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| 12.Jun.2000 |
World of Alternatives Gleanings (Update) Under the titlelink you will find a detailed report from the fair in Neuss, Germany and every relevant link to further reports and pictures. (German only, translations will follow). Update: (24.06.2000, mj) I appologize for the much too long delay, but here it is. The English translation of Petra Struck's "World of Alternatives Gleanings": Further amiga-news.de links Pictures by Petra Struck from the first day Pictures by Petra Struck from the second day Report part one by Martin Baute (SDK presentation) Report part two by Martin Baute Pictures by Martin Baute from the presentation Pictures by Martin Baute from the show Extern links for reports and pictures Marcus Neervoort Pictures Fun Time World Report and Pictures - 1. day Fun Time World SDK presentation Fun Time World Report and Pictures - 2. day playamiga.de Messebericht mit Bildern Amiga-Online Pictures Haujobb/Cyclone Zip file - 3,4 MB kultpower.de Pictures Amiga Times Show report SalvaShow pictures - 1. day Virtual Dimension Show pictures Fun Time World Report by Sebastian Brylka Fun Time World Report by Sascha Atrops AMIGALAND Reporting pictures Amiga Future Show report World of Alternatives Gleanings Autor: Petra Struck Bill McEwen's presentation of the new AMIGA Software Developer's Kit (in short SDK) has made the Amiga/Atari show "World of Alternatives" from 10 Jun to 11Jun 2000 a milestone in the never ending history of AMIGA. You can find details of the presentation inside Martin Baute's report about this event. Before I'll go on describing the highlights of the show I would like to tell everybody, that I personally liked the show well. It was stamped by private, not to say familiar vibes, and the nice time they had at the show was written on the attendants' faces. All in all about 3.200 user came to this fair, whereas I was astonished that many attendants from the neighboring countries partly had taken very long times of travelling to come to the show. On saturday there was a remarkable bigger number of visitors than on sunday due to the presence ob Bill, and his presentation of the AmigaSDK. The fair was held inside the emotive premises of the townhall of Neuss providing a pleasing private ambience. The neighboring Droint hotel surpassing provided the show attendants with drinks and food, but admitedly I was missing Petro's tasty sausages. ;-) For the first time amiga-news.de had a booth on its own. From our editorial were Marin Baute, Dirk Bayens, Christoph Dietz, Ruediger Engel, Martina Jacobs, Rolf Tingler an me present at the fair. Nico Barbat and Felix Schwarz were at the show too, but of course were very busy at their own booths (Falke-Verlag and fxPaint). It was a wonderfull experience for me to get in contact with the audience so close. We had a lot of dialouges and found good suggestions whereof we sure will set into action one or the other. I would like to say thank you for all the compliments we recieved for our sites. Our lottery, whereupon Petro has done the drawing of lots, was a real highlight, and fully a success. Petro gave away an Amiga Software Developer's Kit as additional prize. :-) You can have a look at the winners list here. The prizes will be send directly from the sponsors to the respective winner within the following days. At instance I would like to thank Petro and all the sponsors very much again! I would like to tell you about my dialouge with Gerald Carda from Phase 5 befor I start to report about the fair. I was surprised to meet him at the show, and took this in advantage to ask him some questions. Mr. Carda assured to me, that every user will get back his hardware sent in for repair at Phase 5. If he has pieces available or could raise some, he will send in repaired boards, otherwise he will send in the hardware unrepaired. Queries at that time are only possible via Fax # +49 6171/58 37 89. We also asked, if and how DCE, who took over large part of the production, will provide the entire drivers via FTP again. According to Mr. Carda those files, and all the technical documents are at disposal to DCE. Mr. Carda will continue this job as possible under the given circumstances and I wish him good success for that. Phase 5 already unpupated as "skipjack" in the past, and I hope this will happen again, for so users who did prepayment might get satisfyed eventually. Let's now pass the exhibitors in alphabetical order to make it more easy. Amiga International was represented by Bill McEwen and Petro Tyschtschenko. As metioned befor Bill introduced the new Amiga Software Developer's Kit, and Petro cared for his "community" in his allover favoured manner. Amiga Club *AC# and amiga-news.de shared their common booth with Airbrush Paradise Tingler. This way we had three attractions at one central point. The user could leave their mouse or other parts of thier computer at the airbrushing artist Rolf Tingler, and in the meanwhile talk about questions all about Amiga next-door. As usual there were many experts from Amiga-Club on site. Many smaller and bigger problems could bet worked