In late June Atlanta was the site of the annual Amiga Developer's Conference. Held at the Omni Hotel (also the Atlanta headquarters of CNN), there was more than enough activity to keep an entire network of journalists busy. People attending the three day event were able to choose from the wide assortment of technical seminars presented each day.
There were many well attended sessions devoted to the new Workbench 2.0 operating system. Programmers from most of the Amiga companies represented seemed intent on getting the information needed to make sure their applications not only worked under 2.0, but was able to take advantage of new features. Coincidentally, the DevCon occurred just as the A3000 began appearing on dealers shelves, and several sessions were designed to inform attendees on the inner workings of the A3000 hardware, especially the Zorro III bus. CBM engineers showed a prototype of a 32 meg ram card for the A3000, but explicitly stated it was there just to demonstrate a hardware design and was not an official product. (However, as those who have attended previous DevCon's can attest, these prototypes often end up as products.) Between sessions representatives from several third party hardware companies hinted they would have their own high capacity ram cards for the A3000. Other 'rumored' A3000 products included 68040 accelerator cards as well as speciality video cards that take advantage of the A3000's inline video and expansion slots.
Other topics that were discussed in sessions included network products and the new AmigaVision authoring system. With AmigaVision, CBM seemed to be quite interested in enticing developers onto the multimedia bandwagon. And multimedia was also a major topic in many of the seminars on CDTV, CBM's new consumer based CD/Amiga hybrid. While there were more than a few sessions for the would be CDTV developer to attend, there also seemed to be quite a few 'closed door' meetings between CBM staff and current developers. If DevCon is any indication, it would appear that Commodore is quite serious in it's intent to be a major player in the consumer multimedia market.
