The Wakefield show was quite unlike any show I've been to before. It had an almost totally different 'feel' to the other similar events, I can't quite put my finger on it. Perhaps the expectations of the RISC PC II were too high, because nearly everyone I spoke to was disappointed with it in some way. Many people didn't like the controversial yellow colour of the case. There were also mixed responses to the chosen name - Phoebe 2100. The speed of the computer wasn't evident from the demonstrations given by the people at Acorn, and many of the new features in RISC OS 4 are merely those offered by freeware patches like !Blackhole, !Director, !raFS, and !Longfiles. Nothing taxing was being done on the machines at all. I would have loved to have seen ArcQuake or Era running on one, but there wasn't a glimpse of it.
In the games field, there was a slight buzz around from RCI and Artex.
R-Comp Interactive had Doom and Syndicate running on their stand, and they were taking orders for Syndicate and Abuse, as well as selling the PC Quake packs and the ARM 3 version of Doom.
The conversion of Syndicate looks very tasty indeed, with smooth 640x480 high-resolution graphics and improved sound. It includes the American Revolt missions, and instead of choosing in DOS, you get a desktop window where you choose between regular or revolt play. A few members of the Arcade team have been playing around with a demo version of the game, and it looks just as good up close.
Abuse was running in SVGA. RCI's version is resolution independent (it'll handle up to 1024x768), and the lighting and sound effects have been vastly improved. It includes the full level set as well as a level editor. Many Acorn users have had a taste of Abuse in the form of Lee Noar's original PD release of the shareware engine, but the danger of a repeat of the DOOM situation is very small as the retail version of the game's data set is virtually impossible to get hold of.
I spoke at length to Andrew Rawnsley at R-Comp's stand, and asked him if RCI had had any negotiations with Eidos Interactive, who do, after all, have their roots in the Acorn Market. Apparently, they haven't entered talks with Eidos for precisely that reason; Eidos know what sort of market there is attached to Acorn, and therefore might be somewhat sceptical about giving the go-ahead for major releases.
We also talked about Doom, which has had quite a few problems since it's release. Firstly there was the illegal copy of the author's half-completed conversion, then there was FreeDoom, and then there was RCI Doom, quickly followed by DIY DOOM.
RCI were extremely pleased to get their hands on Doom, and were quite happy to see it come into fruition on the Acorn. Understandably they were not particularly happy about the FreeDoom executable, but on asking the author kindly, he agreed to take it down.
The DIY Doom issue apparently isn't as bad as far as RCI are concerned, as people are likely to treat Andreas Dehmel's free port as a taster, going on to buy the commercial version, with its vast collection of master and extra levels.
There don't appear to be any bad feelings between Andreas and RCI, as RCI's ARM 3 Doom is actually a DIY engine. Apparently they came to an agreement a couple of weeks before the show that RCI could use DIY-generated binaries on certain conditions.
The problem with it being so expensive is really quite simple. To buy the boxed set, RCI have to pay about £2.00 less than on the highstreet. These boxes then have to have the player discs included, and distributed. The distribution reaches a bottleneck at this point.
If they send them off in bulk, the distributor wants a considerable cut of the profits. The distribution via mail also poses a problem, in that the box that the Doom set comes in doesn't really stand up too well to battering in the post, and therefore needs to be wrapped up in thick card, similar to the way a hard back book is. This cardboard alone costs nearly £1.00.
As you can see, with money going to Eddie Edwards (the author), money going to iD, money going to the dealer, money going to packaging, there isn't much margin for price cuts.
Artex had the Exodus music booming out of speakers on their stand, and as well as the release of their graphical adventure game Ankh, they were also showing off a preview of TEK. Artex sold about 40 copies of Ankh at the show, even though they were creating the CDs right at the stand using a PC with a writable CD drive. Artex were quite pleased with this, as Ankh doesn't have anywhere near as large a target market as TEK. A large number of copies were sold to R-Comp Interactive, who were also selling it on their stand, in their capacity as UK distributor of Artex titles.
Despite booking the stand and promising release of Destiny, there was no sign of Robert Templeman. The usenet community has been assured since the show that Rob is still committed to the release of Destiny, but nothing has been heard from him directly since long before the show, when he was promising its release.
The games arcade was running Doom and Syndicate, as well as Technodream (!) and Frak (the classic ProAction game).
The Datastore were selling Shuggy and Tanks on behalf of Werewolf Software, who were unable to make it to the show. They seemed busy, probably because the queue to see the RISC PC II passed by them.
The Wakefield show award for best enthusiast website was awarded to Acorn Arcade (apparently the first internet games magazine to do so), and the best commercial site to the Acorn Cybervillage (which seems to win such awards as a matter of course).
Aside from the computers, I bought a bakewell tart at the cafe, and upon eating it, I discovered that it was not in fact a bakewell tart, but a mince pie, with icing and a cherry.
Written by John Duffey, with input from Jon Hall, Richard Goodwin, Graham Crockford and Tim Fountain.