You've probably read about a hundred reports on Cologne of the form "and company X had Y on their stand. Blah, blah" in the past, so in true AmigaSoc style, we're aiming for something a little different. We'd like to put a little more emphasis on the people that make the show happen in order to make things a little more three dimensional. After all, one of the biggest strengths of the Amiga community is the people that represent the companies, not just their products. We've also added a little bit about some of our social goings on because it breaks up the monotony a little, and with any luck might encourage a few other people who have not been to Cologne to make the trip next year.
I've never actually been to Germany before, so for me at least Cologne was a wonderful experience in many more ways than you'd normally expect from a guy that rambles on about computer shows. I'd heard many tales about how wonderful the shows were, and how great the Amiga following is, so I just had to witness it first hand. A few of us from AmigaSoc jumped on a plane and made our way there to see what all the fuss was about. Coincidentally enough, Amiga Format's trilby-wearing Ben Vost happened to be on the same plane as us. Lucky him.
I was surprised at how many of our fellow countrymen had also made their way over to Cologne. Among them were Bob Hoskins lookalike Tony Ianiri (of Power Computing), Paul Lesurf (of Blittersoft), David Law (of Weird Science), Paul Carrington (of Vulcan), Steve Jones (of HiQ), Mick Tinker (of Index Information), Jeremy Rihll (of Digita), Alan Redhouse (of Eyetech), and the whole Gasteiner/Golden Image team.
Once we'd checked into our own hotel, Ben checked into his own hotel,
the Hotel Eden, which is generally the hotel of choice for these
occasions. Among the guests at the Hotel Eden were Thomas Svenson (of
Sweden's Amiga Info
magazine -an attractive glossy magazine produced
entirely by Thomas on PageStream 3), Jeremy Rihll (of Digita), James
Ceraldi (of AuroraWorks -creators
of a fantastic new Dynablasteresque game called "H-Bomb" designed
specifically for graphics card owners), Greg Perry and Jon Potter (from
GP Software and need no introduction),
and Michael Battilana (of Cloanto).
The "big" people such as Petro and his clan, including his two children
(who were enlisted to help serve drinks to all the thirsty pass-holders)
were staying at the Queen's hotel (probably because the others were
in the hotel Eden!).
Just to make sure we had our priorities right, we decided to round up this collection of Amigans and go to a pub/restaurant. While we were there, we noticed that Thomas carried a little tin of so-called "wet tobacco" with him. We concluded that we could quite easily swap this tin around with a tin of boot polish and he wouldn't notice the difference, but we never got a chance to test this theory out. However, he did offer the tin around to various people gathered round the table, and most of us were smart enough to "just say no". There were however a few exceptions. Plucking up the best of his post-adolescent daring, Jeremy Rihll decided to throw down both his gauntlet and packet of cigarettes to try out Thomas's little vice. After having the carefully-moulded ball in his mouth for a few minutes, he came to the conclusion that burning a hole in his gums wasn't to his liking, so somehow Thomas managed to convince Ben (a non-smoker, thankfully) to try the same trick. It too had rather a profound effect on him. In fact, it had more effect than the huge volume of alcohol that he'd already drunk (we consumed nearly 250 glasses of beer between us, by the way). Unfortunately, the effect didn't involve any of the usual symptoms associated with mass consumption of alcohol. There went our entertainment for the evening.
The following morning, we made our way to the exhibition centre which wasn't too far from the hotels where we stayed. From the outside, it was evident that the show was going to be big. and that there was absolutely no chance of it being a Hammersmithesque half-measure. With the help of Ben, we managed to glean free entry as members of the press. I guess the only reason the people at the admission desk agreed was because it would take considerably longer for us to argue the case using a compound of badly-formed German sentences and English words with "en" tagged on the end.
