Amiga Shows
Click Alt-Woa 2001 to read about the show we attended before this one.
Alt-Woa 2002
Pictures will be added later.
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 (apparently he was snowed in) 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.
Donald
Gallery
Click on the pictures to see them full size.
Someone who didn't make it to the show |
A somewhat customised Amiga |
Would you like to own this? |
A production AmigaOne! |
Another pic of the AmigaOne |
And yet another |
GTA3 on a PS2 behind Amiga Workbench and Freespace |
Look at all those wires! |
The guy in the red check shirt won |
Amithlon |
A workshop in progress |
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© GAUG 2002, Last updated 26/02/02