The Acorn Southeast Show took place in Stevenage on the 27th June, the weather outside was dull and dreary but there was cause for excitement to be found within. Four members of the Acorn Arcade team were at the event, myself (Alasdair Bailey), Tim Fountain, Alex Holloway and James Stevens. The show was well attended but not overly busy so there was no need to wait a long time to talk to people.

As promised, R-Comp had copies of Ankh and Syndicate on sale along with Quake Resurrection packs minus the Acorn player programme. The Acorn Quake player should ship within the next few months and we were given an exclusive preview of the engine so far but it was highly unstable and needs many more bugs ironing out before even a beta test release can be considered.

R-Comp were responsible for running a small games arcade but, unfortunately, there was noting exciting here, just a few A7000+s running Doom and Syndicate as would be expected.

The Fourth Dimension were also represented at the show and were selling all their existing games but a "logistical error" meant that Super Snail was not on sale at the show.

Werewolf Software had a small stand and were selling copies of their platformer Shuggy along with TANKS and also the memory-saving utility, RAMplify. APDL had a packed-full stand offering copies of all their PD CDs along with all the budget games which were formerly sold by The Datafile.

Many other Acorn companies, large and small also had stands including Argo Interactive, Jonathan Duddington, CJE Micros and many others. IMS were displaying a prototype of their RISC OS portable, Peanut, which will hopefully allow us all to play our favourite games away from our desktops. Another highlight of the show was the talk by Chris Cox on Acorn‘s future plans along with a demonstration of a live RiscPC 2. The new machine looks very promising and will, no doubt, breathe new life into the Acorn market.