| The first impression at shows like this is usually the most important. At British computer shows of about 10 years ago (in the Speccy days), the place would always be humming with exhibitors and people. Computer 97 seemed to capture this feel better than I can possibly hope to put into words. There was simply no comparison with Amiga shows in the UK, as there were some 75 exhibitors here whereas Hammersmith shows of recent years barely had a tenth of that many stalls. Certainly the most satisfying thing about this was that the vast majority of these companies were for the Amiga. Some stalls stocked Amiga products alongside others such as PC, Playstation, N64 and Mac. A very small minority of stands stocked no Amiga products. The not-so-Amiga stands didn't attract nearly as many people as the Amiga ones. |
 Even from this crap photo, you can see that the show is infinitely bigger than those at Hammersmith. |
I met up with Finale Development's Alain Penders (who is also one of the leading lights in ICOA -judging by the number of messages bearing his name in my mailbox) who neglected to bring Finale's Java environment, "MochA", with him, most likely because they haven't finished it yet. Seeing as Alain is from Belgium, Cologne was a mere hour and a half's drive from where he lives. I guess that's a good enough excuse seeing as he seemed pretty lost for the most part of the show. This might be because, unlike us (or Ben at least), he didn't quite manage to pull off any stunts with regard to getting a free pass to the show. He did however convince them that he was a maintenance man or something like that (for all the good it did him). Mind you, he did eventually remember to wear his ICOA T-Shirt, so that's something.
I got the opportunity to talk to some of the new recruits in Amiga Inc. Jeff Schindler was a very quiet chap who did seem pretty keen on his job, although clearly not an Amigan. He didn't say a great deal at the meeting I had with him, primarily because I was probably talking a right load of crap and he was just thinking how much of a waste of time I was. The man that did most of the talking was Joe Torre, their new head of engineering. Although I didn't actually talk to Joe as much as I could have done, it was clear to me that he was of the right stuff. Judging by his detailed advice relating to creating my own Zorro prototyping boards (which was his response to my request for them providing some) by hacking old Commodore 2 meg RAM cards to bits, it was quite evident that he was a seasoned hardware hacker (and an Amiga one at that). It was easy to conclude that Amiga Inc. had chosen well. After talking to a few others, it came to light that he was in fact one large hormone. Many reported that he was often distracted during conversation by various young women walking past (Canon being particularly guilty of using such people to advertise their products... but who's complaining!) to the degree that he looked like he was watching a tennis match. Curiously enough, he also had a hobby of collecting empty CD cases from older versions of software from the Schatztruhe stand. Quite why he was slightly more protective of them when seen emerging from one of the many curtained booths labelled "Erotik" is anyone's guess. As for Darreck Lisle, we'd had brief E-Mail contact with him before, and although he comes from an Amiga background, it certainly didn't show. Then again, I seem to remember people saying the same thing about me a while back! I was probably wary of him since Alain Penders had described him as "clueless" (although give me Alicia Silverstone any day). However, from what the others said, he was a decent guy, and that's always a good start!
On each of the three days of the show, there were a number of presentations from notables in the Amiga world, such as Angela Schmidt talking about mastering CDs, and Nova Design's Kermit Woodall (a good and dear friend of ours) showing off some of the features of ImageFX and answering some questions about what's coming from Nova next. The big news is that ImageFX version 3.0 is going to be with us soon (although the interface that many people complain about so much will stay as it is, primarily because the people that use it in the video industry like it that way! It's this interface that makes it more suitable than Adobe Photoshop for video work, we're told). Michael Battilana, the tri-lingual head guy at Cloanto, held a seminar about their new Amiga emulator, "Amiga Forever". Unfortunately, something this controversial was bound to stir up a bit of a racket, and when CDs weren't being flung to the front of the room (one of which hit one of our AmigaSoc clan in the back of the head), some beer-swilling demo coders made various noises at the prospect of taking the Amiga and putting it on another platform, specifically the PC. Michael had a bit of bad luck to start with because he couldn't get the monitor projector to work with his little Pentium 133 notebook. After a little fiddling from various members of the audience, we saw an emulated Amiga screen. We did however get a chance to have a look at Michael's machine up close when we got to the airport on our way home. It's pretty impressive stuff, considering it's running under Windoze. The Linux version is obviously bound to be a bit quicker, because in it's current state, it's not overly nippy (although the usual applications, like PPaint are quite usable -certainly not the case with UAE 0.6.4). As soon as we can, we'll be getting some Work/University machines crunching away at it and bring you a review. The other noteworthy presentation came from Greg Perry. His misfortune began when the machine which had Opus installed on it wasn't set up properly and so much of what he attempted to do didn't work. It eventually resulted in many people walking out on him. He blamed himself for not preparing adequately for the presentation, but to be honest, it was more due to bad luck than anything else.
