3-15-98

Amiga98 -
The St Louis Amiga Show
by Paul Sadlik

Since our last meeting, NCAUG made another raid into the heartland for another Amiga convention. This time, we made our return to Saint Louis, Missouri for the Amiga98 show. Another visit with the new owners of our platform, Gateway and the developers and dealers that keep us in software and hardware.

Relying on the airlines to get us there, we were spared the excitement of exploding dumptrucks and minivan people packing that characterized our Columbus trip. This trip, waking up at 3am got us to the show in time for a full day of seminars and presentations Friday.

Throughout the weekend, dozens of seminars ranged from public presentations Motorola staff on the nature of their new PowerPC processors (used in the new Phase5 "PowerUp" cards) to inexpensive Internet programming classes with our TCP/IP guru, Holger Kruse.

By Friday night, the full NCAUG contingent was on-site - 10 people - setting a record for one of our long distance excursions. The more the merrier, as we were all invited into a Amiga Inc. party held in the hotel Ballroom - where NCAUG had a little surprise waiting for Joe Torre of Amiga Incorporated.

Boing, Boing

Some may remember Joe Torre as the Amigan hired for duty in South Dakota as a Senior Engineer. Many more may remember him as the man responsible for the "Boing Ball Levitator" unveiled in Columbus, Ohio last Fall (check your old Active WIndows!). Our Vice Chair, Bill Borsari took it upon himself (and NCAUG) to return the boing treat to Joe with a gift: Boing Shoes.

Bill Borsari and Walter Miles led an effort to design, fabricate and install a circuit into a mild mannered pair of tennis shoes that would create a boinging noise when walked on. After much hacking, sawing and the sacrifice of a number of telephones, Radio Shack audio circuits and hand-built amplifier circuit boards - they had a working prototype.

To program the shoes, they created the "SPI" or "Sneaker Programming Interface". A small hand-held interface that let the shoe wearer record and playback audio samples on the shoes, even while walking.

To complete the package, Udo Schuermann - our developer of Weblord and KingFisher - created the "Boing Shoe Installation Disk", complete with install script... "Insert foot in..." ... :-) ...And we painted the shoes with a sympathetic, if psychedelic red and white checkerboard pattern.

Presentation

At the start of Friday's Amiga Inc party, a few words were said by Bob Sharp and Bill was introduced. He cryptically went on stage and unveiled the present for Joe. To say the least, Joe was quite stunned, amazed and still he recognized the audio circuit's Radio Shack origins... we have to wonder about that man...:-)...He danced in the shoes for most of the remaining weekend.

The party continued for some time in the ballroom, then settled into the Hotel bar - with a number of tables trying to outdo each other in noisemaking contests. It was a long first day in the Missouri.

The next morning started with breakfast and show set up. Like the Ohio show last fall, NCAUG organized a joint booth for local developers to present their products. This time we had the actual authors on hand: Brian Koetting with his "KidStop" childrens "edutainment" software; Udo Schuerman with his "WebLord" web site compiler; and John Tyler showed his "Ptolemy" web Image map editor. For the demos, our resident masochist - Walter Miles - drove out a car load of equipment and provisions to supplant the "PAWS" portable Amiga Bill brought on the plane.

Let the Show Begin

While the show was held in the same space as last year's show; it seemed twice as congested, with overflow booths down both sides of the adjacent hallways. Besides half a dozen retailers (new and used software and hardware), there were a number of developers:

Nova Design - Kermit Woodall and Corinna Cohn were demonstrating their new ImageFX 3.0 and Aladdin 5.0 packages. The new ImageFX boasts a number of improvements, foremost being the ability to work on multiple images of multiple layers at once. The new ImageFX version is shipping as you read this. Fresh on the heals of a major re-write of Aladdin, the Nova Design crew has been promising a new Aladdin version is in the works. Stay tuned to one of the Amiga's most proactive commercial developers.

