amiga-news DEUTSCHE VERSION
.
Links| Forums| Comments| Report news
.
Chat| Polls| Newsticker| Archive
.

[Login] [Register] [Forgot your password?]

< Next messagePrior message >
11.Dec.2000
Petra Struck


Show Report by Petra Struck

World of Amiga - Gleanings - 10.12.2000
Autor: Petra Struck (German version)

More amiga-news.de Links

Pictures by Petra Struck vom 1. Tag
Pictures by Torsten Dudai vom 1. Tag
Pictures by Petra Struck of the 2nd day
OS3.9 - Presentation by Torsten Dudai - in German

Exteral links to reports and pictures

Fun Time: Eyetech - AmigaONE/AmigaDE Timelines
(Pictures of the Eyetech diagramms)
Fun Time: World of Amiga 2000 - Die ersten Infos
IRC: Fleecy Moss of Amiga Inc.
IRC: Elbox
Pictures by Marcus Neervoort (4,1 MB)
Marcus Neervoort: Fleecy Moss's lecture on Dec., 9th
Tom's WOA 2000 Pictures (Thomas Wenzel)
No Risc No Fun
Fun Time World
WoA 2000 pitctures by Salva
Amiga-Community.net
Videos from Elwood
Report from amiga.topcool.de
Pictures from Virtual Dimension
Pictures from Elbox
Pictures from BAUD
Report from Amiga Globe
Report from Boing World
Report from IOM

Show report by Petra Struck

The World of Amiga 2000 from December, 9th to 10th, which was organized by Haage & Partner, was branded by the vending start of the new AMIGA OS3.9, which according to the vendors sold brilliant on the fair.

The show took place inside the really imposing building of Cologne's Mediapark 7 on about 300 m˛ room. For this show were organized within shortest time this event was attended very well with an amount of about 1500 visitors (note: own estimation). Seminars were held in the opposite building Mediapark 6. The first day of the fair Saturday was stamped by active crowd, while on Sunday it was rather unhurried, cause of only half as full as on the day before.

Before I start describing the highlights of the show I want to put across to every reader that I personally again liked this fair very much. I'm always exited about the cheerful and personal atmosphere. As already in Neuss an amazing amount of international attendants had come to the show. I've met and spoken to people from England, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Belgium, France, and Spain. The visitors had visible fun and where impressed by the many different presentations. Everywhere crowds of interested viewers got together.

Disappointment only dispersed caused by the fact that Bill McEwen didn't attend the show; short- termed and insuspendable deadlines kept him from coming to Cologne. Fleecy Moss, Vice President and Chief of Development, but provided for incredulous astonishment by stating there must be at least 50,000 copies of AMIGA OS3.9 sold, to be able to do OS4.0. As for this time nobody thinks this to be possible his statement was taken for a clear No for OS4.0.

As already in Neuss amiga-news.de together with the Amiga-Club im BTX & Internet was present with an own booth. From our editorial staff were on the fair: Dirk Baeyens, Tomás J. Cantó, Torsten Dudai, Ruediger Engel, Guido Fehst, Eric Gillé, Martina Jacobs, Rolf Tingler, and me truly. Nico Barbat was also on the show, but of course was very busy at his own booth (Falke-Verlag). Rolf inspired the visitor with his airbrushing skills.

We enjoyed to get in close contact with the readers and numerous dialogues convinced us to have high acknowledgment for our work, and encouraged us to continue to spend our free time for this project. Especially intensive and interesting were the dialogues with editors of other news services, as like Andrea Vallinotto from diff.org (ItalY), Adrian Sweeney from amigaglobe.com (Irland), Ian Maack from amiga.dk (Denmark), Sebastian Brylka from Fun Time World (Germany), and Mark Hinton and Russell Trent from AmigActive (England). Along this I would like to say thank you very much for the many kind compliments regarding our news service.

The Amiga-Club provided the people not able to attend the show with actual pictures from the fair, and cared for trouble-free UGN IRC chats. Traditional the club members answered our questions, and helped solving one or the other user's problem.

Also this time Michael Schaefer and Dennis Pauler from Virtual Dimension were busy with their video camera to create informing show videos. They did many interviews, and over and over made the microphone sure to work, cause on the last fair the microphone failed completely, which sure was half a disaster.

Trade and the big ones of the branch were present with their own booths - as a matter of fairness this time in alphabetical order or vice versa:

In talks with the exhibitors it became clear that - almost unisonous - they all came with mixed feelings, but against what they expected the visitors were joyfully buying. Trade overall voiced positive about sales.

Almost at all of the above mentioned booths presentations of different software and hardware took place which I will describe without special order. So for example Peter Hoffmann, Stefan Sommerfeld, and Juergen Rebensdorf from Aliendesign introduced their new sound card 'Repulse', which can be used with every Amiga with Zorro-II expansion. The sound card offers sampling rates from 8 to 48 kHz, including 44.1 kHz and 96 kHz S/P-Diff, and supports 16, 18, 20, and 24 Bit (S/P-DIF) sampling frequence in mono or stereo.