The dedicated Dr. Kittel was among the famous attendees. Although
PIOS were not present themselves, Dr.
Kittel did tell me that Dave Haynie
had recently contacted them to say that he had finished (or at least
nearly so) one of their new motherboards (although I can't remember it
by name). I couldn't help but be concerned over their disconcerting
quiet over the past few months, but the fact that they're still tucked
away somewhere hacking away at their hardware is good news at least.
Chris tells me that many trade magazines carry their Mac clone products
(which have always undercut Motorola's Mac clones significantly) which I
assume must be selling reasonably well given that they have less
competition on that score now. At the end of the day, it's more money to
be put into R&D for their generic PPC-based products. I didn't get to
speak to him much more as I was already heading somewhere else, plus he
was a centre of attention himself. I also caught up with Christoph
Guelicher, who some may remember as an employee of Amiga Technologies at
the show. It's great to see that he's still on the Amiga scene, although
he now works for Siemens Nixdorf (who had a pretty large share in Escom,
by the way). I didn't get to speak to him for very long, so I never got
to find out if he still maintains contact with some of the others from
Amiga Technologies who also had to go when Escom nose-dived.
 Jeff Schindler (left) is harassed by yet more autograph hunters. Petro is hiding somewhere in this picture. See if you can find him! | As far as exhibitors go, Amiga International used their by now familiar stands with the pyramid lights. Believe it or not, these are actually a small remnant from the Escom days. The curvy desk (as modelled by the equally curvy lady from Amiga International) was used when the show came to Hammersmith last year when, as an employee of Escom, I represented Amiga Technologies. When we started clearing up the stand after the show had ended, I watched in horror as someone peeled away the Amiga Technologies logo on the front of that desk to reveal the Escom logo. Urgh! Since then, it's likely that the Escom logo has been removed (and probably burnt alongside an effigy of Bernard Van Tienen). Either way, the stand was populated by several people including Angela Schmidt who was demonstrating MakeCD in one corner alongside Holger Kruse who was showing off version 3.0 of the Amiga's premier TCP stack, Miami. |
Curiously enough, Amiga International had taken it upon themselves to hire a gentleman that was a dead ringer for Leslie Neilsen (of Naked Gun fame). I spent a great deal of time plotting to find a way of getting him to pose for a photograph so that I could stick the picture on the website and say "look who came", but I failed. Apparentely, Joe Torre found this resemblance so uncanny that he decided to confront the gentleman with the observation. From what I was told, he was absolutely delighted by this as no-one had ever pointed it out to him before. I never really spoke with him, but people said that he was a very jolly and good-natured chap.
MicroniK had their own stand as well as a few machines dotted around the Amiga International. Their kit generally appears to be of a pretty high standard, specifically their tower cases. It's not like I haven't seen them before, but I must say that if I had an A1200, I wouldn't consider opting for any other form of tower upgrade. The only reservation is that they appear to be a little pricey.