AsimWare Innovations was also present showing off new versions of their CD applications: AsimCDFS v3.9 now supports more drives and IDE splitter hardware; while the new MasterISO v2 boasts much more bang for the buck than any peecee package with wide CD writer support, including advance audio CD editing capabilities. To whet your appetites, AsimWare was promising future upgrades that will even more drives and DVD writing abilities.

NewTek also made an appearance (maybe they haven't forgotten their roots?...:-) ) with their Toaster, Flyer and Lightwave products. While Lightwave development has been put on the back burner, they were not excluding future development and have said they have Amiga PPC cards in their possession - for potentially peecee eclipsing rendering performance.

One of the most intriguing items of the show was advertised by AntiGravity: the "Neila-498" Amiga computer clone. Starting with an Index "BoXeR" motherboard, they advertised turnkey units for $1495 with a 66mHz '060 CPU, a 1GB hard drive, 16 MBs RAM, 56k internal modem and active ISA slots. Pretty impressive, considering the cost of accelerators alone. AntiGravity CEO Dan Lutz said they expected to be producing the units within the next month or two.

For those Photogenics fans out there, Paul Nolan was present announcing "Photogenics Ng", with a number of improvements, including multi-layer support. He was also showing the latest version of his Siamese system, that lets you see and control your Amiga from a peecee. Finally, he was providing more information on his future efforts to use his Siamese technologies to combine peecees and Amigas into one, high powered box.

Another Amiga clone builder was present for much of the show giving out information on their "Nitro" series of machines: Nova Sector Engineering. Their approach to shipping turnkey systems out the door has been to custom build systems from off the shelf components, including: A4000T motherboards, phase5 PPC cards, NewTek Flyers and a variety of drives, networking cards, etc.

For those desktop publishing folks out there, SoftLogik was at the show with a number of specials on the latest version of their Pagestream 3 package. They also announced version 3.3b, which should be shortly available on their web site, and a new tables and charts editor. Meanwhile work was proceeding with a new 3.4 version with PDF import and export functions.

Finale Development/Gamasoft was also present with a number of their InterNet packages. Chris Aldi demonstrated the latest versions of his "New York" news reader and the "Voodoo" mail program. The latter supporting HTML formatted mail. He promised that new versions of both programs were also in the works, including offline news reading. While he showed us a beta of the Finale Web Cruiser, it didn't sound like it was going to be coming out any time soon. They were also showing "INetAccess", a new Amiga web server. While still in its nascent stages, it supports CGI scripting, multiple connections and is being actively developed. Finally, they were showing off a new text editor program called Digital Quill.

Across the aisle, Holger Kruse of Nordic Global was showing and selling the latest version 3 of his "Miami" TCP/IP stack - the phenomenally easy to use networking software for getting any Amiga on the InterNet. He was also spelling out the features of his upcoming "MNI" driver system, guaranteeing accelerated EtherNet speeds and "sexier" BSD-like inner workings (:-)) - all to be included in his upcoming Miami v3.1 release.

To round out the InterNet pack, John Zacharias was also present showing off his AEMail client. The latest version of this package (v1.5) adds a new ARexx interface to this standalone application - it requires no add-ons to operate (MUI, mail utilities, etc) and integrates itself with your networking software for automatic InterNet connecting to send your mail. John was also advertising the "AmiWest'98" show taking place in Sacramento, California July 10th through 13th - for those people that want to get a real road trip under their belts!

For those video folks out there, OzWare and ProWave were present with a number of Video Toaster/Flyer products. They ranged from a Flyer Undeleting tool for recovering deleted video clips to RenderFX compositing tools to ProMix audio mixing utilities. Tutorial video tapes were also being offered on a variety of Toaster and Flyer operations. A range of products to support the beginner through professional non-linear editors out there.

