SWAG Workbench 2022 provides a platform to showcase what is new, old or just interesting in the modern Amiga scene.
These meet-ups are organised by the South West Amiga Group (SWAG) in the South West of England who do a great job of putting together a packed day of talks against a backdrop of community mingling and various shopping opportunities.
One of the Amiga’s talents back in the day was its use in professional video production through the Video Toaster and software such as Lightwave 3D. Exactly this combination of hardware and software are used by The Amiga Show to produce documentaries about the Amiga, by using actual Amiga hardware and software.
I learnt that the Video Toaster stores video in an analogue form, just like the laserdisc format. This enables the Amiga to work very quickly with the data, as it doesn’t have the digital processing overhead.
We also had guests from Koch Media & Retro Games Limited to talk through the production of the A500 Mini, the plug'n'plug modern Amiga device.
It was interesting to hear the CTO Chris Smith talk about how he’s the person who has undertaken all the technical work to create the software for the device. All the hardware design and construction takes place in Taiwan, with Chris and other collaborating on the process.
They also discussed the difficulties and costs of licencing, which is why there aren’t any LucasArt owned games (e.g. Monkey Island).
The Sensible Software catalogue almost made it to the device, however when EA bought out Codemasters that unfortunately killed the deal.
Some of the Amiga Addict magazine team were present and spoke about their adventures in getting a UK based modern Amiga magazine published. Although there are several non-UK Amiga magazines in publication, the team felt there was room an Amiga mag with more British sensibilities.
It’s easy to assume when such a glossy magazine is produced that it’s an effortless process behind the scenes. However we learnt about all the spreadsheets and last minute tweaks to get everything together to hit the presses on time. Then the hands on effort required to stuff each envelope for each and every subscriber.
After 12 issues they’ve been able to get the magazine on sale in WHSmith stores, which is a impressive and heart warming achievement.
There’s so much more I could write about the day, but instead I’ll leave with a few more photographs and invite anyone in the area with an interest in Amigas (or just retro tech) to consider attending the next meet up.