| Mick Tinker of Index Information had brought his collection of licensed Amiga goodies to Cologne, and was kind enough to explain some of the technical details behind them. The Access is already well-known, and has been lugged around in a case by Mick for several years while he approached one Amiga owner (in the corporate sense, of course) after another with regard to licensing. He told me that he's won the contract he was telling me about in Hammersmith in May. Basically, the people that sell lottery tickets wanted a system to display last week's winning lottery balls, together with a few rolling adverts and so on. That's where the Access comes in. An 020 or 030 processor is more than adequate for such a SCALAesque task, and we all know that this combination really shines at a very reasonable cost. This is truly fantastic, and I hope that such a system will find it's way into other countries as it is a very simple, yet effective idea. Be sure to take a look at Index's website, and you'll see that just about everywhere where you've seen an Amiga-based system installed in the UK, Index have been at the heart of it. I think of them as a sort of British equivalent of NewTek (albeit with a much lower profile), secretly installing Amigas in places where people don't think of looking. |
 Naturally, this picture is deliberately blurry in order to thwart any attempts at theft! |
Haage and Parter had a stand of their own, and also a couple of corners on the Amiga International stand. Their own stand didn't have a great deal to show, apart from a new version of X-DVE (version 3, I believe), with a special guest appearance from the programmer. On the Amiga International stand, they had one machine running Art Effect, and another running Tornado 3D. Although I'm not particularly proficient with raytracers (or indeed anything which requires talent), I must say that I was impressed with the way you could fiddle with the lighting and then have it shade an object a couple of seconds later to show the change in position. Personally, after using Real 3D, Imagine, and Cinema 4D (Maxon Computer, by the way, were conspicuously absent from the show, unless they were tucked away on someone else's stand without me noticing), I always get totally frustrated with getting the lighting just right. This certainly seemed to be a step towards making that less painful (although some smart arse will probably tell me that Lightwave already does that or something). They also held a seminar on their new Java environment, Merapi, but regrettably, I didn't know about it and so I missed out. I was kicking myself for the rest of the time I was there! Come to think of it, it would probably be in German anyway, so I guess I wouldn't have understood much of it even if I did go!
HiQ's Steve Jones also had a little corner on the Amiga International stand showing off the Siamese system. Paul Nolan was in California at the time so he couldn't make it to Cologne himself. Steve's constant enthusiasm and energy for the Siamese is reflected primarily through the fact that he rarely pauses for breath. I never thought to check to see if he was plugged in at any of the power points next to the computers because his energy seemed absolutely limitless. In fact, I'm willing to bet that he never once left the stand for the entire show. He was probably still demonstrating it to the cleaners after everyone had gone home. Again, this dedication is more than commendable.
IrseeSoft had a rather large stand demonstrating TurboPrint 6. Although Florian Zeiler admitted that there is very little in terms of new additions since version 5, the stand still attracted a large number of people. They also had Epson's new photo-realistic printer, the Stylus Photo. The results with TurboPrint on glossy paper were truly remarkable. Even on close examination, the print was the sharpest, clearest image I've ever seen. I hope that Amiga International's new allies at Epson take notice of IrseeSoft's work. Jules spoke to Florian Zeiler to ask a few questions about problems with TurboPrint 5. He specifically mentioned the problem of the rather fickle poster feature. The idea we had was to cache printed strips to hard drive and then hack them to bits later on. Jules was told that although they had considered such a system, it would be rather difficult to implement. Personally, I think their time would be better spent at least trying to make this feature a little more usable rather than implementing new features in Graphics Publisher.
Makers of the highly-regarded Picasso IV graphics card, VillageTronic were right next to IrseeSoft with their ever-impressive collection of hardware gizmos. They had the usual favourites such as the Ariadne Zorro ethernet card and the Picasso IV, along with some new modules such as the Picasso sound module (if I could only remember what it was called) which Ben promptly managed to snap up for review. Coincidentally enough, his A3000T at home has a Picasso IV, so I have a sneaking suspicion that it may take some time for them to get their kit back! The actual module is remarkably small, as no doubt most of the glue logic is already available on the main Picasso board. It measured about 2 by 10 centimetres for all you metric freaks out there. Ben also managed to find out that VillageTronic are working on a slimmed-down version of the Picasso IV (but sadly no news on the proposed PPC version), with slightly less expansibility to keep production costs down. The main reason for producing a card like this is to bring a card with similar pricing to the Picasso II to the market in order to encourage more people to buy graphics cards. A hearty pat on the back for them, I think.
As the owner of an Eagle A4000TE, I felt it necessary to visit Eagle's stand. I'm not sure if it's got anything to do with the hassle I had getting my machine in the first place, but the whole time I was there, I got a feeling that I couldn't trust them as far as I could throw them. My A4000 never came with a manual explaining the jumpers on the motherboard SCSI controller, so Chris (also the owner of an identical machine) asked them about it. The gentleman was remarkably submissive with words to the effect of "Just fax us, and we'll send some along". It's strange that I walked away thinking that it wasn't going to happen. Many people have said some bad things about Eagle. Paul Nolan and Steve Jones have said how Eagle have played some very dirty tricks with Siamese, and Blittersoft, in their infinite wisdom, were fed up with their inability to supply products on time.
