HEW '99 REPORT from Caghan Demirci I dashingly rushed my way into the Home Electronics World at noon on Saturday, after a steady march across the Rhein and the Koln fairgrounds, only to find that my vision was blocked by a barrage of irrelevant "home electronics" stands, who would gladly sell you their PC hardware and software ranging from the odd SCSI cable to the slick driving wheel for some bargain price. Wrong floor? Indeed nay, as the Amiga stands were to be found gathered together at the further half of the hall, with no clear separation between the two partitions. In the very middle towered the Amiga Inc. stand in all ist grandeur, watching over the throbbing crowd and the various Amiga dealers on its four sides. Allegedly the Amiga section is more shrunk than in the previous years, but the aisles have been widened to make strolling easier; even so, there was always a bunch before every stand, talking, commenting, arguing and finally shopping. Annex, now down to three people, danced twice during the day on a small stage placed suspiciously close to the entrance, enjoying keen attention from every HEW visitor, so much so that many people watched the show while standing. In addition to "Keep the Momentum Going," they also danced to the German premiere of "The Spirit," quite an improvement on the former song, I might add. The elastic girls even cheered up the front row to get up and swing their hips, and funnily all this got recorded on somebody's personal video camera here and there. Applause was plenty, and after the show ended, smiling faces could be overheard asking, "So will you be an Amiga-user again, Jon?", and grinning faces answering "Not a user perhaps, but a spectator definitely." Get lucky, and you might even buy some Amiga souvenirs off these eye-catching Annex chaps at the central stand. Also catching the surprised eye of many an attentive visitor were the three wackos strolling around with their Iwin T-Shirts which shouted "Rotten tomatoes onto here!" These guys really don't take their sweet lives seriously. Bernhard, one of this jolly batch that is responsible for the Iwin website, never did hesitate to draw his Iwin(TM) lighter upon the oncoming mob, whose smart heads were more than anxious to run for their lives as they took it to be a flame thrower running on flammable "vapour." No sir, Bernhard wouldn't listen to the two Dutchmen warning him through clenched teeth of his imminent demise. "It is supposed to be a big joke," chuckles Bernhard, who obviously had some bombastic fun making the Iwin site. "I mailed Martin Steinbach about the Iwin company and asked 'You got T-Shirts?'. 'Yeah, we do.' 'How much do they cost?' '28 DM. What's your address?' 'Here it is. Send me a batch, and some lighters.' 'Here you go.' - finished!" He would also claim that from the beginning, the site was nothing to be taken seriously, but having said that, it seemed to me Bernhard was reproached more often than he had thought. He was ecstatic about the whole thing. Apparently the reason why the community can't take a "joke" these days is that as an entity, we have become rather irritable after the chain of recent disappointments and broken promises. It was then natural that the majority of fans thought the Iwin lads had bad intentions. Having the Iwin case cleared for all with a smile on everyone's lips, I was itching to browse the crowded Amiga stands around the hall, various and sundry. Amiga Inc.'s stand was so dominant that even if you thought you were walking in the same direction, you would soon end back up at some unexpected node of the central stand. When he wasn't rushing to his office or to the bathroom for a quick break, Petro T. could always be seen surrounded by Amigans from around Europe. Look carefully, and on the faces of all his listeners you would see an uncertain plethora of question marks, morphing and fidgeting as they asked and listened. As this is my first Amiga fair, (gulp!) I gathered up the courage and finally went up and met him. Wow! I just got to say the vice president is a really really nice man; the community must be lucky to be headed by someone who loves and cares about the Amiga as he does. No one else from Amiga Inc. had come along, as they believed they would be scorned and absorbed in arguments without end, but Petro T.'s son and daughter were there, constantly working at the stand to and fro. "I have to sell stuff and keep a business running," says Petro. "Business as usual." As those of you who already know him would safely assume, the managing director was cheering people up and injecting confidence all around, practically chatting with everyone who came up to talk to him. Allegedly he wasn't as cheerful as in the previous fairs; as to how much of the shaken and insecure