Two members of GAUG went to Huddersfield this year. We were
driven there by an Amiga owner from Aberdeenshire. As you might
imagine he had to drive rather a long way to get there and back
(about 1000 miles by my reckoning)! The trip down to Huddersfield
was rather interesting as we climbed into the Southern Uplands
and later the Peak District. We ran into a lot of snow, some in
the air and some on the ground. Despite several jack-knifed
lorries and a lot of crashed cars we got to a village south of
Manchester where we picked up an additional passenger. We finally
arrived at the show exactly half an hour late and our driver and
other passenger set up their table. The show this year was spread over three floors taking up nearly
the entire building. The retailers such as Eyetech and Weird
Science were in the basement and the User Groups were on the
first floor. Several workshops were run during the day in a small
room on the second floor. Plenty of user groups were there including SEAL, ANT and BAC.
There were also numerous retailers such as Kicksoft, Forematt
Home Computing, Cloanto and Classic Amiga. The spread of people and exhibitors around the building made it
more difficult to estimate a head count but there didn't seem to
be as many people there as last year although there were
certainly more exhibitors. Eyetech came with a massive amount of
cardboard boxes and seemd to be emptying them as the show went
on. There wasn't the same squash around their stand however as
there was the last time. The user groups were running various impressive systems including
an Amiga in a blue metal box with a door on the front and a power
switch on top. To pack it up you just unplugged the wires from
their sockets, closed the door and walked away! Games like Earth 2140, Simon the Sorcerer and Descent:Freespace
were all available to view or play plus the obligatory Sensible
Soccer tournament. Several user group magazines were also
available to buy although, perhaps unsurprisingly, there was no
sign of Digital magazine anywhere. One machine which just had to be mentioned was an A1200 in a
Power Tower with a massive specification. Everyone was
flabbergasted when they saw what was running on its monitor
especially when we found out it had nothing faster than an '060
in it. The specification included a Voodoo 3 graphics card,
Soundblaster sound card, CD-Writer and a TV card. The owner had
plugged a Playstation2 running Grand Theft Auto 3 into the TV
card and had it running as a backdrop to Worbench while
simultaneously running Freespace in a window and burning CDs to
stop himself getting bored! Unfortunately, there was no sign of Fleecy this year although
ZeoNeo were present showing their Shoot-Em-Up 'PlanetZed' on
various computers including a Compaq I-Paq PDA. A Sharp Zaurus
running Intent was was also available to view. Probably the most exciting thing at the show was a tower with the
cover off and a sheet of perspex covering the space instead. The
tower which was at a corner of Eyetech's stand had only cleared
customs that morning and contained an AmigaOne board. Alan Redhouse (MD of Eyetech) gave a presentation about the
AmigaOne during the afternoon. Most people seemed to be expecting
something similar to last year and announcements of more delays,
but Alan had something different in mind. He ran down a list of
questions or complaints about the previously announced
specification of the AmigaOne and covered each point in turn. The
best news of the presenttation was that the AmigaOne board in the
tower wasn't just another prototype but was in fact a production
board! The AmigaOne is finished and is ready to ship whenever
OS4.0 is released. The specification has improved substantially
on what was there before and appears to have answered most
AmigaOne critics. The price was a nice surprise too at only £350
for an entry-level system which has a G3 running at 600Mhz and up
to 2Gb of SDRAM. We all left the show a lot happier than we had been when we
arrived and began our mammoth journey home. After dropping off
our passenger south of Manchester we headed northwards, the snow
having melted off the roads during the day. We arrived back in
Glasgow about 11 o'clock with more things than we had when we
left but a lot less money.