Atari Legacy Q3 2026

Issue 02: the Falcon is being built again, and the magazine about it is still made on one.

Atari Legacy is back for its second quarterly issue. Ninety-two pages, full colour, in English, covering every machine that ever wore the Fuji logo: the Atari 2600, the 8-bit XL/XE/XEGS line, the ST / STe / TT, the Falcon030 and the Atari Jaguar. Issue 02 (Q3 2026) leads with the ReFalcon Project, the first replica of an Atari Falcon motherboard ever to boot TOS, and with a long interview with the musician Jarosław “Yaro” Płocica.

Inside Issue 02

Ninety-two pages of first-hand reporting: two party reports, the second part of the Polish 8-bit demoscene history, hardware tested in the workshop, a Jaguar review, and an interview you will not find elsewhere.

Introduction

• A Note from the Editor. Piotr “Kroll” Mietniowski, PhD, on what the second issue set out to do, and how it was put together.

Demoscene

• Lost Party. The Great Gathering of the 8-bit Computer Demoscene. A report from the party that still gets the whole 8-bit scene into one room.
• Silly Venture 2026SE. Retro Demoscene in the Heart of Gdańsk. Inside the biggest Atari party in the world, on its home ground.
• The History of the Polish Demoscene on 8-bit Atari (Part 2). The series continues with first-hand accounts. One group took its name straight off a wall: “On the pavilions near where I lived, someone had spray-painted Air Star Force. 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.” Elsewhere a half-damaged disk bought at the Saska market, a copy of Rambrandt and a home-written picture viewer turn into somebody’s first mini-demo.
• Interview with Jarosław “Yaro” Płocica. “Introvert. Modest. Withdrawn. My only connection to the world was music.” A musician on producer self-sufficiency, on the thousands of ideas that will never leave his drive, and on why the process itself is enough.

Music / MIDI

• When Dreams Come True. Atari and MIDI (Part 2). Why a forty-year-old Atari still beats USB on timing. The Motorola 6850 ACIA sits hardwired to the system bus and raises a direct IRQ to an 8 MHz 68000. No operating system in the middle, no USB packet layer, and jitter low enough to hear the difference. “In my opinion using a USB solution in a MIDI connection causes more timing problems than the built-in MIDI in over-40-year-old Atari computers. That is why I think this is still an unbeatable solution.”

Game reviews

• VROOM for the Atari Jaguar. Three and a half decades after its debut, VROOM is back on the grid, thanks to the indie publisher Songbird. The Jaguar version comes straight from the enhanced Atari ST build, with all the add-ons. The frame rate holds steady, the controls are tight without being twitchy, and alternate inputs work too, including rotary and mouse. A faithful recreation rather than a reinvention: no flashy upgrades, and no compromises to the original design either.
• An Atari ST Recipe, British Style, or Entertainment with Stronger Tea. After France, the series crosses the Channel. Britain in the second half of the 1980s was the coding heart of the European games industry. Bedroom coders raised on the Spectrum and the C64. Devpac and Lattice C on every desk. A specialist press (ST Format, ST Action, The One, ST/Amiga Format) and distribution into every shop from Cornwall to Scotland. And the part that usually gets lost in the ST versus Amiga argument: for several years the ST was the first machine a British coder owned, which is why a good share of the games remembered today as Amiga titles were born on the Atari.

Hardware, news and hands-on

• The ReFalcon Project. The cover story. A replica of the Atari Falcon motherboard introduced in 1992. There have been a couple of attempts to recreate the design since then, but none produced a working prototype until the turn of 2025/26, when the first ReFalcon prototype PCB booted to TOS after five months of reverse-engineering.
• Sophia 3 for the Atari XL/XE. Digital video and audio without losing the classic character. Sophia 3 goes inside the computer, in place of the GTIA, and builds the picture before anything is turned into analogue PAL or NTSC. It gives you digital DVI output plus several analogue options. An external converter has to undo the blurred lines, colour fringes and crosstalk that the machine’s own analogue path put there; this one never lets them happen. The original monitor socket and RF modulator stay live, so a CRT and composite artefacts are still there whenever they belong to the intended look.
• Back to the gaming roots. “This is a real return to the roots, one that gives a lot of quiet satisfaction and reminds me why I fell in love with games in the first place.”
• Is the Atari 8-bit entering a new era? Can Rapidus, VBXE and large language models open the door to 16-bit-class games? For years the assumption was that a 6502 running at roughly 1.79 MHz, with ANTIC and GTIA beside it, had been explored to its limit. The expansions raised the ceiling. What stayed in the way was software, and the time it takes to write it, and that is exactly what AI-assisted 6502 development is now changing.

Software and programming

• Calamus. The Power of the Pen (Part 2). The DTP series continues: “power without the price”, how the ST quietly took over desktop publishing, and why Calamus became a cult.
• Mad-Pascal. Chapter 2: Bomber. The cross-development series continues, building a complete game step by step with Mad-Pascal and the MADS cross-assembler.
• Where does intelligent or life-like behaviour come from? Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life and the Infinity of Fractals on Classic Atari Machines (Part 1). People who do not know the history of AI tend to date the field to 2012, or to 2017, and to picture room-sized mainframes at MIT or Stanford. In 1984 Joseph Hafner sat in front of an Atari 800 with 16 kilobytes of RAM and wrote a BASIC program that taught itself to play Tic-Tac-Toe.

Story

• The Atari I Somehow Missed. A 2600 loyalist meets a real Atari computer for the first time, at a friend’s house, with a dyed-in-the-wool IBM father driving him there. The same father who once called the people who made those games geniuses.
• A Garage Full of Worlds. The 2600. A garage packed with Atari 2600 consoles, and the worlds still sitting inside them.

Coming in Issue 03, out December 8, 2026

• MIDI environment configuration
• Mad-Pascal: sound and colours
• Interview with Carl Fornhan (Songbird Productions)
• The story of the Atari VCS, the most important console in history

Why this issue belongs on your shelf

• The ReFalcon, first-hand. The first working Falcon motherboard replica in over thirty years, documented by the people closest to it.
• Made on the metal. Typeset on a real Atari Falcon030 in Calamus. As far as we know, no other magazine on Earth is produced this way.
• First-hand material. Party reports, developer interviews, and hardware tested by people who actually use it.
• Ninety-two pages, full colour, perfect-bound. Made to be kept.
• Limited first print run at an introductory launch price.
• Written in English for the worldwide Atari community.

“All the scores for Trinidad were created in Notator. Without [Atari] computers, it would have taken ten days. In fact, it took me half an hour!”
Jean-Michel Jarre, on using the Atari ST and Notator for Waiting for Cousteau, 1990. The closing thought of Issue 02.

Product specifications