mood of his listeners infected him, no one can know. What I have picked up about Petro T.'s hopes of a more prosperous future, reproachful considerations expressed by visitors, and the ambitious plans of Haage&Partner, I will convey at the very end. I carefully browsed through each and every Amiga stand, primary objective being to get hold of as many Amiga mice as I could and take them back to Turkey to the begging crowd, struggling in oblivion with their callous serial port mice. (Some crooked bureaucracy will let you import all sorts of joysticks, but will require you to be a store chain to import a single mouse.) A weird stand had a real Atari SM124 on display, with its back-to-basics OS smiling from a black&white screen. Surely those mice and joysticks work on the Amiga? Better not drool to long, arguably it's a nice place to visit, but you don't want to live there. The next stand, belonging to Shatztruhe, was grand enough with its various showcases to draw the public, and offered many of the most modern Amiga software: Wipeout 2097, DOpus Magellan II, PFS3, Photogenics, Superview, versions of Miami, Amiga Forever, and the Amiga Unix Compendium, each of them a pathmaking jewel in its own right. The employees were very helpful though I bugged them with never-ending questions, and finally sold me the Unix Compendium for a terrific bargain of 49 DM! It's a great feeling to know, before you even try it out, that you've bought the best solution possible and will be pleased with the product, so thanks Schatztruhe, you know your stuff! Who received perhaps more attention than the DOpus T-Shirts and other novelty items at the Shatztruhe stand was Urban Mueller advocating his Aminet CD's and CD-sets. One keeps wondering when an Aminet CD that contains solely PowerPC software will be able to come forth. Buhler Electronic, who look as if they've been in the Amiga business since the beginning of time and are now living their years of nostalgic retirement, were calmly selling all sorts of peripherals like mice, cables, adapters, accelerator cards, and even an authentic Commodore 570 CD interface! Hey, GVP530 anyone? Tranquil though it may seem, Epic Marketing was one of the two stands where you could actually go and speak English to your heart's content. Were it not for my resolution to hang a round and look interested in stuff, I would never have gotten wind of the well-known PC game Epic are getting converted to the Amiga. Which one? But that's elementary, my dear Watson: Think of a graphical adventure game that was planned to be released on the Amiga and the CD32, but never saw light of day. Now think also that Epic are likely to have a British sense of humour. You got it right, it's Simon the Sorcerer 2! After perhaps an eternal time of uncertainty and speculation, one could actually inspect a solidly running version of Simon 2, that Chris Barrie-dubbed bloke you've been itching to frolic with. But admittedly, you had to query about it to be able to see it since the employees did not seem very anxious to show it off. From what I could see, and considering that the developer had to code the game from scratch, perhaps by reverse-engineering the PC version, a lot of steady work has already gone into Amiga Simon 2, so allegedly when Epic can get the 500 preorders they need, development will get green light and "the author can finish the game by the end of January." Somehow I know that for a game like this, the more modest its system requirements are, the more it's going to sell. Apart from Simon 2, Epic had a fine stand overall, with a large collection of old games, not neglecting floppy ones with cute little boxes. They also boasted newer software such as MakeCD and Foundation: Director's Cut, but I really can't make a merry estimation of how much the latter has sold. A running demo of the new Foundation really wouldn't do any harm to dispel the prejudice many people harbour against the original Foundation. Roll on APC&TPC. The Amiga card game and the numerous game and scene CD's they had for sale aside, the Phoenix demonstration by the game's author was amassing groups of people around the clock. The jaw-dropping demo definitely got a few Lambda fans converted to the Phoenix side of things. Well if you haven't seen it, you probably will not believe my description of the engine right now. Slam the resolution up to 640x480, and smooth scrolling is your game. Fly dangerously close to tremendous space bases, run rounds around alien spaceships, try your nervous finger at the trigger, and you won't notice any visible slowdown; even changing the view from your cockpit to behind your ship gives you a lagless zoom. The 3D objects, and space itself, are very colourful, debris pixels whizz insanely by as you confide in your turbo