The Coolest Amiga Setup
Early 2025
Tricked-out treats
There are plenty of cool Amiga setups, past and present. A towerized Amiga 1200 with a Blizzard PPC accelerator? Sweet. A painted black Amiga 600 with a small TFT screen mounted on its case? Yes, please! An Amiga 500 with an old external hard drive and, inside, a Blizzard card with a 14 MHz 68000 CPU and two megs of fastmem? Stop, you're making me salivate!
Still, there are setups and there are setups. Having recently visited the Swedish Amiga demo party GERP, I had the opportunity to photograph a worthy contender to - and, to me, current holder of - the throne. Without further ado, let's examine!
The Mise-en-scène
The above Amiga 1200 is the hardware heart of GERP. It's used to manage all the Amiga competition (compo) entries handed in, it runs the A1200 compos and it's been used to create no small amount of Amiga demos itself. This is cool enough on its own right, but the surrounding hardware and peripherals is what lifts it from a fun retro machine to a true demoscene workhorse.
A breakdown
From left to right, there are a lot of interesting players in this symphony of proof that things were better before.
Above we have a VCR, a small CRT TV and a genlock. The TV serves as a monitor for the VCR and for an Amiga 600 that's not visible in the photo. The VCR and Amigas can be connected to the genlock - the big black device to the right. A genlock (generator locking) is used for combining two video signals into one, and was commonly used in broadcasting and home video editing to overlay normal video footage with computer graphics. This is used to combine and select different video sources for the party's bigscreen display which, when not running the compos, is constantly displaying a demo show or various other entertainment and information. Sadly, I'm a bit sketchy on the specific details here but I believe the VCR is used to display previously released demos pre-recorded on video tape from the A1200, providing entertainment between competitions.
The Amiga 1200 itself. Apart from a hard drive, I believe it's equipped with a 68060 accelerator card with 64 (or more) megabytes of RAM. A PS/2 mouse is connected to it via an adapter and on the left hand side we can see a network card. The monitor is a Philips CM8833-II, a 50 Hz PAL CRT which is basically the same as the Commodore-branded 1084.
The floppy drive is missing its eject button - a common ailment on aging Amiga 1200:s. The small black plastic doohickey visible at the right edge of the image - possibly a lid from a USB stick - is perhaps used as a makeshift replacement.
Common among A1200 aficionados is the clever use of the slightly raised offset of the keyboard as a convenient shelf for easy access storage of peripherals. In this particular case we can see Compact Flash to PCMCIA adapters, a remote control and, of course, the Swedish tobacco product snus, without which precious few Swedish demos would have been made during the last few decades.The keyboard is heavily customized, certainly for aesthetics but perhaps also for increased tactility when touch typing. The sticker on the space bar says "RADIATION STERILIZED" in Swedish.
A closer look at the network card. This is a PCMCIA ethernet NIC which connects the Amiga to - as far as I know - a Raspberry Pi, which presumably acts as a link to more modern hardware and peripherals. As far as I could tell, the Pi was mounted as a device on the Amiga, perhaps through NFS. This allows for easy access to many various media readers.
The Amiga is currently displaying Workbench, the AmigaOS desktop. A shell window is open, having recently been used to format a floppy disk and make it bootable using the "install" command - most likely in preparation for showing a compo entry on an Amiga 500 not visible in the photo.
I usually say "Show me a man's Workbench, and I'll tell you who he is". (By usually, I mean I just made this up.) On this particular Workbench, we see quick access icons for several demo making tools. From left to right, skipping the first three hard drive icons: AHX is Abyss' Highest eXperience, a chip music tracker. Its icon is neatly positioned next to two different versions of Protracker, the famous sample-based tracker used to create the vast majority of Amiga demo and game soundtracks. ArtPRO is used for image format conversion. Then we have AMOS Professional, a powerful BASIC programming environment. P61Con is for converting Protracker modules to a faster replaying format. Above it, we see icons for Lightwave 3D and its modeler, which can be used for creating both pre-rendered still images and polygon objects for realtime 3D demo effects. Lightwave started its life on the Amiga, bundled with NewTek's Video Toaster, and is still being developed for Mac and Windows.
In conclusion, we can deduce that this man and his Amiga is a one-stop demo factory.
Floppy disks are still a convenient type of media for the Amiga, excelling at both native data transfer and a genuine loading experience when showing demos. Provided, of course, you can find both a working drive and working disks. The Amiga uses 3.5" DD disks, even harder to come by these days than the ubiquitous HD disks used in most PC:s well into the early 2000:s. This particular box of floppies seems to have "DMZ" written on it, suggesting it has at some point contained cover disks from the Swedish Amiga periodical Datormagazin - an indispensable source of information for Amiga owners between 1986 and 1995.
I've decided to call this "the I/O stack". Secured with a heavy duty cargo strap are various A/V switchers, signal converters and, in the middle, a multi-format media reader. Without these, there wouldn't be much of a demo party: various retro platforms all have modern hardware projects for file transfers geared at slightly different media. There's also a lot of conversion needed to make the PAL signal from various connectors on old machines show up on a (somewhat) modern bigscreen projector. Apart from Amiga, this year's GERP featured entries on Atari ST, Sinclair QL and Commodore 64. Previous years have had entries on, among other platforms, Atari 2600 and MSX.
The Commodore 64 was and remains an immensely popular computer on the demo scene. As such, it tends to weasel its way into almost every demo party, unless explicitly excluded in the platform list. The machine visible here was presumably used to display this year's graphics, music and demo entries.
Finally
There's of course a lot more work going into a demo party other than managing and showing compo entries, but the central point is to show off all the submitted creative works on a bigscreen in a timely fashion. In order to master such a daunting task, it surely helps to have the coolest Amiga setup in the world at your hands, perfectly honed for the purpose over several years of party organizing. It also shows - once more - that an Amiga 1200 is still a capable machine, clearly up to the task of providing advanced networking, hardware connectivity and conference-grade visual media production facilities even in 2025.
With this, I'd like to thank all the GERP organizers - and visitors - for a great party. I hope to see you again next year!