2 Blokes & An Armchair

2 Blokes & An Armchair is a homebrew rom for the Nintendo 64 made by Tesko and released on 24 April 1999. It contains a slideshow of images of, well, two blokes messing about on an armchair. It was submitted for the Presence of Mind ’99 competition.

You can download the N64 and Amiga version of the ROM on the download page by using the password twoladsandaseat.

2 Blokes & An Armchair is actually a sort of hybrid between a demo and a port/emulator since it is technically a port of a demo made for the Amiga for the Deja Vu 1998 competition in August of that year. There is also an MSDOS version as well.

The Nintendo 64 version of the demo is essentially an Amiga emulator wrapper that runs the Amiga ROM within it. Though from what I’ve seen in a video of the Amiga ROM, it does differ a bit from the N64 version. Both songs are remixes of the Trumpton Firemen roll call but do differ slightly.

The demo itself is a slideshow which plays to the rhythm of the music. It starts up with an Amiga terminal loading screen which then shows the title screen.

It then proceeds to the main section of the demo, the pictures of the 2 Blokes & An Armchair. They sort of move to the rhythm of the music, but it is a bit out of sync.

The images when shift over to an ironing board on the sofa. I’m not exactly sure what it’s doing, but it can be most accurately described as “Juggling a pillow”.

Then we get an image of two comic book characters looking at the reader saying “Did you see the size of his TESKO!?”. I’m not sure what this means. I don’t know where the characters are from but they look like something out of a 1960’s Charlton Comics front cover.

A few seconds later, we get what I suppose they were referring to: Tesko’s name in a weird font covering the entire screen.

It then switches back to the comic book image until the music wears its course and stops playing.

Review and conclusion

This is a very simple demo. So simple in fact that it can run on an Amiga AGA. I had a brief look at the binary and it seems as though the Amiga executable is entirely contained within the N64 ROM so I believe that it is a proper emulator rather than just a port.

However, I can’t find any information on an Amiga emulator for the Nintendo 64 nor any other software that has been ported so this seems to be the only example of this kind of emulator existing.

Other than that, it is a very straightforward demo. There’s not much plot or story to the text itself but there is an accompanying file in the zip archive which only really mentions it as a remix of the original Amiga demo, and I suppose that that is what it will be known for.