boost, and you even get rewarded by a lens flare if you manage the right angle. Markus Pollmann, the author of Phoenix's engine, is not your everyday gamer who plays Colony Wars all day on his Playstation and finally says, "Hey why don't we chalk up something like that for the Amiga..?" He actually said "I don't know about any PC games," when I mentioned Colony Wars. Contrary to public opinion, he has been "constantly working on the game till now," and when asked about how one could find all these algorithms to bring Phoenix souped up to the level of modern space simulations, his matter-of-fact reply was "You invent them." Unlike many other games developers who haven't yet seen the light, Markus's game is programmed in a very clean C++, with which he can "implement the graphical functions more easily," obviously A Good Thing. As it had already been announced, there will not be Frontier-style trade in the game, however we will definitely see a host of alien races with an enticing story to match. Missions are not there yet, but a language for implementing them has already been realised, according to the author. The demo was running on a BlizzardPPC with a BlizzardVisionPPC chucked in for good measure, while the code utilized WarpOS and naturally Warp3D to access the 3D functions of Permedia 2. As if a peak framerate of 70 (seventy!) and a sustainable framerate of 60, never dropping below 40 fps, wasn't enough, you could hoist the resolution up to 800x600 and Phoenix would still run with a peak rate of 65 (sixty-five!) and a sustainable rate of 40, never dropping below 35 fps, even in the closest flights. Real-time enough for you guys? In the completed game you'll be able to communicate with motherships, destroy space bases and whatnot. As to how much there is to its completion, collision detection is already "working very well," though it was shut down for the demo, and enemy AI is "OK, but will be better." Beautiful game. For me, the market seems terribly hungry for a game of this nature; you don't even need to perfect it to sell a good heap. So go and get Starfighter while you wait for this. A non-ambitious AmigaPlus stand offered both developers' CD's and the German magazine itself, which would supply you with an 880KB floppy packed to the brim if you asked kindly. Same if you didn't. Walk a little more to the door of a little cubicle and you would be smiling at a happy batch of eager Amigans under the banner "Amiga Club im BTX&Internet." I must say I am still at a loss as to what the divine purpose of this stand was supposed to be, but it was invariably crowded all the same. Urban Mueller wouldn't miss the slightest chance to break from his solitude at Schatztruhe to frequent this cubicle for the occasional refreshment of his nice girlfriend, so cheers and happy luck to them both! "The Luggage." Yes. Ahem, I'm really at a loss as to what to say here, but evidently The Luggage, a device that openly defies comprehension, was the prominent display gear at Amiga Club. Enthusiastically put together by a gifted Amiga fan called Volker, this flat black box b ased around an A1200 could haughtily brag about its Blizzard 1260/50, its yadda yadda yadda, and its modest LCD screen, while Volker was putting on quite a show as he was using it. Holy cow, words defy me in my attempt to describe how much like a flat black box this luggage looks. Another hand up for the case that Germans can develop wares that can do ingenious things, but leave the design to some robingoodfellow who should creep into your workshop while you are fast asleep and stir your creation to some usable shape. And when nevertheless asked about when the box would be available, its Architect replied "I sell LCD screens. This machine I souped up for myself only." CoolBits constantly had a demo of Wipeout running. Bummer, if Eat the Whistle hadn't intervened, Wipeout would be hailed as the first commercial PowerPC game, but nevertheless, it is always a wonder to behold a 100% finished game on a BlizzardPPC. This race moves fast! Even though Wipeout is not the sort of game that makes a lot of noise, there was always a small commotion before the display, having second thoughts about spending their hard-earned Marks somewhere else. Yet one always misses a good T-Zero demo with gigantic speakers around a broad screen to irritate the crowd. Since Clickboom wasn't around, T-Zero was silently for sale on the shelves of CoolBits, along with VirtualGP, Starfighter, and several more that could be seen at almost every stand. Titan Computer had also taken their stand with emphasis on the upcoming Heretic II, running full screen in 320x200, surprising Amiga and PC users alike, but not with the most impressive framerate I'm afraid. Obviously the same fluency of the