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Mini report of the 2002 Ottawa Amiga Show in
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
by Darren Eveland
I just wanted to let everyone know here that I attended the Ottawa
Amiga show this past weekend in Ottawa, Ontario.... I took some photos
of the show and hope to get them developed and then posted to the web
shortly.
I saw the AmigaOne prototype there (The "a" board) running the OS 4
kernel. I was able to play around with it a bit and try some commands.
It boots very fast and did not crash :) I was impressed with it. (I
even typed "avail" at the command line :) I also saw the PPC boot and
that worked well. It is also command line based, not like a typical
"PC" bios with menus. But that didn't really matter (to me).
I saw some OS 4 components. Right now it looks like they can be
individually loaded with the "Loadmodule" command. There were 6 or 7
components there, all running on a 68K A4000T. I saw the integrated
magic menu and it looked quite good, and also dragged some windows "off"
screen.
I was told that it would not be out of the realm of possibility to
offer some of these components to 68K users (Amithlon, 060, etc...).
But that certainly is nothing "planned". Perhaps something of a OS
3.9.5 or a "module pack" for 68k users who have large investments in
their current hardware, or Amithlon users. (politics aside please, this
was just mentioned :)
I was told that the integration of the kernel and emulation layer
(and thus OS 4 components) should take place in the next several weeks.
Adam, who was demoing the OS4 kernel/ AmigaOne, also had the OS 4
components on the A4000T. He was optimistic that "sooner" rather than
"later" the integration should be working.
There was also a new vendor there for Canada,
www.livewiresystems.ca that was offering AmigaOne systems (both
stand alone and complete systems). I was happy to see a Canadian dealer
for the new Amiga products.
There was another company showing off AmigaDE stuff, but I'm not
really interested in PDA stuff so I didn't really pay attention to it.
I did not attend the after-show dinner with Randy Hughes, so I don't
know what took place there.
[Edit - Actually, there were two companies present showing AmigaDE
software; Technomages and ZEE4.]
It was certainly the smallest Amiga show I have ever attended, but it
was crowded when I was there. Everyone was generally in a good mood and
there were some old-time amiga users present. People were generally
interested in OS 4 and PPC, but also in Amithlon, as there was an
Amithlon system shown at the show. There was no mention of Amithlon V2
or "berniethlon", but the original Amithlon was on sale for $209 CAD +
tax. OS 3.9 was also on sale, as was Quake 2 (being demoed on a laptop,
but I don't know if that was on Amithlon or via Windows?) Quake 2 sold
for almost $70.00 CAD.
There was no morphos/pegasos system shown, but people were talking
about it and asking questions about it in relation to the AmigaOne/OS4.
People generally thought that MorphOS/ pegasos was a good solution, but
they hoped OS 4 would run on that system, or at least offered as a
choice. I hope this gives you a rough idea of what took place at the
show.
Darren
Amiga 4000/060 owner |