out, and many questions were answered. The clubmember Dr. Zarkov presented his in the meantime famous self-made Amiga laptop, which earned a lot of admiration. APC & TCP, the computer club and software distributor had smashing CDs to offer, as every time. New on the list were the following CDs: Amiga Arena CD, the Amiga Game Guide, Digital Makeup and Face of Mars 2000. Further the users could by ahead many interesstig games. Cool bits, distributor from Cologne who also repairs Amiga computers had his own booth at the show where useres could by ahead hardware and software (e.g. Irseesoft). The same at DreiEinHalb-Computer. At Epic Marketing Paul Burkey was guest who presented his new mission CDs Foundation: The Undiscovered Land and Foundation Gold Edition and authographed the CDs if wanted. At Eternity users were able to watch the impressing intro of Tales of Tamar. I got to know the entire team of T.o.T.. Martin Wolf, idea, concept, programming; Daniel Bindel, at this time intensively paying attention to the programming of animations; Markus Holler from Virtual Dimension, responsible for the felicitous soundtrack, and Patrick Beerhorst, responsible for the game's internet presence. Martin explained to me in detail what it is about that "internet game". It is a strategy game similar to Siedler, Foundation or Caesar. As a disposer one takes a piece of land to build on. In the role of the disposer one has to care for nation to be provided with everyting necessary, and to be capable of defence. So far, so usual. The actual gag on the game is that one plays it together with thousands of real players at the same time. How that? Well now, this took me too some time, to internalize it. Martin gave me the striking illustration that one should suggest playing chess with an opposer via email. The opposer recieves a move via email, then he will send the next move in return, etc.. In T.o.T. a server controled by a game manager takes over this mailing job. In game every player sends a move to the server (settings are configured during installation) and some hours later will get in reply the game processed by all moves of all players. Then one can decide his next move. This is not a complete explanation of the game, cause there are many more additional features like the possibility of trading and collecting/paying taxes. A number of characters provide suspense inside the game. There are clerics, magicians, researchers, spies, intelligence service, diplomats, and saboteurs to name a few. Several rooms where one e.g. can play simple board games are designed as pastimes between the single moves. By the way, Marc Albrecht wrote the fist book for the game. At Falke Verlag the users were able to purchase the latest issues of AmigaPlus and AmigaFuture, and elder issues too. Andreas Kuessner introduced his graphics software Wildfire 7.0. Haage & Partner presented AmigaWriter2.0, which know features an interessting possibility for printing booklets, and now can even deal with Word[TM] documents. During the discusion about AmigaWriter Juergen Haage gave me an important hint: If someone has thin stripes printed, when printing several pages via Turboprint the formfeed function of Turboprint should get disabled. A mega font CD suitable for AmigaWriter was released with 5000 fonts on it, and even containing a poster on which one can see all those fonts on the CD. ArtEffect4.0 was available too, and comes up with many new features whereupon the most important for sure is the possiblity to use several alpha channels and alpha compositions on every picture. I positively noticed that all the programs of H&P are comming with a printed manual, which I address very much, cause one can quick find a needed information wihtout being forced to start a viewer first. Gunnar Gertzen is acute working on the printed manual of ImageFX. I was allready able to have a look at a preprint. 85% of that manual are done an it then must get proofread and printed. It would be available after about 6-8 weeks. I think the new Service-CD from H&P is mentionable too, containing actual demos, free patches, German manuals, and full versions of ArtEffect SE (special edition) and StormWizard2.2. Individual Computer New stuff Jens Schönfeld had with him this time he exceptionally presented without a computer: the samba intall CD for the X-Surf ethernetcard were given away for free to more than 100 owners of a X-Surf card. Second novelty was a preproduction model of the ISDN-Surfer. After the conception of this card was changed again due to the continuesly high exchange rate of the US dollar, on Friday the first prototype of this card arrived. For this reason only the empty printed circuit board was was there to look at. On late Saturday Jens took the time to build and test the digital area of the card - positively so far. During the following week testing of the S0 bus will follow to complete. ISDN-Surfer is a ZorroII card and functions in any Amiga 2000/3000/4000, as well as Amiga 1200 with Zorro expansion board. ISDN cards allow direct connection to the NTBA of the Telekom, hence indirection with ISDN modem and seriell port is not necessary