amiga-news.de - HEW '99 Special

19.Nov.1999
amiga-news.de HEW '99 Special
First short previews 12./14.11.1999
Pictures of the first day Impressions - 12.11.1999
Details and pictures of the Met@box processorcard for A1200 - 13.11.1999
Pictures of the second day Impressions II - 13.11.1999
Pictures of the last day Impressions III - 14.11.1999
HEW '99 Report from Caghan Demirci - 29.11.1999

Links to other reports and pictures:
UGN IRC Logs
Pictures from Virtual Dimension
Livereport and Annex Performance from Amiganation
Pictures from javosoft Computer
Pictures from AmigaImpact
Report in german and pictures from AmigaLand

Detailed report
(Translation by Martina Jacobs - Thank you very much!)

AMIGA International, Inc.

The booth of Amiga International was way the biggest and most beautiful one the fair. It took a compressor eight hours to pump up that tremendous Boing-Ball. The Amiga museum was very interesting, where in addition to all the Amiga models ever made the "Walker" were exhibited, which never came to production. The presentation of the operatingsystem update AmigaOS 3.5 was the highlight and of course it was sold at the show. Also A1200 machines and the popular Amiga merchandising products were sold.

There were no new Amigas to show and the MCC was off topic, as it became clear during the weeks before the fair. However, there was a developer machine by Haage & Partner exhibited inside of a displaycase at the AMIGA booth. This machine was a POP board from IBM (CHRP), which can be licensed by any developer who wants to produce a big number of pieces. During an interview Jürgen Haage said that Haage & Partner is planing a nativ PPC port of AmigaOS after developing AmgaOS 3.5. The cooperation of AMIGA by giving Haage & Parter the necessary licenses to do so, is the most important assumption to make this come true. Haage & Partner already negotiats with AMIGA.

Inside the AMIGA booth guests of Tanja and Taras, Petro's children, were supported with tasty sausages, coffee and other drinks in an outstanding way . Petro Tyschtschenko, president of Amiga International, answerd numerous questions. Many users in a distinct manner showed him their frustration and temper about Gatway's decision to drop the MCC . Various users felt downright cheated by those many not fulfiled promises. All this temper were shaked out on Petro. Surely not an easy job, but in the meantime Petro calles himself a "manager of crisis". Unfortunatly many users don't think of, that Petro was the only one who put something into production, for he cared for the development of the operatingsystem update AmigaOS 3.5 and pushed it.

Certainly not to leave behind the music group ANNEX, who delighted the visitors of the fair with several songs an their dance-perfomances. In any case to mention is the visit by Diana and Bob Scharp, who are organizing the Gateway Computer Shows in St. Louis. Furthermore there were many small sub-boothes with Amiga, e.g. the one of Amiga-Club im BTX & Internet and the internet café, which was organizsed by UGN and where the IRC conferences were held - in the meantime usual for any big show. The IRC conferences were organized by Hendrik Höner and Christoph Dietz. The machines for the conferences were at their disposal by Amiga International. At other sub-boothes Amiga magazines like amigaOS, Amiga-Magazin and AmigActive from England were introduced. AmigaPlus were represented at another booth. More sub-boothes are discribed seperately below.

Haage & Partner

At the booth of Haage & Partner users got the occation to buy a lot of good software. Jürgen Haage, his wife an Markus Nerding as well as many co-workers answered questions of numberless users. For almost every product presentations were shown at the booth. Survey following:

STFax 4.0, the ultimate fax solution with 120 professional announcement texts in both, German and English. Many of the features have been enhanced, e.g. remote access, fax on demand, forwarding of faxes and background printing. Furthermore this version contains an enhanced support for USRobotics with improved quality of sound.

NetConnect 3.0, the all-in-one internet bundle with Voyager 3.0 incl. Java-script, AmIRC 3, NetInfo 2, the new mFTP as well as MetalWeb, the WYSIWYG HTML editor.

Warp3D, the highly optimized 3D driversystem for CyberVison 3D/Virge3D and others.
WaruUP, the hightspeed PowerPC kernel for Amiga.
StromMESA, an OpenGL compatible graphics library.
H&P advertises: The combination of PowerPC, 3D graphics card, WarpOS, Warp3D and StormMESA/OpenGL makes your Amiga a highend machine.

