You should have basic knowledge of C, because 99 percent of the demo programs are written in this language (the copperlist is the exception). Possibly, having knowledge of Assembler and/or Pascal and/or Modula is also enough. Anyway you should know at least about the peculiarities of C (arrays, pointer arithmetic, type casting, ...), otherwise you might stumble over things that don't do what you think they do or things that don't look very logical.

Average knowledge about how the Blitter and the Copper work and about the Amiga-Chipset planar graphic format are necessary to understand the source codes.

The demo programs should work on all Amigas having a standard Amiga Chipset (OCS, ECS or AGA). This is not true for the Draco, therefore the programs won't run on that machine. The demo programs use PAL/NTSC screenmodes, therefore your monitor must support a horizontal frequency of 15khz or must be used together with a Scan Doubler/Flicker Fixer. When using GFX cards there might be problems because of the RTG Software and it's options (to force bitmaps to be allocated in FAST RAM). Screen promoters might also cause some trouble. Read more.