amiga-news.de - Event: Review of the Amiga Ireland 2023

24.Jan.2023
CUGI Event: Review of the Amiga Ireland 2023
Amiga Ireland was held in Athlone on 13 and 14 January 2023. We asked the organisers for a summary, which has now kindly been made available to us. Many thanks!

"Amiga Ireland 2023 has come to a close and the feedback seems to be very positive. The organizers sent their annual anonymous survey where the overall satisfaction rate is very high but with plenty of requests for future events.

The positive feedback could well be in part due to the amount of time that Amiga users have been waiting to meet in Ireland. The 2021 event had to be made 100% online due to the pandemic and the 2022 event was deferred to 2023 due to uncertainty about what pandemic restrictions might be in place.

The 2023 event took place in Athlone on January 13th & 14th in the Centre of Ireland and the schedule included speakers and guests including Ron Nicholson (recording of the speech on YouTube) and Nick Veitch, who took questions on their unique experiences in the industry.

A new alpha version dual-stick DB9 game controller was unveiled by Abstraction who also talked about their experience porting Chaos Engine to other platforms.

Amiga cosplayer Ravenlordess talked about her process for making life-size wearable versions of Turrican and other impressive creations based on Amiga games. Her Shadow of the Beast cosplay was admired at Amiga 37 in Germany by fans and former Psygnosis developers alike.

Paulo D’Urso was interviewed about the Passione Amiga Day 2022 in Italy as well as their magazine Passione Amiga. The magazine theme continued with members of Amiga Addict magazine also participating in the event, including deputy editor Ian Griffiths, who donated some magazines to the raffle and introduced some gaming competitions at the Nivrig Games display. These included Dodgy Rocks and Turbo Tomato. In the latter, a new high score was achieved.

The Creative Competition (amiga-news.de reported) returned this year with categories in pixel art and MOD. Some exceptional entries were enjoyed including 1st place winners in each category, which will receive €50 each. These were Black Magic by Punnik (MOD) and Winter Patrol by Critikill. The results will be posted on the "new" website for Amiga Ireland.

Workshop hosts at the event included Lightwave 3D guru Muadib, Rob Smith Dev, Karl Jeacle who developed AmiGemini and talked about Amiga & The Small Web as well as Dimitris Panokostas. Dimitris maintains AmiBerry and have a workshop on animation using Deluxe Paint. His son, Erik, also managed to join the event program by coming 2nd place in the pixel art competition and winning €25 for his artwork, Sunset.

The event organizers stressed that the event is primarily a social event and user group, so while the schedule may be more or less busy on a given year, the priority is meeting other users and enjoying the machines for what they are today.

Also while the venue itself had technical issues of their own that delayed the organizers setup, it didn’t feature much in the survey responses so far, thankfully.

The main sponsor this year is AmigaKit, who stepped in when price increases with 3rd parties put the location in question. The organizers are very grateful to AmigaKit for being the gold sponsor this year as well as A-Eon for being their silver sponsor.

Game competitions included SWOS, Stunt Car Racer, Speedball 2, Turbo Tomato and others. Winners received trophies and will be listed on the Amiga Ireland website’s Hall of Fame at CUGI.ie) Also among awards was an ACA1221 tested at 28Mhz and with 64MB which was provided by Retro Ready. Rob Smith also donated an Arduino Floppy drive to the raffle.

The organizers are still completing the update to CUGI.ie and will send prize money to competition winners in a couple of days. They extend their thanks to everyone who attended and made the atmosphere so enjoyable." (dr)

[News message: 24. Jan. 2023, 05:15] [Comments: 0]
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