Storm DSK, the developer survival kit, containing everything indispensable for professional development. The bundle includes: StromC 3.0 68K ANSI C/C++ Compiler, StormC 3.0 PowerPC ANSI C/C++ Cross-Compiler, StromPowerASM 68K and PowerPC Cross-Assembler, StormWIZZARD V2.2 as current version of the desktop tools, StormMesa - 100% compatible OpenGL library for 68K and PowerPC, Developer CD V1.3 incl. the Amiga Refernz Manuals as AmigaGuide, PowerPC 68K Emulator Beta-Programm.

amigaWriter, the Word Processor with multilingual word-division, chapter-management, automatic list of contents, WYSIWYG style footnotes, extensive DTP funktions, pattern documents, enhanced printing, spell checking with correction propositions and support for TrueType. Unfortunatly version 2 wasn't finished in time before the show.

Tornado 3D Version 3.0, the incredible 3D rendering and animation programm with complete new GUI and an enormous number of features: clothes and threads, mannequins (human figures), improved particle system/force fields, extended inverse cinematic, sculptor (form editor), support for 3D sounds, animation control assistent, project planer, render engines and much more.

For graphics the classics VideoFX 2, X-DVE, FontMachine and of course ArtEffect 3.0 were sold at the show. The grahics programm for picture and video editing and creation of animations, as well as file convertion, ImageFX Version 4.1 is new on the list of H&P.

Also PageStream 4.0, the all-in-one DTP bundle incl. drawing funktions, index and list of contents, PDF export, HTML import/export, chapter dependent stile patterns and variables, multiple chapter/page number, manual printing, overview printing, visitingcard and lable printing.

The AMIGA Developer CD 2.1 containing all the news for AmigaOS 3.5 and for the previous versions of the operatingsystem was dearly desired. This bundle even includes the StormC 68K C/C++ Compiler Version 3.0 among other software and files . However, the CD doesn't contain the PowerPC-Compiler and Power-Assembler, but if you purchase the CD you obtain the opportunity to get StromC Version 4.0 for a special price.

Even a few hardware were offered. One could buy the graphic tablets and the multi I/O card HyperCOM 3+ from VMC, too.

Schatztruhe

At the booth of Schatztruhe of Stefan Ossowski one could see numerous software and among this a real feast for the eyes: the hand-airbrushed Micronik-Tower of Heinz Andreolla from Rüti in Swizerland. This tower is absolutly unique. Heinz took the tower completely apart, and brushed and painted multiple layers inside and outside of it. The Boing-Balls are sometimes raising, somtimes falling, sometimes smaller, sometimes bigger, sometimes more pale, and sometimes real colourful, telling the history of Amiga, which raised in the begining, then was colourful on top, and - as it looks like by now - slowly disapears into the underground again.

A special gimmick on the tower is a little Boing-Ball, which rotates around it's diagonal axis. This ball is driven by a 3.5 voltage ballbearing-engine. It took Heinz two month to work out the tower. Also Heinz together with Oliver Tacke is painting new GlowIcons. Some of the first icons one could already admire at the show. Unfortunatly a few of the icons are still faulty (too small), but those will be corrected and available soon.

One could find Urban Müller (Mr. Aminet) at the booth of Schatztruhe, too. We were able to ask him a number of questions about Aminet, which he moderates together with Matthias Scheler. We were interested in who is permitted to upload files to Aminet. Urban explained this to us, and we continued to write notes on it which we tell you in a summary below.

First of all everybody is of principle permitted to upload an archiv to Aminet. The archives are collected inside a special directory on the server in Paderborn. Before the archives get on Aminet - and by this on all mirrors - those are beeing checked for viruses and corrupt files. Above all they are verifying if the readme-files are proper. By the way Urban called our attention to the bad habit to include the version number with the filename. A lot of programmers are not able to give up this habit. There are two reasons why this is not good. First the filenames are changing continously and by this programms are hard to link to each other, and second it becomes harder to search for previous versions, cause previous version have to become deleted in order not to let burst the Aminet. So, it would be kind if the version number could be place inside the readme-file.

Further we asked Urban, why he dosn't agree with LZX-archives inside the Aminet, since LZX-archives are smaller than LHA-archives. Urban explained, he will agree with LZX-archives on Aminet as soon as LZX will be 100% portable to any operatingsystem. Unfrotunatly this is not possible, yet. What means that a few operatingsystems would be locked out from using LZX-archives.

Dr. Greg Perry from GP Software answerd questions of DirOpus users. A patch which fixes problems with AmigaOS 3.5 can be downloaded at the mentioned webside.

individual computers - Jens Schönfeld

Jens Schönfeld and Jörg 'Schueschmie' Sendrowski showed us the prototype of the new ethernet card. This is a full-sized Zorro card containing 10MBit ethernet and the "usual" expansionports. The card uses RJ45 ("Twisted Pair") as well as BNC ("thin ethernet" or "Lakritz") connectors. Also interesting is the SilveSurfer, a serial port for A1200 and Buddha. For the SilverSurfen even an adapter for A600 is available. This serial port makes up to 460800 Baud, is MIDI compatible and keeps big Fifos for low CPU charge. Additonal to this hardware there was a SCMS-Copybit-Killer. The Copybit-Killer allows multiple digital copying via TOSLINK optical cables between Minidisc, DAT, DCC, CDR and that is the reason why it is only usable for privat purposes.

