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Toronto Times
by Paul Sadlik

Another Amiga show and another trip by Washington's Amiga diehards. Instead of going with another NCAUG table of wares to sell, Bill Borsari organized to run live InterNet "webcam" and chat sessions throughout the show from the Amiga Incorporated booth.

With a little detour to see the Indy 500, Bill and Hans Wolff made their drive to Toronto. Yours truly took a more direct route - driving through the Pennsylvania mountains - while Fabian Jimenez wimped out and jetsetted to Ontario. By Thursday night, most of us were in place and back with the Amiga regulars: Holger Kruse, Asimware's Rick and Tammy, Nova Design's Kermit Woodall and the Amiga IRC crew.

Let the Show Begin

For reasons of scheduling or experimentation, the show was scheduled to take place Friday and Saturday. By Friday morning, Bill had the webcam up and the show was appearing live on the InterNet. Also in the booth, a couple of machines were constantly online with IRC chat sessions featuring notable Amiga personalities - Jeff Schindler, Joe Torre, Holger Kruse, Kermit Woodall, Derreck Lisle, Marcus Nerding, etc.

When attendees could break away, the remainder of the show floor featured a variety of hard and software offerings for discerning Amiga fanatics. Our Internet obsession was reflected with an inaugural appearance of Toysoft showing off their Air Mail EMail and WorldNews newsgroup clients. Just released, the 3.0 version of AirMail features an easy to use and configure graphical interface wrapping a typically Amiga programmable mail client that added the ability to show EMail (between AirMail users) in graphical "forms" and server-like "Supermailbox" message handling. The premiere version of WorldNews offline newsreader presented the same easy-to-use GUI as AirMail, but its youth was reflected in some shortage of message sorting and handling options of other programs. A 2.0 version is already in the works, promising to remedy many of those shortcomings.

Holger Kruse was present with basic booth selling Miami registrations, upgrades and continuing the advertise the Miami Deluxe version in the works. Supplanting the Amiga's best InterNet TCP/IP "stack" program, the deluxe version promises the ability to mix and match local and remote networking, introducing Holger's new MNI driver system for faster networking speeds and proving a variety of LAN to Internet routing features.

One of our favorite Canadians, Rick Giannini lead the whole Asimware crew to the Toronto show to demonstrate their CD and audio utilities. Both the AsimCDFS reader and MasterISO writer software appear to be undergoing continuous upgrades to support a huge selection of CD-ROM drives available as well as minor additions for Microsloth long file name support, etc.

A French developer, Ateo, was on hand to demonstrate their own new bus system for A1200's and A4000's. By installing special adapter board, a couple of ribbon cables are run to daughter card with four peecee ISA bus slots. Ateo was already selling Pixel64 - this system, a graphics card and driver software - for under $500. Network and I/O card drivers are to follow.

Blitzkrieg?

Next door a booth was shared by a pair of German developers: Haage & Partner and RBM. H&P's Marcus Nerding was showing off an early beta of an impressive new word processor they are working on: EasyWriter. To start with, EasyWriter handles all text in flexible text frames, employs Postscript and TrueType outline fonts (providing a replacement bullet.library so your whole system can use them) and supports footnotes (finally someone!). Sporting a modern interface, it looks like it will be a major contender in the Amiga word processor race. A 2.0 version is already planned with more sophisticated features to put it at the high end of our word processor pack.

RBM was a new name for many folks. They are a German hardware company that was showing off the TowerHawk-II - Amiga 4000 and 1200 tower cases with specific slot cards (seven Zorro 3, two video and four peecee slots for the 4000, and one video and four Zorro 2 slots for the 1200). Using a "kit" type distribution method (their cases "break down" and the internal boards are interchangeable), they were looking for companies that were interested in distribution.

RBM was also showing a prototype of a new IOBlix multipurpose I/O card that provides 4 high speed serial ports, up to 2 EEP/ECP parallel ports and a whole bunch of daughter card slots for inexpensive 16bit audio I/O and ethernet add-on boards. Interestingly, the port buffers can be expanded for very high bandwidth port usage and new drivers are promised for supporting parallel port scanners, zip drives, etc. The IOBlix should be available in July.

Across the aisle, the developer invasion continued with Cloanto showing off their Amiga Forever 2.0 emulation software for peecees. On an old 133mHz pentium laptop, the emulation looked luke warm, but people said that given a very fast machine and the Picasso96 software (on the Amiga side), the emulation was supposed to run comparably with a fast Amiga. Cloanto was also showing off version 7.1 of their Personal Paint software. Work continues on bringing 8.0 next year with true color support, layers, advanced multimedia (!) animation and maybe even MPEG support. Cloanto also stated that the new version was being implemented with internal platform independence to make for an easy switch to the coming super Amiga.

