As one of the people having a stand at the WOAse show I thought it would be nice if I posted a personal report for everyone who couldn't attend the show to read (and for those that could!! :)
I was part of the Mediator Support Group along with my good friends Sam Thomas (Stom) and Nick Darley-Jones (GAG). Stom is the main player and runs the Mediator Support Website at http://www.amiga-mediator.co.uk/ while GAG has a nicely impressive set-up and runs the Glochester Amiga Group whos site is at http://www.glosamigagroup.co.uk/ . Myself, I was /hoping/ to have the 4000 Mediator Logic to go into my 4k bigbox but alas that was not to be. Elbox had promised me it would be in my machine by the end of September/beginning of October but at mid-November there's still no sign of it. I was still pleasantly surprised at how much attention my machine got though. Lots of people were interested in my (Rather big!) Zorro cards and the Mediator 4k Daughterboard that was all ready to hold all those lovely PCI cards (Voodoo was already in it)
Elbox was also supposed to attend WoaSE themselves but for reasons of their own they decided not to show up, more fool them! Everyone who came over to talk to us said that if they had been there with Mediators to sell they would have made a killing as I have had at least a dozen people say they would have bought mediators/MMcds etc. Ah well, their loss!
But enough about our stand! :) You want to hear about the rest of the show!
Once again Eyetech still did not have a working A1 board, but in all fairness they did say that things were running being schedule. They had the board, looking fairly complete, on their stand along with the version that was displayed at alt-woa in February. The Feb board had only two pci slots, no ram slots and several other chips missing whereas this new version had all of its pci and ram slots and (to my untrained eyes) looked pretty much complete so its a real shame that they didn't have a working version to show. They did, however, have their usual big range of stock to sell and afaik a hell of a lot of it went before the end of the show!!
Most of the other stands also did a rip-roaring trade but the one that caught my eye was a chappie (source unknown!) showing some VCDs of the first four episodes of the new Star Trek series: Enterprise. He certainly had a flock of people around that monitor all day!!!
Several laptops were in attendance showing various Amiga DE stuff and Fleecy showed me a few of the GUI's of Elate and explained about how the little tiny icons could be configured to do pretty much whatever you want - from launching a program to being pure eye-candy by being "pseudo-intelligent" and walking across the screen doing a jig or somesuch!!! ;
This is pretty much the same sort of thing that Windows XP is currently offering (sorry to mention those words but I have to say this as I went to PC World and saw XP running) - though XP is certainly stabler and faster than previous incarnations its a nasty GUI - massive icons and lots of moving GUI parts that REALLY needs a lot of horse-power thrown at it!! - Basically a Child's Toy!!!).
If Amiga can make this GUI totally configurable so that it does the same sort of thing XP does, but so we can scale the GUI, change it, and run it on something 1/50th the power XP needs then I'll be somewhat happy and what Fleecy showed me certainly looked as though it may do all this and more.
Mark Smith (of Kickstart) had leant his Amiga to Pagan Games for the night and it was running Earth2140 at an impressively fast speed! They also had a handheld PDA along running one of the (impossible to do) games for the DE. The game consists of loads of coloured balls that u have to bounce around in a space-type gravity field and get the correspondingly coloured balls into the corners. Blooming impossible!!!! :-)
Kicksoft, run by the infamous Ray Mccarthy pretty much sold-out of stock the same as always and he almost sold me Pagestream but atm I don't really need it (ok, ok, Ray - I admit came to you asking about it!!!).
SEAL had plenty of people very impressed with their computers running a networked Heretic II - one fella couldn't believe it was running as he "has a similar setup and doesn't get anywhere Near that speed". Go guys! :)
The games area had a great time too, running Sensi Soccer (which, naturally enough, I lost 8-0 in ;-) and taking up a lot of peoples time watching various people thrash each other!
The fella from Amiga Forever put on a demo via his lap-top and projection screen which had a group of Miggy users practically drawling at the improvements in the latest version.
And the SEAL publication Clubbed had an official name change to "Total Amiga" which has been officially endorsed by Amiga and will soon be going bi-monthly!
There were of course plenty of other groups/stands around the show and most of the time you couldn't move very fast because of the crowds but I just don't have the space to write about them all (and I'm sure you've read my ranting for long enough as it is!! :)
To sum up then - and in my own personal opinion - this was a fairly poor show Hard/software wise but for the atmosphere and for meeting people this was a stonker of a show - better in that respect than previous shows I have been to. Going back to my thinking it was a bad turnout hard/software wise - this is purely My opinion. I took neigh on £200 to spend and the most expensive thing I bought was Payback at £30. Plenty of people I know didn't take Enough money so I know that most people were more than satisfied on this front.
It was lovely meeting everyone I speak to over the internet and I hope to see you all at Son of Alt-Woa in February (when I'll hopefully have a 4k Mediator Logic in the machine to show everyone!!! :-)