QuakePPC engine, one can't expect from the Quake 2 engine, upon which Heretic II is based, but to say the truth, an aggressively souped up Amiga should be able to handle this Playstationish resolution with ease. Having said that, Heretic II seems to run perfectly on a BlizzardPPC/233 with a BlizzardVisionPPC, and because "it does not yet utilize the 3D acceleration," (Warp3D anyone?) it tends to jump frames in the more complicated scenes. In any case, old Cybervision64 and PicassoIV owners are not out in the cold just yet. Hence, although the code needs refining, Heretic II is almost real! Preordering forms were plenty, not only for Heretic II, but for Evil's Doom SE, for which insatiable FRP dudes have been drooling for some time now, and Shogo as well. Other than the good old Amiga CD's on the shelves, some digital effects products that sounded sweet like "Candy Effects for Casablanca" were up for grabs. RBM Digitaltechnik would gladly sell you useful stuff like an IOBlix, a ScanExpress, and the like, so it was just the time to shell out the cash if you needed the odd upgrade. Even if you didn't get tractor-beamed by the beckoning Apollo prices, you would appreciate the bipartite ACT stand and the range of hardware they had on offer. Apart from some finely selected Playstation and Dreamcast thingummies, very handy Amiga gadgets were on sale, like Zorro boards, Cybervisions, IDEfix interfaces and the new PC mouse adapter which just can't be a bad buy. Even though 060/50 board prices still roamed high, ACT were offering their Apollo 040 boards for what could be called a steal, so if you still won't look down the PowerPC boulevard, get these boards while you can! And even if you didn't notice ACT, you would definitely notice Wolfgang Haupt, the funny guy trying to blot people's eye out with his shiny Amiga Tools CD's from dusk till dawn during the fair. "3 CD's for 10 Mark! 3 CD's for 10 Mark!" Did he sell any of them? I wonder. On another note, a modest standlet was occupied by Individual Computers, who happily sold innovations like Silver Surfer, Catweasel, and a new X-Surf for Zorro, though not with much fuss. Interestingly enough, a new product called PPC680x0 which "could convert Amiga assembler-source-codes straight to PowerPC source-codes" was advertised by an anxious bloke wearing a dodgy hat. Trace down some of the more obscene CD's, and you would be finding your way to a cubicle with black battlements within a godforsaken bunker surrounded by a moat in the lowest floor of a raven dungeon outside whose door it reads "Beware of the leopard." I could fervently testify that they were also selling Quake and Tekken in there, but admittedly I was afraid to look. Very German indeed. Mice, mice, where are you? Thus I came to Haage&Partner, now of OS 3.5 fame, and consequently star of the show. It turned out that they had a big, big stand, in fact the whole block with its four sides. Jurgen Haage was bustling about trying to make money and talking with curious chaps about the Amiga market situation, and one couldn't help noticing that on Saturday, the AmigaOS 3.5 boxes at his stand were almost sold out! The other three sides were taken up by promotions for many a fine software, with several computers running demos of them. Amiga Developers' CD, Fusion, Genesis, NetConnect (version 3, apparently), STFax, Pagestream, AmigaWriter, StormC, ImageFX, Tornado3D, Warp3D, StormMesa, and a recurring demo of Wipeout would fairly sum up what there was on display. Seemingly FusionPPC is due out on the 20th of November. Although non-AmigaOS excitement is now primarily channeled into LinuxPPC, Fusion could definitely stir up some thrill into those poised to brag about their Office 98 or VirtualPC or Connectix Virtual Game Station they will run on their MacOS. Launch FusionPPC one year ago, and it would be a different story. Launch it two years ago, and we could be at different places now. Same with OS 3.5. The Amiga Inc. stand I've left till the very end, since this is where the whole show sums up. Imagine a little bar where you can eat sausages, drink coke, and, well, eat sausages while you sit around chatting the time away. Two of the walls lead to offices and little depots, and through the other two you can enter and leave. This whole cube is surrounded by showcases and stands facing outwards, and further toward the rim there are many display "nodes" suggesting a bigger rectangle. So was the arrangement of Amiga Inc.'s Cologne stand. One of the nodes was dedicated to ongoing IRC conferences at #hew99. Have you ever wondered who the guy was that told you "Send me a '?' and I'll put you on the question queue?" For the first time in my life, I've seen the administrator for real. True, this guy has to sit in front of his computer