Many people recognized the German developer Individual Computers for their external Graffiti graphics peripherals that have been out for years. Here IC was showing off a whole bunch of innovative Amiga interface products: The CatWeasel floppy interface systems which allows Amigas to use cheap, commodity high density floppy drives to read virtually ANY floppy disk transparently - all Amiga, Mac, PeeCee formats. They also showed the Buddha IDE ZorroII interface, IDEFix adapter for 4 IDE drives and Kylwalda adapter for sharing floppy drives between the Amiga and CatWeasel. For the audio oriented, IC was showing off a prototype of their Atlantis sound peripheral which connects to any Amiga through a floppy drive port or CatWeasel board. The impressive Atlantis includes 20bit stereo I/O, an 80mHz Motorola 56002 DSP chip and AHI software drivers. Given this hardware, the prototype was playing MPEG-3 audio streams with virtually no load on the Amiga. The Atlantis should be available late this Summer.

Villagetronic was also represented by a local company showing off the Picasso IV boards and a number of daughter cards that are starting to hit the streets. Supplanting the already impressive graphics and flicker fixing capabilities of the base board, the PalomaIV daughtercard promises 24bit video digitizing, TV tuning and video Picture-in-Picture display on your Workbench. The Concierto audio daughtercard provides MIDI and four channel 16bit audio I/O. Finally, the PabloIV daughtercard coverts the Picasso's RGB to high quality video output. All of these cards should either be available now or within the next couple of months. To keep us all interested, Villagetronic mentioned add-on 3D engines and PowerPC interfaces were also in the works.

London repercussions

AntiGravity manned another booth, showing off the Index Access Amiga clone in a mini-tower case. Unfortunately, they still didn't have any Neila Amiga clones to show (see the April Active Window). The uproar from London seemed to have kept Index's Mick Tinker from coming or finishing hardware to demonstrate. Regardless, AntiGravity is expecting to have machines coming sometime over the Summer bearing the impressive specs and prices quoted in April.

Similarly, Phase5 staff didn't make it to the show. I think they were still still reeling from the London event. Instead, a double sized booth was staffed by locals showing off PPC equipped machines running the new Tornado3D modeling software and WildfirePPC animation effects software. Both of them use the PowerPC cards to varying degrees, with Wildfire providing some blazingly fast image processing results. For folks into Amiga multimedia, this could be the killer app for the PowerPC.

Britain's HiSoft was also present with a wide range of software to sell. The newest offering was the Soundprobe audio digitizing and editing software. It supports a long list of hardware digitizers and supports the new AHI interface standard. The bad news in the HiSoft booth was that they didn't think they could go through the next year waiting for the new hardware to come out and may not be active in the Amiga market much longer.

More optimistically, NovaDesign was present and upbeat as always. They were showing off their just released ImageFX 3.1 (already with fixes and improvements) and Aladdin4D 5.0 software. Kermit Woodall stated that the new versions of their software were being well received, selling well and that NovaDesign planned to work on the new platform as soon as hardware is available. It looks like we will be seeing Kermit at Amiga shows for some time to come.

The video vendors NewTek and DPS had booths showing off their products. Surprisingly, Tim Jennison, one of NewTek's founders was present all weekend. Maybe they haven't lost interest in the Amiga after all? Optimistic rumors went around that Tim was talking with AI about NewTek's possibilities on the new super Amiga platform. Either that or he just got addicted to Bill's webcam and couldn't stay away... :-)

Finally, we saw our friend Bill Panagouleas again wandering the halls with his Pyromania CD-ROMs and talk of a new project in the works: a red light version of Toaster effects and wipes for those that want to spice up certain... ahem... video productions. Don't look for DiscreteEffects in a family software store near you... :-)

In Closing

Even with the bizarre Friday-Saturday timing, the show organizer, Randomize, claimed to have had a good turn-out. The hall were in was larger than the previous two shows we went to and Saturday had some good crowds. We were even surprised to see even more NCAUG'ers that took side trips while visiting families to make the show.

At show close, Saturday night Amiga Inc hosted a party in their suite and Asimware filled their customary role stocking the bathtub with a huge quantity of Canadian microbrews. To let the Amiga community in on the festivities, Bill wired the suite with the live webcam and three chat machines.

Sunday we had time to decompress and take in some of the sights. Or was it time to recuperate from the AI party and sleep late? :-) By midday, we finally made it to the top of the CN tower and were jumping up and down on the glass floor over downtown Toronto. Nighttime brought a leisurely dinner with Virginian Kermit Woodall and more discussion of our wonderful month of May. The Amiga ride was only going to get more interesting over the next year. Everyone got your seatbelts on? This roller coaster doesn't come with airbags.