by TONY MULVIHILL
Sat, 8 September, 2001
The Comdex IT-Expo was a great success.
I was surprised by the amount of interest our stand generated.
Almost everyone has had, or knew of somebody who at one time had, an Amiga.
We were able to demonstrate three types of Amiga, namely:
(1) A souped up A1200 (mine)
(2) Bernie Meyer's Amithlon running on a 1.2GHz Athlon, and
(3) The DE SDK on a Windows' laptop.
On my A1200, I'd run three programs on their own screens, copy a directory to an empty partition whilst using PrayerII to play mp3s, and then screen flip between them and demo each program.
Then I'd ask what speed processor they thought was powering my machine, and I'd usually get an answer of "between 700~900 MHz". It just goes to show that Windows is the biggest system hog you can install.
Amithlon was AMAZING! I got a chance to play around with it, and the speed was outstanding. Very, very much faster than any version of UAE out there, and compatablity levels were really good as well. The demos we ran on Amithlon were VoxelSpace (70~200 frames per second, depending on how large the screen was); AmiQuake on a 640x480 screen at 46 frames per second (it was AmiQuake with 3 68k render routines replaced with x86 code); Payback (it played perfectly smoothly and fast on a 1024x768 screen); Shapeshifter took seconds to boot, and was about 32 times faster than a 604 Quadra, according to Speedometer; and we even played Mac Duke Nukem68k in a full screen.
Warm reboots of OS3.9 took only 5 seconds with a 1024x768 24bit screen, which totally shocked Wintel users. Bernie even ran Amithlon on the little 366MHz Celeron laptop, and again it's speed amazed everyone.
People wanted to buy Amithlon then and there, and I reckon that, if we had had 200 copies of Amithlon at the show, we could have sold all 200 copies.
We even had the Ezio monitor people come to us for assistance.
It seems they were having trouble with Win2000 being too slow (took approximately 10 minutes to boot) and, coupled with their lack of a fast Internet connection, they couldn't download any mp3s to demo on their new streaming mp3 player.
Of course, I said "no worries," and concluded the demonstration I was giving on my A1200 with a CD burn while running multiple programs.
Our (Amiga Downunder) Stand was busy almost all the time - so much so that we welcomed the quiet periods so we could get a break.
We all took turns demonstrating Amithlon, while Michael Czajka took charge of explaining the DE SDK to the many interested software developers.
Bernie Meyer was in on both the Wednesday (5th) and the Thursday (6th) to talk about, and demonstrate, Amithlon.
We screened videos of the '98 Amigafest, the '99 Canberra Downunder show, the Ace2000 show with Bill McEwen's DE demo, and Bernie's talk and Amithlon demonstration at the Amiga User Group of Victoria's August meeting.
Michael Czajka wrote a few pages on the current developments of Amiga and Amiga Inc., which we photocopied for handout. It was lucky the Comdex people made a photocopier available to exhibitors, because we pretty much ran out of handout info material on the first day. I'd say we gave out around 1500 info sheets between all the groups over the 3 days of the Exhibition.
ADUG's Basil Flinter was a busy person signing people up for the SDK raffle and explaining the virtues of the up and coming DE, and the rest of our crew did likewise, including demonstrating Amigas to all who came by.
Everyone also had a chance to have a good look around the Exhibition and collect freebee's, and some of the technology on display was amazing. I especially liked the tower of CD Burners with the robot arm that placed CDs in the burners and took them out once burnt and stacked them continuously. Only a cool $100,000!!, and the flat huge "hang on the wall" plasma displays. Once again, only $30,000 and even cheaper if you buy in bulk ;-)
We had two visits from the Melbourne newspaper "The AGE". The first to take photos and make notes, and the second was from Nathan Cochrane, the "AGE" journalist who wrote the Amiga retro articles and interviewed Bernie Meyer on Amithlon just prior to the Exhibition. Nathan interviewed us with a view to writing more Amiga articles for the "AGE."
We also had a visit from the editor and his assistant of an Australian PC magazine who, after listening to our spruking and seeing our demos, also expressed interest in publishing an article on the Amiga.
I have to say thanks to all our crew who worked well together:
Basil Flinter and ADUG for handling the administration and for funding our appearance at the Exhibition;
Bernie Meyer for making himself and Amithlon available for the show;
Craig Hutchison and his company CineVision for the loan of the LCD projector;
The 1st Carrum Downs Scouts for the loan of the trestle tables;
Michael Czajka for his assistance in organising and for the loan of a 17" monitor;
Michael Mauracic for his assistance in setting up, packing up and for being at the Exhibition;
Michael Green for his help on the first day of the Exhibition;
Jim Lewis for his help during the first two days;
Merv Stent for his help on Wednesday and Friday; and
Scott Pringle who was there on all three days, and who took photos and put them on his website. Take a look at http://boing.net/comdex to see pictures of the Exhibition.
I'm sure everyone had a great time promoting the Amiga and our User Groups.
Cheers :-)
--
Tony Mulvihill
Happy Amiga User. A1200 060 scsi ide ram rom blah blah
Member & Secretary of the AUG
"Workbench" Editor. The magazine of the AUG
ICQ # 20578798
The Amiga User Group for All Australasians