🎮 Next June 27 I will be presenting at OpenSouthCode in Málaga.
🤬 Too old for this sh*t: MIDI Maze, Atari ST, Raspberry Pico, AI and other bad decisions
Or how to lose your technical dignity rebuilding MIDI Maze in 2026.
Some people use AI to be more productive. I am using it to reopen traumas from the 80s.
In this talk I share an idea that sounded great in my head: take MIDI Maze, tear out its original MIDI network, and rebuild it as a distributed network over TCP/IP.
Quick context: MIDI Maze is a pioneering first-person shooter released in 1987 for the Atari ST, famous for enabling multiplayer by daisy-chaining several machines through the computer's own MIDI ports. Even in 2026 there are still tournaments, and it is not unusual to come across competitions at retro meetups.
Because of course, what could possibly go wrong when you mix:
• 40 year old hardware
• 68000 assembly
• a modern microcontroller
• Python
• Codex, Claude Code, Copilot and NotebookLM
• and a guy from Logroño old enough to have seen floppy disks the size of a truck steering wheel
Spoiler: everything. Absolutely everything.
But the interesting part is not the project, it is the journey: using AI as a dev buddy and discovering it actually has different personalities:
• one brilliant
• one mediocre
• and one clearly improvising so they do not get fired
In this talk we will see:
• How to reverse-engineer with AI without completely losing faith in humanity
• What to actually expect from AI depending on the level of abstraction
• How to assemble an absurdly complex system combining assembly, C and Python
🗣️ The talk will be in Spanish, but once it lands on YouTube we will ship subtitles so everyone can follow along.
🔗
opensouthcode.org/conference…
#AtariST #Retrocomputing #OpenSouthCode #SidecarTridge #MIDIMaze