Jonathan Thomas @atariste.bsky.social

This is the latest build of the Atari STE game I am now provisonally calling "Cavey Taxi". Pick up passengers in a tight cave complex and drop them off elsewhere, fighting gravity, time and fuel consumption. With pretty parallax scrolling and particles. What's not to like? 😀

When AI coding for retro platforms, it's useful to have some hands-on coding experience with the platform involved. If I have a hunch that something's not implemented optimally, the AI tells me how it's currently implemented and allows me to guide it to a more "native" solution.

In 2014, I converted Pole Position to Atari STE the oldskool way, painstakingly disassembling the arcade code and rebuilding in C and assembly. In 2026, I'm converting Pole Position to Atari STE using Claude to see how it compares. Weekly tokens are exhausted but here's a WIP!

Here's the outcome of an (AI assisted) experiment to get the WEC Le Mans arcade game converted to Atari STE. The STE reproduces the colours quite nicely but just doesn't have the horsepower to run the arcade logic. I think lots would need to be stripped back to make this viable.

A flythrough of the track featured in the Atari ST version of Hard Drivin', with the view distance and screen res we all dreamed of back in the day. 😀 (Yes, I'm aware of the jerky camera and visual glitches - it's just a throwaway experiment...)

In one final effort to bump up the framerate of Atari ST Turbo Cup, I pointed Claude at the custom sprite rendering code I used in Faster, and told it to apply it to Turbo Cup. And it did just that. So here we have a 1988 game incorporating tech from a 2024 demoscene game. 😆

I've always wanted to play the DOS/Amiga-exclusive Indy 500 on the Atari ST, so I spent months painstakingly disassembling the Amiga version and rewriting for for the ST with a ton of references close by. Nah, just kidding - Claude did 99% of the work. Absolutely mental. 😱

Turbo Cup on the Atari ST has 384 sprite entries. There are cars, scenery, smoke and dust, interface graphics. And there's .... this.

I just fed the Atari ST Turbo Cup disk image into Claude. I love this game, but the slow framerate annoys me. Claude adapted the game to use STE DMA sound and blitter, and optimised a load of 68k code, resulting in an overall 45%(ish) speed increase. Mind officially blown. 🤯

So I've been playing around with Claude. I guess the art of manually reverse engineering games (as I did in Pole Position and Lotus STE) is dead. 😞 I literally just fed Claude a disk image of F-29 Retaliator, and 40 minutes later I have this world viewer. Not sure how to feel!

Latest work on my #AtariSTE enhanced version of Lotus 2, now with a sky gradient similar to that featured in the #Amiga version. Still loads of work to do in various areas but it's looking good and performing well. 👍 🚗 I'll probably release as a single stage proof of concept.

Spent several hours last night rewriting and optimising the 68k code that draws the rev counter on the #AtariST version of Lotus 2 to use the Blitter chip instead. These are the lengths that us ST folks are willing to go to in order to compete with that other machine. 😉

Spent a couple of days progressing the #AtariSTE enhanced version of Lotus 2 using some of the knowledge and techniques gained while developing FaSTer. Still some way to go, but much closer to the #Amiga version than before. And yes, it's quite glitchy at the moment. 😄