 OK, so it's just a box. What do you want ? | Power Computing/DCE Computer had their A5000 on display. Just by pure chance, the specifications of this machine match the BoXeR quite closely, except for the fact that the A5000 is said to be developed from the CD32's motherboard. Whether or not they plan to include the Akiko chip is anyone's guess, but as I didn't know who to speak to about the technical details, I couldn't find out a great deal more. |
ProDad, the people behind pOS, also had a stand. When I had a spare moment, I examined their little demonstration of pOS with interest. It had several windows open: one with a little tetris game, another with a breakout game and a few others. The whole setup seemed quite attractive, but I wanted to know how functional it was. So I picked up the mouse and tried to explore a little. To my horror, although I could move the mouse, the rest of the display was totally fixed! In fact, it might as well have been an animation that somebody hacked together in PPaint! You could move the mouse, but you could click to your heart's content and it wouldn't do a damn thing! Although I understand that pOS is by no means complete, I felt a bit conned by this little display. If it's complete enough to pre-release on CD, then surely they could at least demo that ? They also gave some space to MacroSystem who despite having stopped development of their products for Amigas, are still developing what appear to be Amiga-based products. Kermit Woodall decided to check out their new Casablanca system. However, soon after he started working with it, one of their representatives promptly whipped the controller out of his hands. He later reasoned that this was due to the fact that he was wearing one of the rather smart "Powered by Amiga" polo shirts that members of Amiga Inc. were wearing, and so they must have thought that he was one of them. Not that MacroSystem have anything to be guilty of or anything. After all, it's not like they've blatantly ripped off the Operating System is it ? Looks like Petro may be ready to slap some wrists pretty soon!
| Jens Schonfeld, a decent chap who shared a rather dubious sushi with a number of us after May's Hammersmith show was proudly stationed by his stand, Individual Computers. Using the ever-imaginative slogan of "Resistance is futile" (well a German translation of it anyway) was as good an excuse as any to get himself and his colleagues clad in Star Trek costume. It's rather heartening that England isn't the only breeding ground for nerds. Jens kindly explained some of the little details behind the new version of his popular and impressive "Catweasel" floppy controller. He also enlightened us as to the choice of name. Apparentely, he was up in the early hours of the day hacking away at his designs when he decided to take a break and turn on the telly. Predictably enough, the infinitely sad TV programme bearing the same name happened to be on at the time. Just as well it wasn't "No sex, we're British" or "Bottom" really... It would be rather disconcerting to have to plug your floppy drive into your bottom. Back to the Catweasel: The actual board itself is tiny, and is an extremely clever piece of kit. Jens outlined some of the things it could do and how it could be connected, and it certainly shows that a lot of thought has gone into it. |
 Widerstand ist zwecklos (resistance is futile). Is there no defence against Trekkies even in Amiga shows ? |
Oberland Computer were proudly displaying a couple of videos of the new version (4.0) of Reflections (YART = Yet Another Ray Tracer), which seemed pretty damn impressive to me, but then again there are very few raytracers that don't produce impressive results of one form or another. Reflections is supposed to have quite a history which ties somehow into Commodore Germany and some guy who produced nice animations with Sculpt Animate 4D (for those of you who remember it). I won't repeat it here. That's an exercise for you! Version 4.0 of Reflections is also shipped with a PPC executable which, to my knowledge, is the first commercial raytracer to support the PPC.
 Some bloke demonstrates the impressive, but cumbersome Wildfire | Phase 5 were, as always, deservedly the centre of attention with their PPC products. The main part of their stand was a tutorial with the PPC-optimised version of Wildfire. Although during the really heavy computations, I noticed that some of the many multitasking animations being run in the background jerked a little, the presentation was still very impressive. Wildfire can do some incredible things, although from my experience, it's been a real pain in the butt to try and achieve such results. I only wish that my grasp of German was a little stronger as I probably would have learned quite a bit. Wolf Dietrich was around, although I never got the chance to speak to him. However, Ben did, and it seems that PPC developers are going to be treated to a PPC version of the stalwart C development environment, SAS/C. This is tremendous news as the vast majority of existing commercial applications are developed using SAS/C. On a darker note, the tiff with Haage and Partner continues, although Ben described Wolf as being more hurt than annoyed at the covert development of WarpUp. |
When passing through one of the aisles, I noticed that one of the stalls was titled "Epic". As it happens, Epic have a German distributor and some of the Epic guys from England (who are a bunch of very down to Earth people) were also around to make sure things ran smoothly. This sort of thing is always great to see as Epic are definitely very dedicated to the Amiga. I never got the chance to pop back and talk to them again, but I'd imagine that they did pretty well out of the show. Certainly as far as UK shows are concerned, their stand is usually among the busiest. It's also evident that they pull out all the stops when it comes to shows like this, and it's good to see that they are adequately rewarded.