Another video oriented company, Y/C Plus, was on hand with a broad range of video oriented monitors and professional video distribution gear: including composite to Y/C converters, test pattern and black screen generator, switcher and tape deck controller boxes. Most interesting to the hobbyist was an inexpensive new product, about to be released, that uses the second Amiga joystick port to control any Sony VCR (they are all said to have the needed "Control-S" ports). They said that the system could be expanded to support other decks that had similar control interfaces. This opens up interesting areas from home control to video integration with apps like Scala on your Amigas.

While it may come off as a novelty for most Amiga users at a glance, a small Amiga developer - WeemsWare - was demonstrating an interesting program called "Lips". By mating appropriate graphics with the Amiga translator system and a sophisticated speech/audio/gfx scripting system, it lets you easily create the kind of "Max Headroom" presentation that was only dreamed of a few years ago. It's conceivable that 3D modelers could use this to create talking animations from their 3D images or animators out such a tool to use for talking cartoons. With continuing development, the possibilities broaden.

Amiga icon Jason Compton also hosted a booth selling a variety of wares: they quickly sold out of their video Amiga news report, "Legacy"; they were demonstrating their ImageFX animated compositing software "PanFX" and showing their ImageFX tutorial video tape. Word was that a new tape might be in the works for DTP fans out there.

Another booth was occupied by a St Louis developer, Brewster Productions, that was selling a couple of productivity apps based on the Superbase data engine. "Organize Pro" is a sophisticated contacts manager that was originally written for the operations of the Gateway show itself. It offers mail merging, filtering, classification and sorting functions needed for an operation with thousands of database entries. Their other product "Payroll Plus" is an even rarer Amiga program: an application for the recording of employee wages, accounting, pay check printing and tax record keeping and reporting. Just what the doctor ordered for any business that wants to put their employee bookeeping on a reliable platform.

The Vagabonds

With booths filling the show room and spilling out into the hallways in all directions, it wasn't surprising to see a number of Amiga developers wandering the show, some with their products in hand. One notable was Marcus Nerding from Haage & Partner, the German developer of StormC and a number of productivity applications. He said that while development was continuing on their C development environment, they were about to release a new Amiga word processor called EasyWriter. Stay tuned!

Bill Panagouleas, formerly of AntiGravity fame, showed his latest product, developed in conjunction with VCE: Pyromania Classics. A CD full of royalty-free, high quality animations, video clips and images of fire and explosion effects in Amiga formats (for the Toaster/ Flyer, Animators, etc). Bill told us, the CD was selling well and that he was negotiating with them to do a follow up Amiga project.

For a little blast from the past, Brett Hester appeared at the show with a bright Yellow CanDo T-shirt and copies of the program for sale. He was also selling copies of his own "Plug-Ins and Go!" macros for Lightwave - a large number of macros for speeding, aiding and refining Lighwave's operations.

A number of shareware developers were also wandering the floors and doing seminars: Adreas Kleinert, the author of a number of graphic datatypes on the AmiNet came over from Germany. As did Stefan Ruppert, the developer of the HTDS datatypes system, who gave a seminar on developing datatypes for the operating system.

All of the activity and people made Saturday a hectic day. While we haven't heard specific numbers, the show attendance (both in developers and visitors) was well above last years numbers. Bob Sharp has to get a bigger space next year!

The Banquet

A little while after the show, Ball room was filled with tables and set up for the official banquet and speeches. With much grumbling, the ballroom over flowed and a number of people were forced to eat dinner in hallways and anterooms. At least, we had an interesting dinner with Petro and Don Hicks, of Amazing Computing. Afterwards it was time for speeches.

As usual, Petro exuded his confidence and love for the Amiga platform... this is the man to grab a Stein and lead us all into the trenches to do battle with the "assimilated". Mitch Stone, the founder of a "Boycott Microsoft" movement (see http://www.vcnet.com/bms), followed him up with a speech on the evils of the Borg... err, um... Bill Gates... :-) Unfortunately, for the crowd, his words went on at great length and more theoretical detail in the usurping of open standards, the leveraging of OS control into applications control than most wanted to hear about... :-( ...

