pouët.net

[ 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.

[ demoparty.net ] Heads up: demoparty.net is moving servers

We are upgrading our infrastructure and will move to a new server in the coming days (probably early next week).

Expect a brief downtime while we flip the switch.

[ Wanted! ] I need hardware help with Sharp MZ-800

Hey hey. Potentially found a way to horizontally scroll on Sharp MZ-800 via hardware trickery but the trick only solidly works on CRTs and professional upscalers; nor on modern LCDs or cheap upscalers. And I only have a cheap upscaler and LCDs. So if you can help me with this problem do contact me! I also speak finnish.

Interview with teadrinker on datunnel.

[Submitted by friol]

[ Atariscne.org - News ] Software Version of Jaguar core for MiSTer

laoo of NG ported the Jaguar core from MiSTer to C++ which gives the first really 99.99% accurate Jaguar emulator. Of course it does not run at 100% speed. In fact the speed highly depends on how much the bus is used as this is the "base-clock" for the system.   He provides precompiled binaries for Windows, Linux and MacOS.   https://github.com/laoo/JagMCP   The emulator "speaks" MCP, so it can be used with AI agents to support debugging.   This finally solves the problem many Jaguar developers face as they test their code with BigPEmu or VirtualJaguar and see it fail on real hardware. Now with JagMCP there is no excuse.