Wednesday, April 8, 2026

Running modern AI on a 1985 Atari ST

Plumerai People: Cedric's side project of running modern software on ancient hardware.

One of our engineers, Cedric Nugteren, recently set himself an unusual challenge: running modern AI on a computer from 1985. In the video below, Cedric introduces the Atari ST, a system he first programmed as a 6-year old, and revisits it as a hobby project decades later. He demonstrates his MidiSurf game, and shows how he successfully ported Plumerai People Detection to the Atari ST. Despite the hardware’s age and constraints, the system is able to run real inference of a convolutional neural network.

This project is a fun example of what happens when curiosity meets efficiency: pushing modern AI to run on unconventional, highly constrained devices is exactly the kind of challenge we enjoy tackling at Plumerai.

Apply here if you want to work with Cedric and other amazing AI engineers and researchers.