Then for the blockbuster speech of the night - Jeff Schindler - the man at the top of Amiga Incorporated. With a year under their belts at the helm of the Amiga, what did he have to say? To try to summarize the speech, let alone analyze it is a challenge - so look for the side bars in this issue with a transcript of his speech as well as more in-depth conclusions from Udo Schuerman. On one hand, it seems that Mr. Schindler does have his heart in the right place and that he has an idea about what the Amiga is about. On the other, he is grounded by the demands of the accountants and business managers above him (in Gateway 2000, proper) that want to know the bottom line, the quarterly forecasts and probabilities of success... His comments seem to confirm that Gateway did not buy the Amiga just to dump some unwanted money into decade old patents and intellectual properties, but that there is some higher plan still unrevealed. We Amiga users can only benefit from this if we survive the hard times in the meantime - could the next two years be any worse than the last four? Read the speech and Udo's comments - what do you think?

That's what bathtubs are for?

In retrospect, I begin to worry about the Amiga die-hard community - the developers, users and executives - that spend their nights wearing funny looking shoes, packed into little hotel rooms with walls full of electronic equipment generating psychedelic images and music... all night... :-)

I assure you, I only went this place purely journalistic reasons... When I entered the packed room, there was only the electronics, people and a lone six pack cooler of drinks. Aaron and Robert, our hosts from Atlanta, were simultaneously editing a Banquet video while playing mod files along one wall. Every remaining square foot of bed and floor was packed with folks dissecting Jeff's speech and interrogating Joe Torre and Derreck Lisle for their opinions. Then the Canadians showed up (bless them)... with a trash can... full of beer from the North country... A couple more trips with the trash can, and four floors of the hotel had been emptied of all of the ice and the bathtub filled to the rim with chilled drinks. The party was still packed and going quite strongly at four something, when my journalistic will finally faded and I retired for the night. Maybe Bill Borsari has video tape?

The last day

After the crowds of Saturday, Sunday was anticlimactic. Many visitors headed home midday and the die-hards were left to their own devices again. With the bar depleted of quality beers, we were reduced to drinking local suds (or should I say spud...err, bud?...:-)). My time at the bar still gave me a taste for what the ICOA is up to.

While we spent a lot of time during the weekend informally with folks like Fleecy Moss and Dean Brown, more serious discussions were going on Sunday night. As one who has explored the possibilities of improving the Amiga printing system, I joined a group of developers under the banner of: the Amiga Printing System WorkGroup. It was founded a couple of weeks ago and this was our first chance to sit down with a few folks (Holger Kruse, Joe Archibald of NationalAmiga and I dragged our friend Udo Schuermann in) and discuss possible directions for a new system.

In this group, like others formed for improving the Amiga graphics system, documentation systems (Amiga Guide, etc), developer interaction, etc. initial discussions are going on and some work is being started, pulled together and coordinated to give shape to the future of the Amiga Operating System. Starting just before Gateway bought the Amiga, the entire ICOA has almost had a "come hell or high water" attitude about what they are working on. While Amiga Inc. has risen and been offered the reigns for leading Amiga development, the group is still trying to make immediate headway. The upcoming OS (v3.5) is bound to reflect a lot of this effort.

Finally, we made our way back to the St. Louis airport and for our red eye special back to Washington. These meetings with the people that form the North American core of the Amiga community is reassuring. These people are all focused on trying to make Amiga things work and proceed. There was no bespectacled troll lurking in a back corner (hiding from pies?) trying to control or undermine things. No slick salesmen practicing their schtick for the upcoming FOSE show. Just a bunch of folks looking for more ice for the bathtub, a new rendering engine for their PPC cards and an all around elegant computer platform. The quality of the Amiga is a result of where these people have been, through the ICOA and Amiga Incorporated, I hope their determination reaches an even higher targets tomorrow.