tinkerer
GEM was the graphical desktop environment that shipped on the Atari ST from 1985. It gave the ST a consistent, window-based interface at a time when most home computers were still command-line machines — and for a decade, an enormous catalogue of serious software was built on top of it: music tools, DTP applications, graphics programs, professional utilities. The ecosystem was real and deep.
From Film Competition to Global Recognition I never expected Sad Disco to go anywhere. It began as a submission to the “Pusher II Soundtrack Hunt” — a competition Nicolas Winding Refn organised alongside GAFFA and Mymusic, looking for diegetic music to use inside his film. I entered on something of a whim. To my surprise, Refn and his music director liked it enough to place it in the actual film,…
The case for more choices in desktop computing. Differences matter. Not just in the abstract, philosophical sense — as with Yin and Yang, the dry and wet sides of the mountain — but practically. We need to hear more than echoes of ourselves to stay sane, to know where we end and the world begins. Computing forgot this somewhere along the way.
The Atari ST’s BLiTTER chip was designed for one thing: moving rectangles of pixels around as fast as possible. It’s not a processor. It can’t branch. It has no ALU. And yet, buried inside it is a smudge mode that turns its halftone pattern registers into a 16-entry lookup table — which means, if you’re creative enough with your data layout, you can coax it into doing arithmetic. Which raises an…
Deep inside the silicon of the Atari STE’s GLUE/MMU chip, there is a register that nobody seems to have documented. Writing a single bit to address 0xFF9000 activates a signal called GAMECART — and nobody knows quite what it was for. Here’s how I found it. Background: the dream of a better MMU As a long-time Atari ST owner I’ve spent more hours than I should admit with emulators, clones, and…