anymore. Less wastage of data flow; transfer rates of more than 7.5 kbytes/s are standard with direct ISDN connections. Internet surfing with Miami, Genesis or AmiTCP becomes possible by elaborated drivers from VMC. To mention as a great advantage to existing cards is the easy installation. Konfiguration using mystery terminal commands is foretime, cause a little tool querys all necessary data during installation and automatically deals with the settings. The technical data of the card in short: up to two independend simultaneous connections (like two modems), one 26pol expansionport for the Hypercom3 module, one clockport for a Silversurfer or Catweasle MK2, and one port for a phone module making a convenient ISDN phone out of the computer. An optional voltage surge protection limits damage after a stroke of lightning. According to Jens this show was a complete success for individual Computers. Both, attendance and volume of sales surprised him positively. He will gladly actively help designing the next "World of Alternatives", as the organizer asked im to do so. All of the following retailers of hardware and software had an own booth at the fair: KDH Datentechnik Schatztruhe Titan Computer Verkosoft Vertrieb A. Knoetig Vesalia At Titan users of course jumped at the long awaited Heretic II, which was recently finisched. The team of Hyperion Softwar was at the show and handed me over the press release about the porting of "Soldier of Fortune". Simply fantastic that Hyperion is porting so many good games to the Amiga! Elbox was guest at Vesalia presenting the new MEDIATOR PCI 1200 busborad. Addionally the following products of Elbox were there to by: Winner Tower for A1200 and A4000, FastATA controller 16.6MB/s with AllegroCDFS for A1200 and A4000, the Mroocheck PC mouse interface, and the 4xEIDE'99 interface with AllegroCDFS. Presentation of programms were given at many boths. At Eternity e.g. I was able to persuade myself of the features of EASys!. The author Tom Neidhardt showed and explained to me the merits of this AMIGA System Enhancer in detail. With this software, which is a mixture of toolmanager, filer and a partial Workbench replacement, if I understood everything well, many features of the Workbench can be made more easy and cyclic procedures can be done more quickly. Here are some of the features of EASys!:
At COOLbits Felix Schwarz presented his marvellous image editing software fxPaint. I don not need to tell the advantages and features here anymore, as those are well known. fxPaint now has new features for HTML-Album, which I as a webworker like very much. Now you realy can configure the design of the catalog. Addional to the usual settings now you can configure:
Just have a look at our show pictures, which all were generated with fxPaint, of course inclusive the needed HTML pages. Simply resourceful! But also for picture generating there are many new and helpful features, e.g. the new colour manager. One click on a point of the picture and the colour manager shows the relevant colour as RGB palette. And even with this Felix Schwarz thought of the webworkers. If needed one can copy the HTML code of this colour to the clipboard. I noticed the improved plugin choice, too. Jens Langner and Jens Troelger were to find in the grand entrance hall. Jens Troegler is working on installer modules which generate executable binaries from the scripts. Jens Langer, the programmer of P96Speed and AmIDE, is now coding a new Paloma module for VHI-Studio, and new AmIDE modules for other compilers, such as StormC or GCC shall be created. Additionally the two Jenses are about to programm a driver with GUI for a seriell radio adapter, and are thinking about to rewrite the performance test programm Tiniymeter from Tinic Urou and of course to enhance it with some of thier own features. Near the end of the fair I visited the booth of Stefan Kost and his SoundFX. SoundFX is curently as version 4.0 avalable. This realy extensive sound editing software attends with the following features:
Stefan permanently developes the software, so that users can look forward for many new features. Not to forget the nice meeting with Michael Schaefer and Dennis Pauler from Virtual Dimension. Those two have done a video of the fair and have done interviews untiring . Unfortunatliy they had bad luck. Today I recieved the following eMail from Dennis: "Michael did allreay mail via mobile, that the are some SMALL technical problems with the video: we have wonderful pictures, but due to a defective microphone unfortunatly no sound at all - which means the intervies are - as super as they was - unfortunatly not usable at all.... :-((( But we will try to make the best out of the remaining stuff and will make up the intervies at the next show." Even though this is realy bad, it is not to change and as it is generally known pictures are telling more than thausand words. I am looking forward for the video, anyhow. :-) (ps) (Translation: mj) [News message: 12. Jun. 2000, 08:00] [Comments: 0] [Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version] | ||
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