Retro Computing and Gaming
The Commodore 64, the Amiga, the Atari ST, old handhelds, retro gaming museums, and the early history of computer art and digital comics. Old machines, and the things people made with them.
18 articles, newest first.
October 2026
Stay Forever Con Nord 2026
A Retro Weekend in Hanover, From the Pavillon to the HI-SCORE Museum
At the end of October 2026, I traveled to Hanover for the first northern edition of the Stay Forever Convention: two days of live podcast recordings in a packed hall, a quiz night, a community dungeon puzzle, and a Saturday after-show among the arcade cabinets of the HI-SCORE video game museum. Plus Deutsche Bahn.
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October 2026
Multicolor Mayhem
My Ten Days as a Commodore 64 Art Robot on a Deadline
In late September 2026, Drees of the C64 group AMID asked me to draw the pictures for a demo about a camper van in a jungle and a T. rex. The Deadline demoparty in Berlin was about ten days away. This is how I turned into an art robot, fought the Commodore 64's multicolor mode in Multipaint, and followed from a distance as Thunder in Paradise ranked fifth in the ORWOhaus.
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May 2026
ST-News Disk Mag
A Digital Archaeological Analysis of Its Evolutionary History and Cultural Impact
ST-News was one of the first disk mags I ever read. And what a catch it was! A true labour of love, made by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. That infectious passion completely captured my heart. All issues of ST-News are preserved on its creator Richard Karsmakers' website, and a few years ago I set out to write a paper about this disk mag for my university studies. It never quite happened... until now. Here is the revised and expanded version of that original article (I kept the pretentious title).
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November 2025
From Zero to Koala
Learning to Draw for the Commodore 64 to Compete at Transmission64
I joined the demogroup VCC to make graphics for their Commodore 64 demo without ever having drawn a pixel for this machine. Now my chunky images are part of a quirky Ski Jumper demo, released at the remote demoparty Transmission64 in late November. I learned more about retro art, collaboration, and community than I expected. This is my making-of and demoparty report.
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November 2025
Speedrun of the Retro Gaming Museum in Vienna
I hope you love retro computers, joysticks with microswitches and the glow of arcade screens just as much as I do. I spent a delightful evening underground in a WWII bunker filled with beeping, blinking nostalgia. This quick tour of the Retro Gaming Museum in Vienna is light on text but heavy on photos.
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September 2025
From Pigments to Pixels
Why Art and Technology Have Always Belonged Together
We often imagine art and technology as opposites. I think the story is different: from Renaissance painters grinding rare minerals into pigments to today's artists coding immersive digital worlds, creativity has always relied on technical skill. The divide is less a truth than a myth we've inherited.
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July 2025
Bringing Back the Weird
On the Disappearing Web of Enthusiasts
The internet used to be weird and wonderful. Personal websites were built out of pure passion, not profit. But somewhere along the way, the enthusiast spirit got buried under branding, analytics, and algorithms. It's time we bring it back.
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August 2024
Time Bandit
A Love Letter to the Game That Sold the Atari ST
When the Atari ST was introduced it had a stand-out game: Time Bandit by Bill Dunlevy and Harry Lafnear. It was a wonderful action-arcade game with kick-class graphics, puzzles and text adventure elements. In this slice of retro gaming and computer history we dive deep into the colorful time gates, two player action and strange new arcade worlds!
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June 2024
Palming Without Distractions
Distraction-free Writing with a Palm Organizer and a Foldable Keyboard
The Palm m125, with the right peripherals, can make a great distraction-free writing tool to sustain the flow state that many writers of prose and long articles seek to achieve. Here is how a decades-old organizer can help, and what to pay attention to for a frictionless experience. This epic article has it all! (Including a hidden section about PalmOS Hacks.)
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May 2024
The Books That Chronicle the History of the Atari ST Demoscene
Over the past decade, a number of books were published that chronicle the history of the Atari ST demoscene. These books provide a detailed look at the creative and technical achievements of the demoscene community, exploring the innovative audiovisual presentations created on the Atari ST computer. Here I introduce and discuss the various volumes in this loose collection.
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February 2024
Archiving an Archive
My Adventures Scraping the Contents of the Archive of Digital Art
A while ago, I wanted to learn web scraping so I wrote my own little suite of applications based on Puppeteer/Node.js to grab content from the Archive of Digital Art (ADA), parse it into JSON and extract the images. Join me as I scrape the bottom of the web archive.
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December 2023
The Commodore Amiga and its Undying Adoration by Anarchist Creatives
Let's investigate the birth of the demoscene, the Amiga platform's revolutionary beginnings, its emotional resonance within a dedicated community, and its broader influence on the field of computer graphics and music. Why is the Amiga still one of the most significant platforms in the demoscene?
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September 2023
Why the Treo 90 is Like an Amiga 500 for your Pocket (in Spirit)
The Handspring Treo 90 is not compatible with the Commodore Amiga 500. It does not run AmigaOS, it cannot load ADFs, and it will never boot Workbench. And yet, it evokes something deeply familiar to anyone who had an Amiga on their desk. Not technically. Spiritually. It's not all bonkers! Bear with me. I'll explain.
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June 2023
Guide to ClockworkPi's Portable Linux Console
The ClockworkPi DevTerm is a peculiar portable Linux device with numerous delightful features, albeit some frustrating ones as well. This guide will demonstrate how to configure the DevTerm to overcome its limitations, such as the small screen size and the somewhat challenging trackball. Additionally, it will provide instructions on using the DevTerm with an iPad Pro.
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May 2023
The Portable A500 Mini and How It Ended Up in a Pub
The A500 Mini is a nifty recreated retro computer that can be made to run any classic Amiga software. Here's how to turn it into a portable device using an Android tablet as a screen to bring it to the pub for field-testing. And I shot a video doing it! Let me show you, it's fun.
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May 2020
Telidon Meets Instagram
The Telidon Art Collection at Inter/Access
This is the story of the Canadian Telidon system from the early 1980s, the artists who worked with it, the unlikely story of how their work was rediscovered by the Toronto-based Inter/Access gallery in 2015, and how to conserve digital artwork created with Telidon.
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December 2019
Pixeling in the Retrosphere
Creating a Comic on 1980s Hardware
In this project I created a five page comic story using 1980s computer hardware. I refurbished a thirty year old Atari computer, upgraded it and then pixel-painted a comic using the art package NEOChrome Master and only 16 colors.
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May 2018
Dots By Any Other Name
The Story of the first Digitally Produced Comic Book
This is an essay about Shatter, a comic book created by Mike Saenz, Peter B. Gillis and Charles Athanas in the mid-1980s on an Apple Macintosh (though with traditional, analog coloring). This milestone of the comics industry paved the way for other digital comics like Das Robot Imperium by Michael Götze.
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