Early spring is always so quiet for the Amiga community. We're already pretty used to using our new OS 3.9 upgrade and are now busy contemplating what Amiga, Inc. is going to do next. It's very nerve-wracking for us because there never is any announcements from Amiga, Inc. until Amiga`2001 in St. Louis, Missouri which is always at the end of March/ early April.
Amiga, Inc. has stated from the very start that they won't announce anything until they are ready to ship. This is a wise practice because a lot of things happen in the computer industry. Plans (and companies) change. There's a lot of vapor out there too. Amigans have grown tired of empty promises in the past. It's just a smart practice for Amiga, Inc. to follow.
Still, this quiet is always pretty nerve-wracking. Panic often sets in, especially with newsletter editors needing articles. Everything dries up. Announcements have to wait for these big shows. There is no actual product in many cases at these shows so the announcements are all you get, and we Amigans are hungry for it.
Something different has happened though. This year, a small users group of about 12 members put together an Amiga show in the north of England called alt.World of Amiga. You may remember the old World of Amiga shows that was always held in London in late Spring. This small group of members put together a small convention of booths and invited the Amiga community to come by and visit.
There were many booths and tables for vendors and users groups, but what was amazing was the following. About 400 - 500 Amigans showed up for this event. Here's Bill Hoggett's postings about this.
First off, I do the hour's drive to Huddersfield around lunch time, in gorgeous sunny weather and a nice mild temperature for February in these parts. Around five hours later I drive back home in the midst of a veritable blizzard which made the trip a nightmare of concentration. Don't you just love the British climate?
But back to the topic at hand. The show itself was held in the function room of a large pub outside Huddersfield, and as such there was less room than you'd expect at such an event. This wasn't the surprise. The attendance was. There must have been 400-500 people crammed in there, which surprised Fleecy as much as it surprised me. The organizers, the local user group, did a great job in setting up the event and were well rewarded by the turnout. Eyetech, who sponsored the event with Amiga Inc, were also rewarded, if in a more prosaic way. They certainly shifted a lot of stock, and would have shifted more if they hadn't encountered some technical difficulties. Sadly, Power Computing weren't there, but I think that was rather to their own loss. Their gear would have sold well.
Suffice to say that I went in with a wallet full of money and an empty bag and came out with a full bag and empty wallet. Had I taken more money with me I would have spent that too, no doubt. Oh well...
I was impressed with the machines running the games area. Payback (the new GTA clone) looked quite good though it's not a visually stunning genre, Napalm looked good but played just a tad sluggishly (if you're used to fast C&C clones on the PC that is) and Heretic II - which was running a head-to-head tournament - looked and moved very well indeed. No match for a GeForce 2 hosted game, but good nevertheless. Copies of Bubble Heroes, Nightlong, Earth 2140, Heretic II, Exodus, Simon The Sorcerer II and the now fairly old Wipeout sold in quantity.
On the application front, there were demos of a few packages, like Draw Studio 2, GoldED 6, Photogenics 5.0 and a couple more, as well as the new revamped AmiBench 2 site. There were also three Internet connected machines forming Neil Bothwick's Cybercafe stand, which at least worked, unlike at the WoA `99 show. Shame these were just AGA displays from A1200s, and not gfx card equipped machines.
I made a number of purchases, and am happy with all of them except for the AmigaSDK. For reasons I won't cover here, I chose to buy a copy of the Linux version and one of the Windows version. Even with a kind discount (thanks Alan), I still think I've paid a lot more than I would have liked. I'm going to have a moan at Gary Peake for that, fear not.
The most pleasant thing was the overall friendliness at the show. Everybody was willing to stop and have a chat, offer help, advice and so on. I met one or two old acquaintances and made a few new friends.
Sadly, except for the MASPlayer (an external MP3 player), there was no new hardware on show. The G-Rex/Predator is apparently not quite ready yet, and while the AmigaOne 1200 board *is* ready, Bill McEwen decided he wanted it held back for unveiling at the St. Louis show, when he will make his *BIG* announcement. Since Power Computing didn't turn up and they are the sole Mediator distributors in the UK, there were no Mediator boards either.
At the end, Fleecy made a short speech then Alan Redhouse gave us a presentation on the AmigaOne project, which was very similar to the one at the Köln WoA show by all accounts. A Q&A session followed, which was a little hindered by the fact that both Fleecy and Alan were tied down by NDAs so that they weren't in a position to answer a number of questions. However, I did get an answer when I asked roughly how fast the 68k emulation was envisaged to be. It will depend on the type of application used, but for retargettable apps, graphics manipulation, etc., the increase over 68060 is envisaged as being *very* significant (Alan gave us a figure, but since it was off the record, I shall respect the confidence). The boards are slated to go out to beta testers in May, and are targeted as a Classic upgrade to the new AmigaDE OS, which will in the interim also act as a much faster Classic Amiga machine. Bye bye 68k CPUs. These boards will not have serial or parallel ports, but they will have AGP, USB and Ultra ATA, and the price is expected to be "very attractive" when compared to current high end PPC solutions for the Amiga.
All in all a pleasant day. Thanks HAUG, Eyetech and Amiga Inc., and greetings to all the people I spoke to if you're reading this. -- Bill Hoggett