all day typing his time away, but did you know he ate his breakfast, lunch and supper in front of the monitor as well? Since he insists on question marks, one would think he has a script or something that automatically inserts the sender into the question queue. No cigar, I'm afraid, cause when he sees the question mark, he manually types in a queue command with the new query order. Send him a sentence, and he will ask you for a question mark instead, so the procession rolls on in a more divine manner. There was also a second Amiga Internet node in fact, where anyone could try his hand out at the new Voyager 3.0.37, or AmTelnet, et cetera. Right beside it was the AmigaOS 3.5 demonstration stand, receiving continuous attention from a host of people who seriously considered leaving the fair with this wonder box under their arms, also for sale at the Amiga Inc. stand. One couldn't help noticing that the stand employee was constantly very busy displaying the secrets of the OS and advocating its future prospects. The very curious onlookers selected multiple icons and dragged them over the screen, exclaiming "Echt cool!" when they beheld the neat dragging effect. Anyway, at yet another node was Amiga Zentrum Thuringen showing off TVPaint, and what drew particular attention there was Amiga LinuxPPC running on sundry Amiga screens. APUS is one of Amiga's really tight grips on survival, and the fact that LinuxPPC was being exhibited on almost the same level with OS 3.5 shows how much significance Amiga Inc. grants to it. KDE ran superb, multitasking rather well with an x11amp for good company, and on one other screen AfterStep was running its super-fast rounds around the PowerPC CPU. DCE and KATO Development had also taken their stand with their Twister 1200 and Melody 1200 Pro banging the speakers out of shape. With the help of a Winamp clone called AMPlifier, I must say the boards sounded remarkably good. Eyetech Group Ltd. was also there, and had what I take to be a Scala MM400 machine with multimedia stuff on display. EASys, a new Workbench replacement or so it seems, was introduced to the public by a friendly guy who had apparently spent such a long time talking and explaining that his throat was regrettably sick when I came up to query him. "It is designed to make using Workbench easier," he told me before he almost choked on me. "Excuse me, I need to take a break." It was really too much for him. Sorry, my questions weren't intended to tumult you out of shape! On this Amiga Inc. domain I've been describing, AmigaActive was arguably the second of the two HEW stands where you could go and speak English as you would. The publisher was grinning there, having sold out his magazines by Saturday afternoon, but an extra supply of cover CD's saved the day for his stand, brought along by Neil Bothwick, one may presume. It's pleasing to see the magazine getting the attention it deserves; AmigaActive is just one mag for which one can honestly stand up and say, "Reading it is well worth the price." Again under the flanks of Amiga Inc.'s roof was the German magazine AmigaOS. Though a nice lady was posed at the stand promoting the last two issues for a cheap bargain, it never did receive as much attention as AmigaActive, I'm afraid. During all this stroll through the HEW, I have actually met notable people whom I had only known through the Internet till now: Petro T., Jurgen Haage, Neil Bothwick, Simon Archer, Ben Vost, etc. I still can't believe I'd been standing there conversing with fellow Amigans; just a few weeks ago, this wasn't even remotely possible. Ben Vost was a real nice chap, who pointed me in the right direction of the cool PC mouse adapter from ACT, just what is needed in Turkey. "Not bad!" would he grin when asked about the new-fashioned rivalry who had shown up with a stock of magazines at the fair. "I had a bunch of magazines, too, but I sold them all out before noon. Well someone has to represent Amiga Format at the fair, does he not?" Agree he would that "Petro isn't as happy," and as to my concerns about the future, Ben said that Amiga Format would definitely go on in the foreseeable future, and informed me of the brisk rumours flying around that Met@box's AmiJoe was actually running in an Amiga. Were it not for his nudge, I would have never found out about the significance of that unsightly board beside Walker in the Amiga museum. More about that later. I also had the honour of acquainting Bob Scharp and his wife, producers of the Gateway Computer Shows from Amigan-St. Louis, at the much-abused Amiga Inc. bar. It is amazing that they've flown all the way from the United States to attend this union and reassure people of the future. Cheers, and good fortune to this sweet couple! Neil Bothwick could be seen