SOUTH WEST AMIGA GROUP

January 25th 2020 – Chipping Sodbury
10:00 – 10:00
sponsored by

Games, Tournaments, Talks, Repairs, Traders, Live Music & More!

Revised Opening Times

Thanks to an early morning booking cancellation at the venue we have been able to extend our booking. We now have the venue booked from 10am – 10pm. Those of you who’ve been to previous SWAG meets will know that the first 30 minutes or so is spent setting up the tables and kit. If you’re not bringing equipment then you’re still welcome to arrive for 10am to help us get set up quicker.

Those of you who’ve been to previous SWAG meets will know that the first 30 minutes or so is spent setting up the tables and kit. If you’re not bringing equipment then you’re still welcome to arrive for 10am to help us get set up quicker.

Our Guest Speakers

Right now we are going to confirm our first guest and that is David J Pleasance who will be talking to us about Friend OS and will be selling his media on his stand. As this is our annual Workbench event we’ve pulled out all the stops to bring you some fantastic guest speakers. We’ll have details of our full line up shortly, but we can reveal the following so far.

First-up is Stephen Jones who will be giving us an update on his Amiga Checkmate Kickstarter campaign. You can expect Stephen to provide a good mix of amusing anecdotes and details of technical challenges experienced in the run up to completing the Kickstarter. Next is Vicky Lamburn aka Pixelvixen. Following her excellent Deluxe Paint live tutorial at a previous SWAG meet, one of the Amiga’s most prominent modern day artists makes a welcome return before she moves to Japan.

Vicky will be showing us what she’s been up to since she last presented and will be on hand to provide tips and tricks to help you improve your Amiga art techniques. Finally, we are pleased to announce that ex-Commodore MD David Pleasance will be our very special guest. David will be giving a talk on the Friend operating system and will also be selling / signing copies of his book. If you wanted to find out more about this groundbreaking cloud OS then you don’t want to miss this! You may even be able to ask him questions relating to his days at the helm of Commodore UK. Right now we are going to confirm our first guest and that is David J Pleasance who will be talking to us about Friend OS and will be selling his media on his stand.

Tickets now on Sale

Tickets to Workbench 2020 are now on sale, priced at £7 per person. Note that children under 18 accompanied by ticket holding adults are free. We just need you to let us know how many you’ll be bringing to help with food / drink ordering.

Your ticket price covers room hire, tea, coffee, soft drinks, snacks and a sandwich lunch. The ticket price also goes towards some of the prizes we’ll be dishing out on the day.

To book a place click on the below link. Once there you’ll see a layout of the room. 

If you’re planning to bring hardware to set up and use during the day then please book a table by selecting one. If you’re planning to attend but don’t want to set anything up then please select a chair only.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS

Important – at standard SWAG meets we don’t mind if attendees bring non Amiga related kit. As this is our annual Workbench event we ask that you ONLY bring Amiga or Amiga related (e.g. emulated Amigas) hardware to this event.

January 25th 2020 – Chipping Sodbury
10:00 – 10:00
sponsored by

Games, Tournaments, Talks, Repairs, Traders, Live Music & More!

Following on from our initial Workbench 2020 announcement this second email brings news of a revised start time and details of our sellers.

First-up, and our start time has now moved forward from midday to 11:30am. For those of you who have attended previous SWAG meets the first hour of each session is usually spent getting the tables arranged into an optimal layout and for attendees to get their kit set-up. This extra half hour will mean we have a bit more time to spend enjoying the day.

If you’re not bringing kit with you then you’re still very welcome to get to the venue as soon as the doors open. We can always do with help arranging tables and assistance in lugging kit from car boots to the hall!

Seller Lowdown: RetroBench

Following the success of their stand at the September SWAG event sponsor Retro Bench will once again be selling a mass of Amiga related goodies.

From cap kits and Amiga spare parts & accessories to new Re1200 motherboards & PCBs, you’re certain to find something to spend your hard-earned pennies on at the Retro Bench stand.

The team will also be on hand re-capping classic Amiga systems and performing repairs. Don’t forget to dig deep when tipping for the work!

Seller Lowdown: AmigaKit

We are pleased to announced that legendary long-time Amiga retailer and supporter AmigaKit will be manning a stand at SWAG’s Workbench 2020 event.

The Amiga Kit team have booked a whopping four tables and will be taking up an entire alcove at the hall.

You can expect to see Amiga items for sale covering both classic and modern systems. We’re hopeful that there may even be a next generation Amiga system up and running on the Amiga Kit stand.

Tickets on Sale – 21st December 8pm

Tickets to the Workbench 2020 event will go on sale on Saturday 21st December priced at £7. We’ll send out ticket links via email once the page has gone live. Be quick! Tickets sold out extremely fast for our September meet.

Merchadise for Workbench 2020 is now available.

Once again, where do we start? the South West Amiga Group came back to Doddington Parish Hall in Chipping Sodbury for our tenth meet where within 48hours on our booking page, we were sold out of our tables. But the venue that week had sprung a leak, part of the building was roped off and toilets were outside, but this didn’t put us off from fitting everything in and having a good time.

We wish to thank so many people for all their help in bringing this together, there is a true feeling within the group that we made something special for the community and we are listening to you. Scott from Retrobench , who has been to virtually every meet helped sponsor this event, he had helpers to sell items on his table as well repair Amiga’s all day long. Retrobench not only sponsorred the meet, but ran a raffle where ‘3 Amigas’ were the prizes and the proceed’s of the raffle were reinvested for future meets.

We also had Chris Poacher with a music studio setup, he showcased his music catalog and how he used Octamed to remix dance music and how he was sampling back in the day. He also had an array of studio equipment that was on show.

A sligthly different presentation was from Chris Forrester from then ANT group , he showed how the Amiga was used in Stop-go frame-by-frame capture which was used for Felix the Cat commericals.

We also had demonstrations of Video capture from Andrew Reader, Retro Revival Craig and Arron with the latest games for the Spectrum next and an interesting lightgun project. Error 42 Paul was also at the meet and below is his preparation video.

We had so much going on it was hard get around and see everything, so with the help of our friendly YouTuber’s, Colin and James from Let’s Talk Retro, the other video will be from Neil of Retro Man Cave and currently that video will be shown to Patreon’s first and we will link it here soon.

So, two dates to add to your diary are 25th January 2020 and 30th May 2020, we are now starting to put together what we are going to do and invite anyone with ideas (amiga related) to contact us to share suggestions.

Most importantly thank you to everyone that came and enjoyed the day with us and we look forward to seeing you at the next one.