper slow to load – I never had the patience to wait for minutes on end). The VIC 20 always results in errors after loading – even though I think there’s a workaround for that, I am too lax to do that. None of the “Game & Watch” titles work (they are not a high priority for me, but it would be cool to be able to play them anyway). The fact that the whole thing is Linux-based also makes me a bit reticent to experiment with configuration files and the like.
So it looks like I will be experimenting for some time to come until all of this works like it should. Once that has happened, I will merely be a reboot away from playing some of the best games around, not just when I am in a mood of nostalgic reverie.

My experiences in this column are totally PC-centric (GTX 1080 graphics card, Intel Core i7-8700K at 4,7 Ghz – pretty high-end for a laptop bought at the tail end of 2017), but there are Batocera versions for Mac, Steamdeck, Odroid, Raspberry, and a whole lot of other systems. There’s even a category of “very old PCs (20+ year-old)”. Apparently, most systems up to Playstation 2 can run on pretty much any old device.

Here’s some links that will help you find your way if you decide to give Batocera a go…

A general video about what Batocera is
The official Batocera site, for an overview of the features, the download page, and support
A site where you can find lots of game ROM files for most systems

This page was last updated 4 November 2023