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==  WOA '94 Report                                        By: Andy Dean  ==
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        The World of Amiga show is the first major Amiga show here in the
UK since the demise of Commodore.  We visited the show on the last day of
the three (Sunday), and after walking around most of the Wembley complex we
happened upon Exhibition Hall 1 and went in...

        The whole show took place within one large hall, with the centre
being dominated by the large "Amiga" stand.  Here lies the main difference
between this show and those that have been held previously - there didn't
really seem anyone in charge of the main exhibit.   Previously Commodore
owned the centre exhibit and had at least a small booth manned with people
giving out Commodore literature.  This time, nothing.  The Amiga stand
itself was home to many CD32s, a wall of TVs and a car but no "Amiga"
employees.  Needless to say, there wasn't any new Commodore hardware on
show at this stand, although Workbench3.1 and some new A1200s could be
found on nearby stands.

        The story gets stranger though, as upon walking in everyone was
presented with a genuine Commodore bag (complete with Commodore
chicken-head logo) and there was a stand selling "official Commodore
merchandise".  Even the less observant visitor couldn't help but notice
that there was something a bit strange afoot in the Commodore household.
Attendance seemed healthy, not so busy that you couldn't move and not
deathly quiet; I don't know how this compared to the previous two days.

        Newtek were one of the first stalls you saw as you entered, and
were showing a looping video of various industry graphics gurus extolling
the virtues of Lightwave.  No actual machines were to be found on the
Newtek stand though, Amiga or otherwise.  Next to Newtek were DPS, showing
their Personal Animation Recorder as well as demonstrating some of the
Video Toaster's realtime video effects, something which we don't see too
much of in the UK.

        Lightwave itself was to be found amply demonstrated elsewhere
though, none better that on the RAMIGA / ACE stand.  Here John Allerdyce
was showing off the Tower Assault intro and outro animation sequences (no
need to play the game, now I've seen how it ends :)) while John's Raptor
stood menacingly by.

        Staying with graphics, Almathera were demonstrating and selling
their new "Photogenics" image manipulation package.  This really does look
like an excellent program and at a price of 49pounds (show price) it seemed
to be selling like hot cakes.  Photogenics allows the loading and saving of
many common file formats, real media painting tools (Chalk, Felt tip,
Crayon ...) and special effects (Emboss, Distort, Rub through ...).  The
image is shown in either HAM8, 256 colour or greyscale and the program
seemed fairly fast even on a standard Amiga.   The program is entirely
modular with loaders, savers, effects and painting tools all loaded
externally - it looks a little like a baby version Adobe's Photoshop.  The
downside to the program are its requirements - Workbench3.0 or later, an
AGA Amiga (although third party graphics cards are supported) and a fair
amount of memory (they suggest that it can be run in 2MBytes, but I'd say
4MBytes was a more sensible minimum).  Coming somewhere between a paint
package and an image processing program, this program is going to do very
well.

        Incidentally, I saw Photogenics running on a A4000/040 equipped
with a Cybervision64 graphics card - now that's really fast!

        Jim Drew was showing off the new EmplantPC software, proof that it
really does exist and it really does work.  The presentation of the setup
software seemed very similar to the Mac emulator and Jim had it running
some simple text based and CGA software.  Apparently the VGA graphics
drivers aren't finished yet so Windows was not shown running, which was a
pity as it's difficult to judge the speed of the emulation with text based
applications.  The Mac emulator was also being shown, this now looks like a
very polished product.  Emplant boards were being sold by Blittersoft at
the show (Emplant Deluxe, 299pounds) so with the cost of the PC emulator
being 99pounds the possibility of having both usable Mac and PC emulations,
SCSI port and AppleTalk for less than 400pounds this seems like good value.
Jim also had strong views on which of the 2 main players in the Commodore
buyout he supported - I'll give you a clue, it wasn't CEI.

        PC Task 3.0, Chris Hames's entirely software PC emulator, was also
on display and I saw it running Windows on a A4000/030.  A fine achievment,
but to my mind it was running too slow to be usable for anything but the
simplest of tasks.

        Digita had a large stand, where they were apparently showing their
new database "Datastore".  Unfortunately, I can't get excited about either
(i) Digita products or (ii) databases, so a Digita database program had me
heading straight away.

        Attendance by the UK Amiga magazines was good, with most of the
major magazines being represented.  It was also good to see some of the
minority magazines like "JAM" also present; incidentally, the show
programme was produced entirely on an Amiga by Jeff Walker of JAM magazine.
I expected more PD houses to be present (I only counted two) - I can
remember the PD houses being very popular previously.

        I can't really comment on the new games being shown, as I didn't
really pay much attention; it was noticeable though that there were
considerably less game-playing youngsters at the show than previous shows.


        Most of the software on sale was slightly cheaper than could be
obtained normally (ArtDeptPro 115pounds, Lightwave 415pounds, PageStream3
175pounds, VistaPro3 22pounds) but there were some bargains on older
software (DPaint4AGA 8pounds, Lemmings 1pound).   Hardware could also be
obtained slightly cheaper (IDE hard drives were about 10percent cheaper
than normal) and again some bargains could be found (a hand scanner for
A500 only was 30pounds).

        Well, you can't go the a show and not buy anything and so we came
away with Photogenics and VistaPro3.  All in all, a pleasant day and I hope
that in next year's show the main stand will actually belong to someone.