Kickstart 02 UK Amiga Show
02 July 2024
This past weekend I travelled from Belfast to Nottingham for the second edition of the Kickstart UK Amiga Show, and a fine time was had indeed. Like Amiga Ireland, it was both exhausting and left me wishing it was longer!
Once again the show took place at Meadow Lane football ground and was split into a Trader's Room and a User Group's Room. The key layout difference this year was a third, upstairs room where the talks and presentations took place. This worked much better in that you could hear the talks and it left more space in the Trader's Room.
Rogue Declan Twin-Stick Battle Station
Immortal Joysticks / Retro32 had a fantastic Rogue Declan themed dual joystick battlestation on their stand and I ended up spending a lot of time there talking to people about the game. I didn't go to the show with a plan, but that's how things unfolded. They also had Turbo Tomato on another machine and quite a few people asked if they could buy the box on display. The boxes are out of stock everywhere, but given the interest I think it might be worth investigating a small "second edition" run. The physical copies of Rogue Declan I took along also attracted a lot of interest.
I also picked up my Immortal Joystick I backed on their Kickstarter earlier in the year, and a lot of other attendees picked up an Immortal Joystick as well as he had completely sold out by the end of the show!
I had been hoping to have a reasonable demo of my WIP isometric game to show, but I haven't been able to work on it much for the past couple of months and, on the day, couldn't get it to boot from ADF and so couldn't run it on the Retroid 3+ console I'd taken along (for just this purpose) anyway. Not even some last-minute airport hacking could get it going. Disappointing, but the game will be in much better shape for the next Kickstart at least.
User Group Room
AmigaKit were there with the retail version of their A600GS on show and had a very busy stand. The retail boxes and cases were improved from the prototypes I saw at Amiga Ireland in January and included two DB9 ports for old-style joysticks - I think these were an optional extra previously. I'm intrigued by their plans for an online store for Amiga games with direct purchases and downloads and will be investigating this in due course.
Other hardware announcements included The Orb, a new spherical case that can take a different boards inside to provide an Amiga experience that doesn't look out of place in a modern living room. I was most interested in the option for a (modified) Denise ITX board as I had been looking in to building one of these myself, but perhaps I could pick up a ready-made one instead? Steve Jones from Checkmate announced new plug-in modules for their series of retro monitors including the "imiga3k", an accelerated Minimig-style FPGA Amiga that can live right inside the monitor. A-Eon had final A1222+ boards for sale for OS4.x inclined folks.
Stoo Cambridge - Thoroughly Nice Bloke
I very much enjoyed the talks I attended too. I got Stoo Cambridge to sign a Turbo Tomato poster (he did the poster artwork) and before that he'd actually called the game out during his talk! I had a good chat with him and Tony Warriner afterwards about many retro-nerdy things. They are working together on a Spectrum Next game that will be later ported to Amiga, which is exciting. I missed Stoo coming down to play TT though - that would have made a good photo.
If you happen to be the person who snapped Stoo signing the Turbo Tomato poster please get in touch!
The user group room was the usual mix of wild and wonderful Amigas (and related) machines on show. There were also Atari and Spectrum Next interlopers this time! New and upcoming games MegaFrog, RogueCraft and Cecconoid were on show as well as plenty of the old classics. I didn't spend enough time in this room, to be honest, and there were things that I missed like the networked games setup. You couldn't miss Rob Smith's crazy disco-music fisher-price floppy cleaning contraption though.
H0ffman In The House
For me, Hoffman's set was the highlight of the afterparty on Saturday even though it was only a half hour long. It was on point for a retro computer event to have Zen from Blake's 7 as the backdrop to the stage too. The venue and sound system this time was much improved and we stayed there to past 2am, mostly just chatting over a few beers.
A Good Night
I got back to my hotel around 3:30am so it must have been a good night!
Sunday was more of the same, but much more low-key... I did win a Checkmate Mini case in the raffle though!
Kickstart 02 was another fantastic and successful event bringing the Amiga community together in the UK and, if the chat is to be believed, pulling in some fresh and lapsed members too. 2025 is the Amiga's big 40th birthday year and I'm already looking forward to the sure-to-be-epic Kickstart 03!
See you there.