===========================================================================
                     Cologne Computer '95 Show Report
  Jeroen T. Vermeulen                                       jtv@xs4all.nl
  Hans Guijt                                         h.guijt@inter.nl.net
===========================================================================

WOA Cologne, day 1 (Friday november 10th)

We've just come back from the World of Amiga show in Cologne; in one word:

                               MAGNIFICENT!

The Amiga really is back.  Our impressions are reported below.

There were two halls: One for the Amiga, and one for the "other platforms"
(PC, Mac, Acorn).  The "other" hall was fairly quiet, and we visited the
Amiga side mostly.  Amiga Technologies logos and the much-advertised slogan
"Back for the Future" were everywhere.

A1200 Magic Packs were sold by many companies, as well as the new M1438S
monitor.  Although there was relatively little new software, the atmosphere
was very upbeat--which was perfectly appropriate.

We stopped at several stands for a closer look:

AMIGA TECHNOLOGIES:

AT had a big attractive-looking stand in the middle, manned exclusively by
representatives of 3rd-party developers (4th Level Development, Haage &
Partner, Interworks, and others) in cool black T-shirts with the AT logo. 
Machines were mostly high-end: Very sexy A4000Ts, all fitted with MagicWB
and ethernet/arcnet/ graphics cards etc.  Next to each machine was a
summary of the goodies inside.

There were also several A1200s showing off the I-Glasses, and even one with
synthesizer keyboard for the musically inclined.

The AT stand made a very fresh, bright, professional impression.  While the
machines were all equipped differently and manned by staff from different
companies, the overall look was still consistent and well-organized.

I would sure buy a computer from those people ;-)

In any case, we bought some very flashy T-shirts with the new logo.  Many
people were wearing similar ones with the "Intel Outside" logo on the back,
but I don't know where they got them.

PHASE 5:

Believe it or not, the Phase 5 stand had a real PowerPC development board!
It contains two CPUs (68030 and a 604 PPC chip) and appears to be a
prototype of the PowerUp card which should be available sometime next year
at prices in the 1000-2000 DM price range.  It will be available in both
603e and 604 versions.

According to a leaflet we picked up, Phase 5 is porting Exec to native PPC
code and other libraries will follow.  Old programs will be run under 68k
emulation.  Partners mentioned ("we are not alone") include Softwood,
Almathera and Maxon.

Commercial developers are to receive their boards early '96.

Also at the Phase 5 stand was the 2-GO!  DSP card which combines four DSP
processors with a 50 MIPS RISC controller and a 100 MFLOPS FPU.  Internal
data throughput is said to be 4.2 Gigabytes per second, external throughput
is 32Mb (Zorro III).  The card is supposed to execute 2 BILLION
instructions per second!

The card can be used for things like encoding or decoding JPEG pictures and
MPEG animations, and realtime sound and graphics manipulations.  Encoding a
JPEG picture (res.  352*240) takes only 8 milliseconds!

As the slogan said: "Where do you want to be tomorrow?"

We also learned that the 3.0 release of CyberGraphX will include 3-D
primitives.  CyberGraphX 3.0 will also be available for the PowerUp and
2-GO!  boards.

MS MACROSYSTEM GMBH:

These good people were showing off their 060-based Draco with the XiPaint
graphics package which seemed to be selling like hotcakes.  One machine was
quietly mixing away at some real-time video input, while the eager masses
were lining up to get the feel of Final Writer on another.  It was quite an
impressive sight; pages were flying by at a speed that must have been close
to the monitor's refresh rate!

One of our "mission objectives" was to find out whether WordPerfect will
run on the Draco.  The staff were very helpful and even let me run WP from
my own disk, which I had brought along for this purpose.  It gave us no
trouble during our very brief test (although the representative told us
this did depend on using Topaz 8 as the screen font) and felt very
responsive and flashy compared to our "good old" WARPEngine/040/40!

MacroSystem GmbH has nothing whatsoever to do, by the way, with either
MacroSystem Development (of WARPEngine fame) or with the less well-known
company MakroSystem.

On the price list, curiously enough, was also a 33MHz "Draco 040" for DM
4495.  The 060 version costs DM 5995, and includes CD-ROM and 4Mb of
graphics memory.

MUI 3.0:

Tons of pamphlets told us the new version of the Magical User Interface has
now been released.  It was available at Hirsch & Wolf's stand for DM 40.
One of these little pamphlets was actually the first thing we saw as we came
up the stairs.

Advertized features include Bubble Help, Drag-and-Drop and many that we've
forgotten.  We apologize.

MAXON COMPUTER GMBH:

We were much impressed by a video produced by Tobias Richter using their
Cinema 4D product range.  Some of this stuff even looked better than
Babylon 5!  The package is being ported to Mac and Windows, and a small
demo rendering on the PowerMac of a spiral staircase and a few smaller
objects took just a few seconds; the Windows port wasn't as far along yet.

For good measure we asked to see a demonstration of their C++ compiler as
well, but they weren't really planning to give any.  Unfortunately no free
demo version was available either.  Casually mentioning our plans to write
a report on our experiences *almost* worked miracles: On the verge of
giving us a free copy including manuals, manager Harald Schneider finally
understood that we were not writing for a magazine.  More on this below.

HAAGE & PARTNER:

Out of the blue, there is a shiny new C/C++ compiler for the Amiga!  It's
called StormC and comes with a very intuitive graphical user interface.
There appears to be some kind of relationship with Maxon, which Maxon's
manager didn't seem very eager to discuss--mostly due to being in a hurry,
I must add.

We got ourselves a preview version of StormC and plan to post a review
later on; unfortunately we won't be able to compare it to Maxon's compiler.
Perhaps I dropped the term "c.s.a.misc" a little too casually, giving the
manager the false impression that this was a magazine we were writing for
(oh well, if ever we do start an Amiga magazine I guess CSA Misc would be
as good a name as any other).

There was some confusion as to the relationship between StormC and Maxon
C++; according to one Maxon representative, StormC was based on the Maxon
compiler.  He even told us that some requesters in StormC used the name
Maxon in stead of StormC, but searching the entire preview distribution for
that word yielded nothing.  Perhaps this was just a misunderstanding.

The Haage & Partner representative said they had been working on StormC for
just under a year with a team of five programmers, but it was easier
because they used a lot of "older" code--whatever that may mean.

At any rate, the compiler looks GREAT!  It has intelligent Drag-and-Drop,
clickable error messages, easy project management, an editor with syntax
highlighting, a debugger which interacts with the editor, and even resource
tracking.  If SAS comes back (and I hope they will) they could face some
stiff competition from this newcomer.

That's all folks.  After today, there can be no doubt that AT is serious
about the Amiga!