trekking to and fro, now with a busted cassette recorder, now with a minidisc recorder in his hand, speaking with dealers all around. Can't desist pressing CD's, can you, Neil? Just try not to blot people's eye out with those. Apparently Neil is working for both AmigaActive and Amiga Format, so long as his Javascript tutorial does not reach a conclusion, that is. As to who among the ex-CU-Amiga and AmigaActive writers Neil, as a long-time sojourner, thought had greatest writing talent, he was "not going to answer that," since they had "very different writing styles." "It's not at all easy to get the magazine on the shelves," he replied when I reproached him for the absence of AmigaActive in the rest of the world. "Magazine distribution is a very complex exertion even in Great Britain itself! It's not enough that you just send a shipment all the way across and expect them to be put on the shelves. Mostly it is impossible to distribute the magazine unless newsstands from that country request it. And how can someone request it, if they don't even know about it?" Hopefully this fair has extensively helped wake the international public to the fact that a brand new Amiga mag had ascended the soapbox. Simon Archer was also present (wow, you never know who you can meet at an Amiga fair), and though we babbled briefly about AmigaActive and the bitter Amiga situation, I couldn't convince him to kick Jonathan Drain off the mailing list. Better luck next time. As these guys occasionally sat at the Amiga Inc. bar, ate sausages, drank Bitburger and discussed minidiscs and 3-wheelers, a constant hubbub was afoot right outside at the very center of Amiga Inc.'s facade. All kinds of novelty items were up for grabs, with Amiga posters, pens, matchboxes, cups, colas and stickers selling like candy. You could even buy Amiga socks and boxer shorts if you desired, and spare me the jokes about the boing balls, I beg you. I bought four white Amiga mice, an Amiga pen, and an AmiCola, with a free mousepad and stickers to boot! This souvenir stuff is just great. What was more important though was that the most passionate Amigan discussions were carried out here with many a fan. It all got more silent after 16:00 on Saturday, yet no one was lonely enough to be able to sit around twiddling their thumbs. Hang around the stand and you could awe at people walking away with their new Amiga Magic packs picked up for a bargain. It is amazing to see how a computer designed with vision 7 years ago can catch the imagination of the demanding populace today. The Amiga Inc. stand's highlight this year was the Amiga history exhibition which could be observed in showcases on three sides of the central cube. Articles ranged from an ancient Commodore PC to the wedge box and desktop Amigas, "Best computer of the year" awards, the CDTV, the CD32 and finally the Walker. If you browsed carefully, you would definitely stumble upon the A500 PPC card by DCE that never actually got realised. "Is that even possible..?" you ask. An adapter kludge to bring the BlizzardPPC and the A500 motherboard together, and you have your panting hot box. Try running Wipeout on that! Don't forget to call your PC-owning friends home! Anyway, it really is a pity, but then, this is DCE. Geez. I really can't stress enough how phenomenally astounding it feels to dwell in an Amiga fair. There is no need for me to put in words which managing director gave me a free black mouse when he saw how unhappy I was that they were not for sale, which journalist pointed a shaky finger at me and scorned "Who the hell is this guy?", which magazine editor taught me how to pronounce "DOpus" correctly, which vice president I had to remind to press the [Enter] key after he had typed his answer to an IRC question (noticed the delayed answers?), which software dealer offered me a drink when he learned it was my first fair, how the managing director cheerfully took out his pen as he saw me approaching with a mousepad, or how I got stood up for an hour in the Cologne cold when two journalists, one publisher, and two more "friends" failed to show up where they said they would, ruining my day; the fair is all there to experience and apperceive. "Piracy!" barked one Amiga-lover at the Amiga Inc. stand. "They asked and longed for OS 3.5, they said it would sell to all Amigans, and when at last OS 3.5 comes out, at a very cheap price for an operating system, you can find MP3 sites all around with the pirated OS 3.5 free for download. It's very very difficult to work in a market like this." "Yeah, true," agreed another, "but you are forgetting that we Amigans have been kicked from the back and fell on our noses so many times now that we don't know what or whom to trust. We can't see the future!" "But we must not