New at individual computers was the ISDN-Surfer Zorro card which was to purchase either with or without OVP. The announced products 'Lyra' (adapter to use WindowsTM keyborads with Amiga), and 'Buddha Flash MK2' unfortunately were not finished, but probably will be available before Christmas.

Dirk Conrad introduced his MAS-Player which is distributed by Eternity. The MPEG-Player is a small piece of hardware looking like a serial plug. The player can play MP3 files already on a machine only equipped with a 68000 68k processor. HiFi quality is around 18 Bit / 44 kHz. Since the WoA 2000 AmigaAMP is supported.

At the booth of Hyperion the attendants were able to admire a prototype of the G-Rex PCI board by DCE with Voodoo3 graphics board on action. With this system Heretic II really looked smooth, it was fast and the lightning effects were wonderfully visible. Users can look forward to better speed and nice graphics. The boards are planned to be finished end of December 2000.

Of course we yet asked for the projects under construction at Hyperion, and summarized the answers as follows:
  • Shogo: Hans-Joerg and Thomas Frieden are working on the Amiga version which presumably will be finished end of January 2001.
  • Freespace: On the port of this space shooter Steffen Haeuser and Matthias Roslund are working. It is planned to finished 1Q/2001.
  • Majesty: Stephan Rusdorf and Thomas Frieden are busy porting this fantasy strategy game which includes roll game elements. It is expected to be finished 2Q/2001.
  • Die Voelker (Alien Nations): Harry Sintonen is working on the port of this popular build-up and strategy game, which is a big success similar to Siedler.
  • SIN: Steffen Haeuser and Peter Annuss are working on the port of the 3D shooter. The game will presumably be finished 1Q/2001.
  • Hyperion will also port the 3D software 'Realsoft 3D' by Realsoft to the Amiga! With this software comparable to 'Cinema3D' or 'Reflections' the Amiga users will get a 3D modelling tool more extended and modern than anything else released before.

Eyetech together with Martin Schueler from Escena introduce the plans for the AmigaOne machine. It was shown on diagrams how the system will look like. The 68k emulation is being developed by Haage & Partner.

At Eternity Tales of Tamar was presented - Martin Wolf's favourite project. In the meantime the world map and cities have been enabled. Still intense online tests are running and the beta testers are really sold on the game. Initial bigger beta test are planned for 2Q/2001.

Also at Eternity EASys! by Tom Neidhardt was presented. The current update offers improvements like e.g. a built-in start menu, OS3.9 menu support and alignment. Other changes: the archive manager now supports XPK; the menus are structured better, and extend of menus is scalable, and moreover the buggy installation of the previous version has been fixed, hence a trouble-less installation is possible,yet.

Eternity moreover presented a PC (Eternity 1) basing on 1 GHz (Tunderbird processor by AMD), equipped with gigabyte board, 128 MB DIMM -133, Ge-Force II graphics board 32 MB DD-RAM, Catweazel controller, 52x CD-ROM drive, 20 GB Quantum HD, two PC floppy drives (one of them connected to the Catweasel), as well as a sound card 128 Bit PCI. The gag of this PC is a perfectly pre-installed UAE under Windows. This way one gets a fast PC, and an AMIGA at the speed of 68040/60.

During an interview with Andreas Magerl and Georg Breitsprecher from Amiga Future and APC&TCP Mr. Magerl stated that financing of the now self-produced print magazine 'Amiga Future' finally is safe. Number of orders still isn't 100% satisfying, but a huge layout enhancement would attract more orders. I've seen the new layout and I can confirm it to be a difference like night and day. :-)

Andreas Kuessner from WK-Artworks presented 'Taifun', the successor of 'WildFire'. Taifun is being developed for the new operating system 'Amiga DE' using the Amiga Software Developer Kit (SDK). KDH-Datentechnik will be distributor of Taifun.

At epic interactive Paul Burkey introduce 'Simon The Sorcerer II'. The game will be at the vendors form the middle of next week. Also presented was 'Earth 2140', a real-time strategy game has been ported to the Amiga by Pagan Games on demand of epic interactive. The master volume is on its way to production.

Still under development is Dafel:Bloodline. Status: Thomas Wuergler continues to work on this game, but when it will be finished cannot be estimated at the time being. 'Converting games' currently has a higher priority.

The ATC team handed me a disk containing a preview of the reworked classic game Dynamite. This one will be to play via internet. I promise to have a look at it soon. :)


My quite personal summary: The AMIGA is anything but dead! There are innovative developments in hardware and software taking place. There is unfractured engagement and unrestricted attendance to continue. In many dialogues it got clear that we are facing a future which though is undetermined, it's not hopeless. Tenor from the exhibitors' commercial point of view was, "Though one is able to make enough money with the Amiga, one cannot 'line his pockets'". Already from just this solitary point of view I rate this fair as a success. I had a lot of fun, anyway, and to have been there really pushed on my motivation. :-)

In terms of this....
Petra Struck

[News message: 11. Dec. 2000, 01:00] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail]  [Print version]  [ASCII version]
< Next messagePrior message >

.
Masthead | Privacy policy | Netiquette | Advertising | Contact
Copyright © 1998-2024 by amiga-news.de - all rights reserved.
.