SOUTH WEST AMIGA GROUP

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

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

As the date of our second annual Workbench event gets ever closer we’ll be teasing you with regular updates detailing just what you can expect to see (and hear!) at January’s event.

Once again, we owe a very big thank you to Scott MacDonald of Retro Bench for sponsoring the event and covering the room hire in full. Scott will be returning to repair more of your poorly Amigas while his team man the Retro Bench stand selling all kinds of upgrades and goodies for your beloved machines.

In this initial teaser post we are proud to reveal our first very special guest. Ravi Abbot, co-host of the ever popular “Retro Hour” podcast will be bringing along his dual Amiga DJ set-up to blast out tunes across the hall. Not only is his music a joy to listen to, but this is a great opportunity to check out Ravi’s set up, ask questions and find out just how he DJs with two retro machines.

We’ll have further reveals in the coming weeks, but for now make a note in your diaries. Tickets to Workbench 2020 will go on sale the week before Christmas (December the 21st) at a cost of £7 per table. This covers the cost of a sandwich lunch, snacks, soft drinks, tea/coffee and one entry to the main tournament.

If you are a trader, have an announcement, or wish to talk to the organisers then please contact us as we are still preparing for the event.

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.

UPDATE 1st September 2019: Thank you to all that have purchased a ticket to go to the next meet and we soon filled the tables up with only a few seats left. Some have messaged me, some have messaged Rob, we introduced the booking system to help us keep on top of the money, we won’t be chasing you for the money at the meet’s, we won’t have a cash tin in any shape or form, we hire venue as a private-gathering. We also need to keep an account how many heads are coming as the food/drink needs to be divided fairly, this time round you have a chance to win a recapped Amiga courtesy of RetroBench, all you will need is your ‘paid entry’ to enter the competition. I know it sounds weird, but purchasing a seat just means ‘you are attending, you have entered the competition and you have been accounted for food’, it doesn’t mean you gonna be sat in it the entire meet so please don’t think of it like that, it’s just to help us count heads. We look forward to seeing you all and remember you will need your 4-way extension cables. Anyone bringing something ‘interesting’ please post in the ‘Declare your SWAG” Facebook / Twitter. please so we can help in anyway. Thanks and let’s have a good one.