Probably the most amusing aspect of the show was a German service provider who confidently provided about eight PCs running Netscrape in an "Internet Cafe". Naturally, this was blatantly abused by just about everyone who used them... including us. The actual speed of connection was pretty impressive if you were used to 2400 baud modems. That's probably a bit of an exaggeration, actually. It was nowhere near that fast. In fact, we came to the conclusion that all eight machines were using the same modem. The alternative was that there was someone tucked away inside the sinister-looking pavilion in the middle of the circle of machines furiously tapping away with a morse code key.
There was a rather intriguing stand that was selling phenomenally cheap
(branded) hard drives. For just a few Deutschemarks, you could buy a
modest hard drive, be it SCSI or IDE, but just as Jules and I were ready
to part with our cash, some gentleman was kind enough to mention that
he'd bought drives from these people in the past and couldn't get them
to work. Considering that his English was very limited, the fact that he
went to great pains to explain this to us meant a great deal to us. Sure
enough, on closer examination, there was a poster at the back which,
from what I could work out, stated that the drives came with no
warranty. Just to cover their backs even further, they were getting the
customers to sign declarations that they can't hold the retailers
responsible for any problems. Very dodgy.
| There was a great deal of excitement at the prospect of a developers' conference that was to be held on the Friday after the show had ended. After making a complete hash of the one in Hammersmith in May, I was dying to see how we could improve upon it. The conference hall was quite magnificent, in stark contrast to the manky old room we booked (even though it was all we could afford -just about). Unfortunately, although the invitation, complete with mis-spelt name (after all, it's four bleedin' letters, how can anyone get it wrong when it's written in front of them!), clearly said "Developers' Conference" it was basically a press conference. Did they say anything of interest ? Nothing we haven't heard already. Disconcertingly enough, they started handing out questionnaires which basically asked "what do you want from your next Amiga ?". After all this time, you think that they'd have figured it out. Nevertheless, we all dutifully filled in our opinions, and were heartened by the fact that they were able to present a set of statistics from questionnaires that have been filled in from previous "Developers' Conferences". At least they were doing something with the forms, I guess. The hold up in their schedule was mainly because Gateway 2000 has to approve their budget, so in a way it's understandable. The fact that they fell over themselves trying to think of an E-Mail address that we could relay comments to them with did not go down to well with many of us. I was half expecting them to throw a bucket of confetti over the audience, honk a horn and then climb into a bubble car and drive away. Petro said a few words, again nothing new, but he proceeded to list all the companies that have licensed parts of the Amiga from them since things started in May. This alone was evidence to me that things were moving. While Escom still had Amiga Technologies, licensing deals seemed to take a lot longer to go through, and very few deals were actually struck. There is a definite change of pace here, and there's no doubt about it. However, once again Petro put his foot in it by making special emphasis on DCE's A5000 as being a magnificent achievement, when he made only a passing reference to Index's BoXeR. Mick described this as "political", but I don't think that Petro really meant to sound quite so biased. Petro is a nice enough chap, it's just that he isn't always aware of the ramifications of his actions. |
 With such a large hall, we were expecting big things. |
After the show on Saturday, Petro decided to hold a little party for all the notable developers who had attended the show. The number of seats were limited to fifty, and so only the real elite were given access. Petro certainly did not make any friends by organising this little party. Unimportant individuals such as Greg Perry could not get an invitation, but pillars of the Amiga community such as Paul Lesurf did. Thomas Svenson quite happily sold his colleague down the river to get entrance. It's always good to know who your mates are! Not a lot was said about what went on but reportedly, Darreck Lisle was quite enthused by the prospect of a cornucopia of free drink. So much so that he decided to show his appreciation by dancing on the furniture. I'm sure Petro was quite impressed by this show of loyalty.