expect everything from Amiga Inc..." "I agree, but Amiga's owners haven't given us anything that we can believe in! We don't have a direction or vision to strive for! Who can foresee what the future of AmigaOS will be?" "The owners of Amiga aren't going to give us a present just because they feel like it. Don't just sit and wait. From now on, anything that is good, it's going to come out of the community [or congregation, one might say in this case]!" "I have no problems, as a developer, to bring forth better products for the computer I love, but I don't know what I should work on or what I should help with! If Amiga Inc. shows me a path, if they give me a vision, saying 'This is the direction we are taking, and here are our assets; you can trust us,' then I'm more than happy to develop in that direction. Amiga Inc. should use its resources and assets to set a solid goal, and must constitute the primary engine that drives the Amiga forward towards that design." "[silence] It's about the money..." "What?" "It's about the money. There is no boundless treasure sack where Amiga Inc. can scoop up the funds to research a new generation computer. The scheme you are suggesting is out of reach of Amiga Inc.; it's not going to happen..." "[silence] Then why didn't they tell us about it?? Why don't they just get up and say 'Money is the problem. We have limited resources, sorry,' and have it settled? They could let us know that we must toil more actively." "[silence] [nod]" "That's not something so awful. Until now, Amiga Inc. has encouraged and motivated us with one promising design or other! First they say 'OK, we're going in this direction, this is the future for Amiga,' and with all enthusiasm we start research and development towards that goal. And when we have come a long way and go up to show Amiga Inc. our inspiring products, they smile and say 'Well that's really neat, but it's not something we need; we have a brilliant vision and are going in this other direction now.' And when we devotedly pool our time and efforts towards that new promised future, Amiga Inc. says 'That is very nice, congratulations, but that direction is invalid now; we are going down this other path.' Why are they declaring imaginary designs and directions when they are not actually going to realise them? It is us that get misled." "[silence] [silence]" I've talked to many, even those who had spoken personally to Jim Collas after he had left, but got nowhere; obviously the exact reasons for his departure are not meant to be public. The predominant conjecture was that his plans had fallen in conflict with what Gateway wanted to do with the Amiga, and the visionary wouldn't have it. As to what Gateway wants to do with the Amiga, any powerful nose can smell out the foggy future through odoriferous sites like Amiga.org. Though some wouldn't admit it, every Amigan at HEW '99, even Petro T. himself, was tense with the bitter acidity of unkept promises and missed opportunities. There is no denying the fact that such an exquisite community never deserved such grief. "Right now, nobody's making any money in the Amiga market," said one journalist. "They work for the Amiga for the love of it." So even though there were no men in suits rushing in and out of cubicles, holding covert business talks behind closed doors at this fair, Amigans themselves were there, with their ablaze innovations and prescient consciousness. Gone are the faint OS 3.1 screens in low resolution that embarrassed us in front of PC-owning visitors. In practically every stand, OS 3.5 is installed and is dancing in full colour, high resolution; the whole face of the fair has jumped years ahead. With such broad appeal, AmigaOS 3.5 is likely to become the de facto standard for Amiga software. It was selling in large quantities at the fair, that's true, but Haage&Partner need to sell more. As I conveyed my wishes of success to Jurgen Haage, I noticed that despite his devotion to OS 3.5, he was rightly concerned about piracy. To and fro he was explaining to everyone that Haage&Partner had spent so much development effort on OS 3.5, and yet had maintained a price tag so cheap for an operating system, that the instant availability of pirate copies could only be destructive and hostile. One Amigan who had the undivided attention of a questioning group demanded "Do you think that Microsoft earns money from home users to whom he sells Windows? Nothing could be further from the truth. When Microsoft licenses its OS to a company with 500 employees, it gets paid the money for 500 licenses, and that's it! Amiga has no such opportunity, because Amiga does not sell to companies. The sole income of the Amiga market stems from one-to-one relationships with the home users themselves; when home users do