ATARILEGACY

The ReFalcon is a replica of the Atari Falcon computer motherboard, introduced to the market in 1992. Since then, there have been a couple of attempts to recreate the design, but none of them delivered a working prototype until the break of 2025/26, when the first ReFalcon prototype PCB successfully booted to TOS after five months of reverse-engineering work.

Introvert. Modest. Withdrawn. My only connection to the world was music. Once, it facilitated contact with people; later, it restricted it to a minimum due to my dream of “producer self-sufficiency.” That is basically the antithesis of a pop star.

I am fully aware that with thousands of ideas always sitting on my drive, most of them will never see the light of day. And that is fine by me. What I value most is the creative process itself. The joy and fun that accompany it — that is fulfillment enough for me.

The origin of the name ‘Atari Star Force’ is interesting — it came from graffiti. On the pavilions near where I lived (next to the Community Centre), someone had spray-painted Air Star Force on a wall. At some point, already knowing Magnus, Joker and others, I wanted to create my own group, which I named Atari Star Force — from the writing on the wall.

The story of my first production is prosaic. I was sitting at the Saska market, browsing some disks at the stand of a man I knew, and I found on them the program ‘Rambrandt’ and some collection of pictures. The disk itself turned out to be damaged in large part, but there were a few sample pictures on it, which I decided to copy onto cassette and then, as a programming exercise, write a ‘viewer’ for them. Looking through those pictures I came across one that seemed to me a good starting point for writing some mini-demo. I thought that all that picture needed was some scroll, music, and maybe something would come of it.

Part 1 ran in Issue 01 — still available in the archive.

In my opinion using USB solution in MIDI connection causes more timings problem than built-in MIDI in over 40 years old Atari computers(!!!). That’s why I think this is still unbeatable solution.

Moving away from modern, virtual plug-and-play frameworks, Atari MIDI systems relied on direct, bare-metal hardware processing. The defining characteristic of this setup is the complete elimination of a middleman operating system or USB layer. Instead of converting packets via USB, the host computer interacts with the MIDI data stream at the motherboard level. An 8 MHz Motorola 68000 processor handles calculation tasks directly. A dedicated hardware chip — the Motorola 6850 ACIA — is hardwired directly to the computer’s system bus. When a MIDI message arrives at the hardware port, the ACIA triggers a direct Interrupt Request (IRQ) to the CPU. The CPU instantly halts background tasks to process the incoming byte. This hardware-level priority results in exceptionally low jitter and highly stable timing.

Part 1 ran in Issue 01 — still available in the archive.

In the previous instalment I took you to France. I tried to show what the local development scene looked like there and what people from Loriciel, Infogrames or Silmarils could squeeze out of the ST. This time I am crossing the English Channel in a dinghy and landing on the Isles.

Great Britain in the second half of the 1980s was not just another market. It was the “coding heart” of the European games industry. The “bedroom coder” culture, raised on the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, at the moment when 16-bit computers appeared released into the world a whole generation of programmers who could count processor cycles on the fingers of one hand. Add to that a developed specialist press — ST Format, ST Action, The One, ST/Amiga Format — and a distribution network that could push a game into every shop from Cornwall to Scotland.

And here I will mention something that is often forgotten when the discussion slides down into the eternal ST versus Amiga subject. For a good few years it was the Atari ST that was, on the Isles, “the first computer for a coder”. The machine was cheaper, available earlier in larger quantities, and had excellent development tools (Devpac from HiSoft and Lattice C were mandatory positions at the time). The effect was that a large part of the games today associated mainly with the Amiga were born on the ST and only later moved to the Commodore machine.

An external converter receives a signal that has already passed through the computer’s analogue circuitry. It must separate brightness and colour again, detect synchronisation, scale the picture and convert it back to digital form. Together with the intended image, it also captures blurred fine lines, coloured fringes, crosstalk between components and interference that varies from one Atari to another. Sophia 3 solves the problem much earlier in the signal path. It is installed inside the computer and replaces the GTIA chip, giving it access to the information needed to build the picture before that information is turned into analogue PAL or NTSC.

The upgrade generates a digital DVI output as well as several analogue video options. It does not take away the Atari’s original way of working. The standard monitor output and RF modulator remain active, so a digital display can be used alongside a CRT. The user gains a new video path while retaining access to analogue PAL effects, soft edges and composite artefacts whenever they are part of the intended appearance of a program.

People unfamiliar with the history of artificial intelligence often assume that the field began around 2012, when deep neural networks started to dominate image recognition, or perhaps in 2017, when transformers transformed natural-language processing. Looking further back, they imagine AI as something confined to laboratories at MIT, Stanford, or Carnegie Mellon, running on room-sized mainframes backed by multimillion-dollar research budgets.

While researchers on powerful mainframes pursued grandmaster-level chess, Joseph Hafner sat in front of an Atari 800, writing a BASIC program that could teach itself to play Tic-Tac-Toe. It was 1984. The computer had just 16 kilobytes of RAM.

A saucer crosses the screen one character at a time, drops bombs on a randomly generated city, and dies if it hits a tower. Poke and Peek straight into screen memory, ATASCII converted to internal screen codes, and a frame-counter trick that makes the bomb fall twice as fast as the ship moves — without a single extra variable.

The chapter prints the complete listing. You do not have to retype it: the source, the build commands and an errata table live on this site, free, for as long as the magazine exists.