Amiga is a state of mind. Or, if it isn't, lftkryo, of "The Commodorion" fame, has just accidentally created something very Amiga.

Admittedly, this isn't strictly about Amiga computing. Linus Åkesson, aka "lft", or "lftkryo", as he is known on YouTube, creates a lot of interesting stuff using retro tech. Among other skills (e.g. music), he's also an accomplished assembler coder, mostly using the Commodore 64's 6502 CPU, but also several other old or odd nerd machines. 

After releasing the stunning, "impossible" C64 demo titled "NINE" a couple of months ago, his latest creation runs on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2, which is a very stripped down, minimalist version of a Raspberry Pi, with a dual-core CPU running at 150MHz.

It's a very nice demo, obviously some serious programming skills went into creating an entire system with VGA video output and sound - and, in a way, it almost spells out "Amiga". The screen resolution is somewhere between Amiga's "HiRes" and "HiRes laced" modes, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 has 520KB of RAM, which pretty much matches an Amiga 500's basic configuration, the font is very Topaz, the color palette looks very familiar from 80s/90s Amiga demos, the demo effects are classic, with glenz vectors and "copper" (?) bars, it has a (kind of) Boing Ball, and he even uses an Amiga magazine coverdisk for illustration in the video.

So there is certainly some sort of connection, at least in spirit, somewhere. But seeing the demo makes you wonder: This kind of stuff can be created with a 5$ microcontroller (and some added resistors and capacitors)? This is pretty impressive. What else can it do? This demo experience is so close to watching an actual Amiga OCS demo from the early days, it would be really interesting to see what can be squeezed into, and out of, the Pico 2's little amount of RAM and 4MB flash memory, that makes is behave even more like an Amiga.

Anyway. Until someone starts porting Kickstart 1.3 to Raspberry Pi Pico 2, the most Amiga thing on this platform is lftkryo's nice demo. It reached 2nd place in the Wild compo at Revision 2025. Enjoy!

Watch lftkryo's "Kaleidoscopico" demo (2025-04-21):

Check out lftkryo's YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/@lftkryo