not pirate but pay for the software they use, then the market can stay alive." At any rate, Jurgen Haage is seriously determined to realise OS 3.6 (where Miami might be replaced with Genesis because of financial problems), and wants to go on beyond that till the ulterior plan which every right-minded Amigan had in mind during the fair. After the Walker in the Amiga museum came an opened-up tower containing a PowerPC motherboard by IBM. Publication of the IBM PPC board specification to form a basis for the common PPC platform (remember PReP?) obviously caused an excited stir among eminent Amiga developers, since not only did it mean liberation from the CHRP swamp that had suffocated the PPC, but it also implied that a PPC-based Amiga-compatible motherboard could be produced with relative ease! That's right, an excellent scheme that had been proposed several years ago but never realised, namely an Amiga motherboard running on the PowerPC chip, is now at the very focus of Amiga Inc.'s plans! Of course, the operating system will have to be converted to the new CPU, a dragging exercise which Haage&Partner is willing to undertake. Jurgen Haage agreed with me that the untimely launch of the AmigaOS open source petition had put a lot of impulse OS 3.5 buyers off the cause. Getting suspicious about even the sincerest development effort is another consequence of our having become very irritable as a community. After a few months of the OS release, the campaign could have done no harm, but when it got launched right before the release, many people could have moodily convinced themselves that Haage&Partner shouldn't have done in-house OS development in the first place! Nonetheless, Jurgen Haage believes that AmigaOS can eventually go open source, but not in the way petitioners suggest. When patent problems are out of the way, open source development should be a strictly centralised and thoroughly guided effort, where everyone who is given access to the source must describe exactly what he has done with it and turn it in. Petro T., too, is not very interested in what the open source campaign can do. "My first priority now is to convert the OS to the PowerPC," he says. Obviously, the vice president is a little disappointed about the BoXeR; as he said on IRC, it is a good idea but a never-ending-story. (Blittersoft with their promised BoXeR weren't evidently at the fair.) Unfortunately, Amiga Inc. does not have the financial resources to sponsor any sort of new motherboard design. Moreover, nobody outside the community is going to support Amiga Inc. with the millions of dollars necessary to produce a groundbreaking AmigaNG prototype, let alone a new architecture. That is why the IBM board was a very welcome gift to those with an eye on the future. Even in its currently quite useless state designed as a server motherboard, which does not address the niche Amiga wants to appeal to, the IBM machine is definitely a non-vapour product, alleviating developers with most of the work done for them. Hence, after legal considerations are sorted out, after AmigaOS 4 emerges for the PowerPC, and after some tweaking of the IBM board to be able to fulfil the demands of the Amiga niche, we can well see a whole new line of PowerAmigas rocking the assembly lines in their wake! This grand plan is one of the most realistic we have been exposed to for a long time! So Amigans like me, who had been asking with a raised brow, "Well the Iwin site is a big prank... But what's the point? Why? What use does it have?" have been paid a blessed answer by developments which turned Iwin guys into Amiga Nostradami. That was what I had in mind when I mentioned "prescient consciousness." Iwin showed us a mirror onto ourselves, disclosing our arcane desires and exactly what prevented us from achieving them. It revealed that anything that is good, is going to come out of the community; when we believe in our own momentum and work towards a common goal, even dreams will one day be realised. Perhaps the most poignant moment of the whole fair was when an Amiga stand employee with a flaming red face and moist eyes voiced, "I've sworn, SWORN, that if I win the lottery, I will sponsor the development of the new Amiga computer architecture." So will the Cologne show let you breathe among Amigans with the same passion and vehemence as you. Together you'll get a glimpse of the foreseeable future, rejoice, and feel as if you've known each other for years. So, as we say in Turkish, today's Amigans dwell with "sails down on the water," but, as we say in Turkish, "the cur howls but the caravan walks," and, as we say in Turkish, "the visible ville needeth no guide." (C) Contents of this article are Copyright Caghan Demirci
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