Eyetech Group Ltd

Alan Redhouse showed us varaible hardware which is mainly used for industrial applications. Those are several components and modules which are to plug into the floppy port. Those keep an image of a bootdisk. He showed us a karaoke machine which used a small LC display and Scala to display the text of a song, while the music was played from an integrated CDRom drive. The necessary hardware sticks into a 19" shelf, hence is optimal for any insdustrial application. According to Allan Redhouse the Amiga Operatingsystem proved itself as definite stable and reliable, whereas the use of other systems brought up problems and crashes again and again.

Amiga Zentrum Thüringen e.V.

Wie talked to Kai Mache and Rolf Hoffmann. The AZT, surely known by some users from the "Fun of Computing" , mainly calls themself an address for users wanting to meat and get to know other users, in oder to discuss about their favourit subject and to help each other with problems. The subject of AZT's little sub-booth at Amiga definite was Linux. They lend help and the club also created a CD with all the necessary files to install Linux. Of course there are thorough manuals on the CDRom, too. The CD can also be ordered after the show from Thomas Mache, Lindenberg 59, 98693 Ilmenau, at a price of 25,- DM

KATO Development Group

Jörn Plewka, Thorsten Gruner and Thorsten Hansen showed us the new Twister 1200 NG, which is produced by DCE. A multi I/O card with automatic dataflow control and 460800 baud independent from the CPU in use. Twister 1200 NG is compatible to the Melody 1200 soundcard.

Further we could astonish at the new Zorro 2-fast-ethernet card Unity Net. Here some of the specifications: 100 Mbps and 10 Mbps (100Base-TX and 10Base-T), 64kB databuffer, auto-negotiation IEEE 802.3, full autoconfig (no harware settings needed), full duplex in 10Mbps mode, RJ-45 connection (Twisted Pair), automatic speed detection inside the network and SANA 2-driver. This card will be available in late january 2000 at the earliest.

EASys! by Tom Neidhardt

EASys! builds an OS enhancement for the standard Workbench, which is 100% compatible to OS3.5, and holds many additional features. Here some of the features: multithreading on WB, www pages as icon, send WB files as email, internet doc (unfoldable), office doc (unfoldable), system doc including drag 'n drop docs for presentations, editor, printing, and global help, and many many more. Further details are available by the link above. EASys! Version 4.6 coming soon on CDRom together with extended background stuff. Innovativ (Felix Schwarz) will deal with the sales. There is a test report for version 3.5 in amigaOS' issue from mai `99. The provisional product "MARInA" fits well as demo for snooping into the software, and is available on Aminet in the aminet/util/wb directory.

Vendors

We had no extended look at the vendors, but tenor of the conversations was, that there were not enough hardware for sale. Only a few PPC cards, graphics cards and accelaration cards were available at the fair. Nevertheless, the turnovers weren't lower than the year before at all, what after all means that the turnovers might have been much bigger, if there were more hardware for sale at the show.

At the booth of COOLbits people could purchase software updates from products of IrseeSoft. Further there were Bühler Elektronik, TGV-Haupt, ACT electronic and Elbox at the show.

RBM digitaltechnik

First your eyes were catched by the coloured tower cases, which RBM will soon offer painted with any colour wanted. We couldn't disregard the "Swopper", which has nothing to do with Amiga at all but nevertheless is interesting. "Swopper" is a chair like seat, which works like a big round ball, but doesn't roll away. Unfortunatly at a price of 800 to 900 DM this is a quite expensive fun.

Certainly ScanQuix 5 were presented. ScanQuix now supports the ICS colour management and offers further new features. The power failture system AmstroNG and Towerhawk 1200/4000 were shown, too.

Felix Schwarz von Innovative presented his new graphical editing programm fxPAINT at the booth of RBM. fxPAINT offers everything necessary for todays professional designers: painting tools and surfaces, highly comfortable to operate, many special effects, open concept for enhancements, integrated modules for convertion and administration of pictures, webdesign tools. fxPAINT is furthermore the first application fully using the features of OS 3.5 and of course supports PPC. Felix did an extented presentation for us and we realy were filled with enthusiasm.

