Amiga Guru Meditation Error screen Wallpaper

The Amiga's famous crash-screen - The Guru-Meditation Error.

The Amiga’s famous crash-screen – The Guru-Meditation Error.

The original Amiga concept was for a video game console, which could be turned into a computer.  Early in the development of the system, the engineering team constructed a controller called the “Joyboard”, similar to a Wii Balance Board, and a simple game which detected movement on the Joyboard.  The game involved the player sitting on the Joyboard, in a stereotypical cross-legged guru meditation position, and when the player did move, the game would announce their turn had ended on a ‘guru meditation error’.  Although the Joyboard was dropped when the Amiga concept moved towards a personal computer, this in-house joke survived, making it into the AmigaOS as a sort of easter egg. When early Amiga (Workbench 1.x) systems would suffer from a crash, and the flashing “Software Failure” screen would appear.  The number were helpful hints to developers as to why the software crashed.

The downloadable ZIP file contains the famous “Amiga Guru Meditation Error” screenshots in the original 640×480 format, as well as:  640×960 (great for smartphones), 1024×768 & 1280×800 (for iPad’s and tablets), 1440×900, 1600×1200, 720P and 1080P.

Download · File size = 264.4 KB · Download Count: 653

If you would like this as an animated GIF, you can find that here.

Be sure to check out the rest of our Amiga stuff.


Mike Knotts

Mike Knotts was born in 1968 in a small town in southern Indiana. Even when very young, Mike showed a love for all-things technical and sci-fi. Moving with his family to California in the early 80's, he eventually graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a degree in History. Rather than put that to good use, Mike continued to pursue his passion for technology by working for early, regional ISP's in the mid 1990's. He currently resides in the Pacific Northwest, where he works as a project manager for an Internet startup. Mike is a co-founder of Geekometry.

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