 Greg Perry looks strangely cheerful after consuming some of the restaurant's food. | While the notables partied away, the rest of us plebs were recommended to go to a Persian restaurant of some description by some of the others. What started off with just a few of us, including the ousted journalist from Amiga Info, turned into a complete invasion of this quiet little restaurant. Looking around, there were many inspiring photographs of empty tables, second only in terms of entertainment value to the inane grinning of the restaurant's proprietors. If we could understand their language (which wasn't German, I hasten to add), I'm sure they were secretly rather joyous of the fact that anyone had actually set foot inside their establishment. |
A number of the AROS team were also in attendance, and while we didn't exchange that many words with them (purely because we didn't really know what to say!), they were kind enough to help us translate the menus (well, the German parts of them at least). One of their members happened to pop downstairs to visit the bog and found that there was already a huge number of Amiga people down there, so they decided to join them. Uneasy at the prospect of being seated alone in the restaurant alongside the photographs of empty tables, we decided to join them downstairs. We were led into their dungeon-like basement section where we found all but one of the tables completely filled by Amigans. We swiftly noticed a scene that looked bizarrely like "the last supper" with a rather familiar-looking gentleman with shoulder-length frizzy hair surrounded by a group of disciples. We knew they liked the Amiga in Germany, but quite who this guy was, we had no idea. We were hoping that they'd order some garlic bread so that we could watch what he'd do with it, but for some reason best known to themselves, they didn't have any food on their table.
The first sign of trouble was the fact that the first round of beers (yes, five) were served in two different types of glasses. We were rather wary of the fact that subsequent drinks would probably be served in hastily-hollowed courgettes or something and served with twisty drinking straws. Our predictions were close enough when they no longer saw fit to actually bring the bottle that contained the beer to us, and serve them in narrow, almost clinical, glasses. They clearly had never had so many customers since they opened as they only actually had eight menus for the entire place. Fortunately for us, our newfound friends from AROS did not make the suggestion that we could pass the menus amongst ourselves quickly enough to make each of us think that we had a menu all to ourselves.
| Greg and Jon later appeared to further add to the incredible squeeze at our table that was only really designed to handle about eight people at most. Ben and James decided to call it a night and leave Petro's little party quite early. Before they'd even eaten, in fact. It was probably the prospect of watching Darreck Lisle pull off his polo shirt and do a truffle shuffle while balancing an A1200 on his head that put them firmly off any food Petro had planned to give them. So they too decided to join the squeeze round the table. To add to the confusion, Greg and Jon each ordered a pizza, but something must have been lost in the translation. What they actually got looked more like a hardened pancake with some cheese and various unidentifiable toppings. In fact, on the way in, I could swear I saw a few sheets of balsa wood with some circles suspiciously cut out of them. Jules on the other hand ordered a kebab of some description. A couple of hours later, he was handed what appeared to be a circumcision that had gone horribly wrong. Apparentely, it didn't taste any better either. As for the rest of us, after waiting three hours for our orders, we eventually decided to pay for what we had consumed (ie. nothing but beer) and go somewhere more capable of dealing with people who wanted to eat. By this time, a number of other people had arrived upstairs, including Stefan Ossowski and Alain Penders. However, some time after we left, they too caught on to the fact that they had picked a bit of a turkey and headed off to a restaurant that actually served food. |
 After changing restaurants, Jules looks a little smashed. |
Overall, Cologne was indeed a fantastic experience, and one that we'd
thoroughly recommend to others. I'm not sure whether it was the
incredible atmosphere or the fact that everyone is so friendly. In fact,
my only regret was that my German is pretty poor to say the least, and
it is somewhat embarrassing to be a guest of a country and not be able
to speak sufficient of their native tongue when so many of them can
speak such excellent English. However, the excitement of all the
wonderful new products that are either already here or in the works
somehow builds bridges between all languages. We certainly plan to go
again next year!