Amiga-Club im BTX & Internet

The Amiga-Club im BTX und Internet takes the task to help Amiga users with all their problems concerning Amiga. It is important that the members help each other, by that contacts become closer and a good community is builded. To do so on the websides of the club a number of forums are available and thats also why the club were at the show. At their booth at the fair users could ask questions about any subject, many small problems could be fixed at the booth. The booth had a lot visitors, and many peoples who knew each other only by the forums had long conversations. Volker Mohr presented an Amiga laptop, which he put together himself laborious.

Aaron Digulla presented AROS. AROS is an new implementation of AmigaOS, which is open-source. Linux is used as developer system, cause it is available for free and stable, and allows a quite comfortable development of its own source code. AROS is to imagin as a kind of emulator, emulating the features of AmigaOS similar to UAE in which UAE builds a hardware emulation, whereas AROS actualy emulates the operatingsystem.

This project gets ahead only slowly at this time. About 60 % of the work is done, which mainly is due to that of 60 registered developers only a hand full gets active on this regular. Many developers are motivated, but there are problems with time. After all the project progressed far enough that we were able to play a mine-game. We asked Aaron who else he would like to have in the team, and of course he said that Olaf Barthel would be great. :-)

APC&TCP Computerclub

The APC&TCP Computerclub offers many performances. Some of this are directly deald by the central office, others by several members of the club. And quite that is the power and of course the main meaning of a computerclub. A lot of members like to help other members. This is done at the users' home or by the club magazine NoCover, which one could get on disk, via email or from the homepage of the club.

APC&TCP-sale cares for updates and patches for many programms, and supports developer of games. At their booth one could purchase a lot of games. Markus Pöllmann showed a demo of Phoenix, a outerspace game.

Epic Marketing

Epic-Marketing presented the new game "Dafel Bloodline". That is a Zelda like role game which will support AGA and graphics cards, will use a new sourround sound system and will contain many aktion elements.

Lukas Hartmann told us about his realtime strategy game "Soeki - The plague", which he together with Atomatirx (4 ppl) are developing on BeOS and will then be ported to Amiga, if there will be any moving on. The story of the game is very extended. It starts with an over-populated earth and a group of peoples getting teleported to a planet far away. That planet is build out of five islands, of which one is contaminated radioactive. Of course the people have to wear protection suites on that contaminated island what later turns out as a good thing, cause there enrages a virus on each of the islands turning human into monsters. Only the people wearing protection suites don't get affected by that virus. Everybody can imagin how the story continues....

We also met Paul Burkey, the programmer of Foundation (now Foundation - The Directors Cut) at the booth of Epic Marketing. An update for Foundation - The Directors Cut which will fix little bugs will be realeased soon.

Titan Computer

The highlight at the booth of Titan surely was the presentation of the demo of Heretic II. This game is beeing ported to Amiga by Hyperion Software. The programmers Thomas and Hans-Jörg Frieden as well as Christian Sauer told us, that a fast PowerPC and for the best a 3D graphics card is recommended for the game, as for Shogo.

Ingo Kleefisch presented his morphing programm "Fantastic Dreams", which now even can save single sequences as animations. Also the programmers of the well known CDR-software "BurnIt", Michael Siegel and Axel Deising, were at the booth of Titan. Michael Garlich, the chief of Titan-Computer, told us the decision of Gateway not to develope the MCC anymore put him to worse, cause he believed in those promises and invested a lot of money for licenses.

Summary

As you surely could read between the lines of the short previews, the show wasn't a "banger". All in all less visitors, only on saturday there were a quite good visitation. This time appearently only those people have come to the show who realy wanted to buy someting or to talk to the developers and to meet other Amiga users. As one could imagin before there were no single sign of the revolutionary development we heard about long time ago. Nevertheless, there are some good starts, but unfortunatly all this is still not "to hand", nothing we would be able to buy here and today. I talked to many users who came with a lot of money to the show, but left it again with the money. This in mind I'm astonished by the vendors beeing quite satisfyed by their turnovers not less than previous jear. This shows definite that there is a existing marked. It would be nice if something "real" would be brought t ging new starts (PPC) would realy come to development, because for me I'm fed up with those keep-up-slogans any way. OS 3.5 is a begining, but now the developers of hardware must come along.

This show was a great experience for me. I got to know an incredible number of people personaly who I only knew by email or phone before. I had a lot of intense and extended conversations, which gave me a better understanding of a number of interrelations. I want say thank you very much for the kindness I recieved everywhere. This all was great fun for me and motivated me to go on with Amiga News. One word about those many rumours at the show, as usual at any show. Certainly I've heard some, but I rather stick to facts and will wait until I'm able to report facts.

I hope that I didn't forget anybody or anything important, and that I didn't confuse specifications or anything else. If so, please sent me a short email. (ps) (ps)

[News message: 19. Nov. 1999, 08:00] [Comments: 0]
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