This past weekend Kickstart took part in Zzap Live in Coventry. An annual show organized by Fusion Retro Books (publisher of the revivied Zzap 64 and Zzap Amiga magazines), this is a great hands-on event, with loads of Amigas and Commodore 64s, as well as other systems and arcade machines out to play with, an excellent talks programme, as well as a variety of traders selling hardware, software and themed merchandise.
Since its inception in 2023, Zzap Live has always encouraged the user group community to get involved, and once again we were excited to take part. Chris Green, Sam Byford and Paul Dean took part to fly the Kickstart flag, as well as support other groups such as ANT and SWAG. A big thanks to Dave Boswell and our friends at SWAG for coordinating the Amiga user group participation again this year, helping us on the day with PAT testing (Zeb Elwood – thanks again for your help there) and for ensuring we had a good variety of machines on display.
Here are a few pics of the Kickstart corner from the day, along with a link to an early video that provides a good walkaround of everything that was on show, along with a video from Kickstart’s own Leigh Malpas.
Across multiple rooms there were tables full of wedge and big-box Amigas, original and new Commodore 64s (Commodore were there showing off these new machines, based on Gideon’s fantastic Ultimate64 FPGA board), as well as other computers and gaming systems. I even spotted a prototype of the Vectrex Mini, which should be shipping fairly soon.
Upcoming Kickstart Events and Visits
The next Kickstart meet is Kickstart 9, our all-day summer BBQ meet on Saturday 18th July 2026.
At the time of writing there are less than half a dozen non-table tickets left, so grab a place at the hottest Amiga event of the year while you can.
In addition to this we will be attending SPAG – the Stamford and Peterborough Amiga Group meet on Saturday June 13th 2026.
We might be attending an event on Saturday June 20th 2026 as well, but its unclear as we still haven’t had any information from the organizers about what’s going on with the event.
While not directly Amiga-related, there’s also the inaugural meet of UKAG, the UK Amstrad Group taking place on Sunday 21st June 2026 at Kickstart’s home venue, Ottershaw Village Hall. While we love the Amiga, we also love the Amstrad CPC and Kickstart has been heavily involved in bringing UKAG and its inaugural meet to life.
It’s going to be a great day with Amstrad CPC legend Roland Perry and Club AUA from Spain attending. Expect to see lots of interesting machines from Amstrad’s 8-bit (CPC, PCW etc.) and PC eras, along with my two Schneider 6128s from Germany!