@thread
since so many folks have been posting on amiwest, i thought i'd type up a quick walk-through of my time at the show this year. here goes....
i arrived in sacramento on wednesday on the train from chicago a day before the programming seminar was due to start as i usually do. brian deneen (president of SACC, the user group that runs amiwest) and steven solie (@ssolie) were kind enough to pick me up and take me to the show hotel. after checking in we piled into len's truck and went to brian's office to start carting the signs and other equipment needed for the show to the hotel. andy (@broadblues), Epsilon, and others were already starting to show up.
thursday morning we all set up our next-generation machines up in one of the hotel meeting rooms to start the programming seminar. this year was more akin to a hackathon, for those of you familiar with the term in the linux world. we each brought an idea or a project to work on while developers from the AOS4 team helped out. there were eleven attendees and four developers on-hand to help. i wanted to port over libvncserver as a standard amiga library and from there work on a new VNC server to replace amivnc. i learned plenty, as did others. one husband-and-wife team is interested in continuing jabberwocky development, for example.
friday some of the regular attendees started rolling in, with many of us still hacking away on our machines. during the show, one of the tables in the presentation area was set up for folks to keep their computers there so they could continue to code during the show. the SACC guys all started showing up that afternoon to set up the best display of classic hardware and software i've ever seen. every system commodore shipped was available for folks to use, with plenty of installed software ready to go; the 'jay miner' software library was available to peruse, which includes hundreds of titles; and daniel and alan were available throughout the show to help repair classic gear that needed some TLC. friday night was the classic clinic, and folks brought in machines needing repairs. bill borsari brought his A4000 desktop which needed re-capping, and there was an A3000T, too, which was being worked on. someone also brought an A1200 to have looked at by amigakit. many of the attendees went out to an italian restaurant afterwards for dinner, and upon their return, the party continued late into the night, with everyone helping themselves to some of the beer brought by robert goodlett (@goody).
saturday morning the show officially was kicked off. this year the vendors included hyperion entertainment showing off an amigaone 500 and sam440ep running the latest build of amigaos 4.1 final edition; intuitionbase.com, which on saturday was ably represented by mike brantley (@mbrantley) and samantha brantley demonstrating digital painting with sketchblock and other graphics tools; A-EON, which was showing off amistore, radiance, and a couple of beta testers brought their amigaone x5000 systems; SACC, which had an awesome display of classic gear taking up a good portion of the show floor; bill borsari (@tekmage) of UGN, who did a great job of streaming the presentations with a video toaster-based broadcast setup; Epsilon came all the way from australia and was showing a powerbook with MOS 3.7, a macbook pro running AOS4.1 classic under winuae, a netbook running AROS, and a minimig runing some classic games; infocessories, which was showing off amiga REBOL on a sam440ep; matthew leaman of amigakit (@amigakit), who had a couple of tables with classic kit for sale; and alex perez, who was showing a chameleon 64 and an X5000 running linux.
the presentations were kicked off by the indomitable steven solie, who updated the crowd on amigaos 4.1 final edition and where things were with amigaos 4.2. hyperion followed up the presentation with a formal press release on AOS4.1 final edition (
http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=157:amigaos-41-final-edition&catid=36:amigaos-4x&Itemid=18) with details on what's included. for some reason hyperion wanted to keep some of the details under wraps until the next issue of amiga future is released, in which is an exclusive preview article. kinda wanting to give the attendees a bit more info, i actually did a demo of the new release on sunday (with permission, of course
, but more on that later. next up was trevor dickinson (@TrevorDick) of A-EON who had tons of news, including:
- the official unveiling of amistore with a terrific apple-style introduction video
- the official unveiling of radiance, a great suite of graphics and video tools
- the official unveiling of version 2.4 of the radeonhd drivers, which now supports composited video, much-improved performance, and support for most AMD R5, R7, and R9 video cards
- an update on libreoffice for AOS4
- an update on warp3D support for radeonhd cards, including news that A-EON has purchased the rights to the W3D source
- an update on the amigaone X5000 beta testing
- news that A-EON has acquired the rights to octamed soundstudio from the original developer and is working on a native AOS4 version
- the official unveiling of the first xorro board and news that more are in the works
- and, lastly, that amigaworld.net, like amiga.org, is now being sponsored by A-EON
paul sadlik, a very active beta tester for amistore, was running it on his SAM at the hyperion table for folks interested in checking it out, some of the X5000 machines were around the show floor, the new drivers were up and running.... so, yeah, nothin' going on in amiga-land, huh? ;)
after lunch we were treated to the first of several presentations by andy broad, this one showing up some of the components in the radiance multimedia suite for AOS4. the package includes:
- version 2.4 of the radeonhd driver set
- an updated dvplayer to use composited video, plus new performance tweaks
- an updated mplayer to use composited video, plus major performance enhancements
- sketchblock 2.7 and sketchblock fractals for radiance, a terrific digital sketching and image editing program
- personal paint 7.3 for AOS4, which has received a pile of new features and runs natively now on next-generation machines
- workbench candi -- animated and composited backgrounds for the workbench
- animated icons for workbench
- and tons of new backdrops, videos, posters, etc.
andy also walked us through the new sketchblock and personal paint features, which looked terrific. my only frustration was having to wait a few more weeks to get this stuff. all of it will be made available via amistore through the radiance bundle or individually. i've been using sketchblock for over a year now, and am a big fan, and have already paid for personal paint 7.3. now we just need amistore to release to the public.... (hint, hint ;))
bill borsari did his annual review of games released in the past year including the latest from cherry darling and some indie releases for the classic amiga, like solid gold. bill also showed off some CD32 games, the chameleon 64, and the new bespoke joystick from amigakit. afterwards folks started to shuffle out while the banquet was being setup by the caterers.
... continued in part two ...
