pouët.net

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Fandal giving up his website

For two decades the Fandal maintained the website generally known in the community as "Fandal's website" or "A8.fandal.cz" which was dedicated to the collection, curation, metadata provision and promotion of all kinds of demos and games for the Atari XL/XE system. Among the Atari 8-Bit scene enthusiasts this place was an institution with its over 5.000 games and around 3.800 demos available.

Unfortunately Fandal came to the conclusion to stop his activities, also due to the exuberant wave of AI generated content flooding the retro computing sphere.

"All right, that’s it. My retro hobby is being eaten alive by AI at an ever-faster pace, and I definitely don’t want to reach a point where the news section is nothing more than a list of things generated by a prompt.

For this reason, and also because site traffic has been steadily declining to minimal levels, I’ve decided to stop all updates after more than twenty years."

I remember that in the pre retro computing revival era in the 2000s the website seemed as an exceptional project "against the tide" and I always appreciated it. While it is very sad to lose this passionately hand-crafted institution of the Atari scene I have hope the archive remains online for further use. 

What is left to say? Thank you Fandal, for for all the years of support and work for the Atariscene!

🔗 Fandals website

[ SceneSat upcoming shows & events ] Flashparty 2026

31 Oct – 1 Nov 2026

Demoparty held in Buenos Aires, Argentina. With all the usual categories of competition and modern and retro platforms. With special detail in text art compos.

Event website: https://flashparty.ar/

Listen or watch on SceneSat · Full schedule

All of the latest news, links and releases from the active demoscene community. This week in particular with an overview of TRSAC, the acid, ducks, vikings, caravans and sheeps demoparty that took place in the Denmark this past weekend! https://youtu.be/2M37LOP_qzI

[Submitted by psenough]

[ Atariscne.org - News ] New IDE for Atari assembly development

PiST - A new cross-IDE (Integrated development environment) aimed at Atari assembler projects.

It includes editor, assembler, emulation with debugger, sprite editor and much more. It is available for Linux, Windows and macOS.

Further description of the software snipped from it's Github page:

• Editor with m68k Motorola-syntax highlighting, error markers and the current execution line, find/replace (Ctrl+F / Ctrl+H, F3 and Shift+F3, match highlighting as you type, match-case and whole-word options, and a hit counter that admits its cap — past 2000 it reads "N of more than 2000" rather than counting on), completion as you type (Ctrl+Space, or Tab on a word: mnemonics, directives, and the build's labels and equates), a Go to Symbol palette (Ctrl+Shift+O), a hover card for any mnemonic, TOS call or label (below), Ctrl+click to open an include or jump to a label, and a searchable 68000 instruction + TOS system-call reference dock that follows the cursor — on a trap #1/#13/#14 line (or a push feeding one) it names the GEMDOS/BIOS/XBIOS call being made and what it is being called with, and every entry carries a worked example and one line on when to reach for it

[ demoparty.net ] New Server, More Self-Reliance & Faster Search

After more than 1½ years without updates to demoparty.net, once Evoke 2026 was wrapped up it was about time to finally show a little bit of love to the site.

Today, we completed the move to a new server! Beyond upgrading the hosting itself, a big focus of this overhaul was greater self-reliance: reducing our dependency on external third-party services and commercial APIs where possible, in favor of running our own lightweight, privacy-friendly tools.

More In-House, Less Third-Party:

• No More Google: We replaced both Google Maps and Google reCAPTCHA. Maps now use fast vector tiles with full dark-mode support (loaded lazily only when scrolled into view), and our contact form is protected by a self-hosted, invisible Cap instance—meaning no third-party requests to Google and no more traffic-light puzzles.
• Retired Foursquare: Since Foursquare put its API behind a paywall, we removed the integration altogether.
• Self-Hosted Tooling: Behind the scenes, we moved away from several external cloud platforms where it made sense—switching from Sentry to a self-hosted Bugsink instance for error tracking, and replacing Zyte’s cloud service with our own local Scrapy setup for automated data imports.

What Else Improved for You:

• Faster, Smarter Search: We moved from Elasticsearch to Meilisearch. Search results now pop up almost instantly, forgive typos (searching for “asembley” will still find Assembly), and support filtering directly by type (e.g., type:event or type:user).
• Snappier Images & Smaller Assets: Party flyers and banners are now processed on the fly via imagor and automatically delivered in modern WebP/AVIF formats. We also trimmed down our icon fonts to only include the glyphs actually used, reducing overall page weight (and maybe sneaking in a few visual details along the way).
• Safer External Links: Our link crawler is now much more resilient when checking external party websites (including Wayback Machine fallbacks), and submitted links are automatically checked against the abuse.ch URLhaus malware feed.

Under the Hood:

While we were at it, we brought the entire codebase up to date—upgrading to PHP 8.4, Symfony 7, and Vite 8, moving from traditional web hosting to a containerized setup, and migrating our repository and CI/CD pipelines from GitLab to GitHub.

If you spot any broken links, missing images, or glitches after the move, please let us know via the contact form.