The combined Amiga User Groups presence at the Melbourne Comdex
IT-Expo was a great success. Held under the banner of the Amiga Downunder User Group, we were
all in agreement that the interest in our stand and Amiga in
general far exceeded our expectations. Almost everyone has had or
knew of somebody who at one time had an Amiga. Interest in our
stand started on setup day with several of the crew and other
exhibitors coming over and talking about Amiga in general and
their Amiga's (yes, many hightech PC company people are very
happy to use Amigas). We were able to demonstrate three types of Amiga, a souped up
A1200 (mine :-) 060, scsi, mediator & voodoo3000, hypercom
serial, IDE-Fix express,3xscsi h/drives, cd burner, cdrom and a
10gig ide harddrive.) Amithlon on a 1.2 GHz Athlon and 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 mp3's 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 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 compatibility 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, 46 frames per second (it was AmiQuake with
three 68k render routines replaced with x86 code), Payback, it
played perfectly smooth 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 and totally shocked Wintell
users. Bernie even ran Amithlon on the little 366 celery laptap
and again it's speed amazed everyone. People wanted to buy Amithlon then and there and I recon if we
had 200 copies 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
approx 10 mins to boot) and coupled with their lack of a fast
internet connection they couldn't download any mp3's to demo on
their new streaming mp3 player. Of course I said "no worries" and
concluded my current demonstration of my A1200 with a cd burn
while running multiple programs. The ADUG 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 demoing Amithlon and Michael Czajka took the task of
explaining the DE sdk to the many interested software developers.
Bernie Meyer was in both Wednesday and Thursday to talk about and
demonstrate Amithlon. We played videos on the wall of the 98
Amigafest, the Canberra Downunder show, Ace2000 with Bill
McEwen's DE demo and Bernie's talk and Amithlon demo at AUG'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 show. 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 show and collect freebee's and some of the
technology in display was amazing. I especially liked the tower
of CDBurners with the robot arm that placed cd's in the burners
and took them out once burnt and stacked them continuously. Only
!! a cool $100,000 and the huge flat "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. Nathan
interviewed us with a view on 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 an article on
the Amiga. I have to say thanks to all our crew who worked well together, Basil Flinter and ADUG for administrating and funding our
appearance at the show. Bernie Meyer for making himself and Amithlon available for the
show. Craig Hutchison and his company CineVision for the lend of the
LCD projector. The 1st Carrum Downs Scouts for the lend of the trestle tables. Sydney Amiga User Group and AnythingAmiga for the AmigaDE SDKs. Michael Czajka for his assistance in organising and the lend of a
17" monitor. Michael Mauracic for his assistance in setup, packup and being at
the show. Michael Green for his help on the 1st day of the show. Jim Lewis for his help during the first two days. Merv Stent for his help on Wednesday and Friday. Scott Pringle who was there all three days and who took photos
and put them on his web site. Take a look at http://boing.net/comdex/ to see some more pics of
the show. I'm sure everyone had a great time promoting Amiga and our user
groups. I know I certainly did. URL's
