You Oughta be in Ottawa! Show Report

[kwoodall]

You Oughta be in Ottawa!

The Ottawa Amiga Show is now past and a fantastic time was had by all.

The event started at 11am on a crisp Canadian Saturday morning, however the real action started the night before the event. After some early setup on Friday, the exhibitors all walked over to enjoy some Fine Indian Dining.  Actually it was my first time with Indian cuisine (I'm not known to be epicurious) but I enjoyed it thoroughly. Everyone had fun catching up on rumors and news. This went on until well past closing for the restaurant - we then moved to another business that served coffee and desserts and kept going for quite some time more.

So back to Saturday morning. The doors open and the Amiga fans begin sampling what the Ottawa Amiga Show has to offer. The show is primarily local developers (Technomages, ZEE4) and resellers (Livewire and others whose names I forgot - sorry!!). I was there to represent Genesi and show off Nova Design's ImageFX for MorphOS as well.

My Pegasos system, tried, tested and delivered to me at the Washington, DC Pegasos Event, performed like a champ. I showed MorphOS 1.4 and PegXlin (which I installed prior to the show) and presented the crowds with our new Presentation showing information and background on Genesi, Pegasos, MorphOS and the other operating systems for Pegasos, and the SuperBundle. I also occasionally would run a few dozen Amiga and MorphOS programs, play Quicktime and AVI movies and whatever else people wanted to see running. MorphOS never once crashed. Mplayer (a third party movie player) did lockup twice - but after a ten second reboot, MorphOS was back and amazing everyone.

Even though I work for Genesi, MorphOS is relatively new to me. I've been using it for a few weeks now and it continues to amaze me with it's stability and speed. It's very advanced and has a wide range of native software already. It's Amiga compatibility really amazes me - later that night everyone left at the show retired to the Royal Oak Pub several blocks away - and we were discussing what a smooth extension of the original Amiga concepts are seen in the Pegasos/MorphOS combination. Everyone saw how MorphOS supports pretty much ALL of the top Amiga standards. AHI, Warp3D, Rave3D, TinyGL, WarpUP, PowerUP...it just goes on and on. With the rapid expansion of the Pegasos market into other niche markets and the Linux market - it's really astonished people.

Back to the show. Over the course of the day about 50 people, some coming across the border from Syracuse, NY and some coming from the far northern reaches beyond Quebec, came to the show. One of the club members, Paul, had a giant wooden Amiga 1200 on display outside the main doors. He'd built it himself for a display some time back. It was a really beautiful piece of woodworking. Everyone seemed to be pretty happy with business at the show overall.

Now - back to the pub. Well, not much to report here. We drank. We ate. We swapped gossip all night long. You really need to be at one of these late night sessions to get an idea of how much fun they are to attend. Everyone made fun of everyone else's accent (Bonjour ya'll, eh? VDQ!) and country. Or province.

I couldn't attend brunch the next day (yes it's true, one event, three get-together event meals) and made my way back to America.

The photos:

http://pegasosppc.com/images.php?f=gallery&id=80

Photo 1: Paul, Tracey, Thomas, Jay, Zoltan, and Justin - at the Indian Restaurant

Photo 2: The Genesi table and display - someone's wife whose name I forget. Sorry!

Photo 3: The wooden Amiga 1200

Photo 4: The Electronic Morpho

Photo 5: Justin, Lucy and whatshername (sorry!!)

Photo 6: The whole inebriated gang!

[NeRP]

Wow, this sounds great that Genesi set up and organised this whole event.

Good thing there was absolutely no AmigaOS 4 demo, eh?

[Step]

MorphOS never once crashed. Mplayer (a third party movie player) did lockup twice - but after a ten second reboot, MorphOS was back and amazing everyone.

Sounds just like the util from MS, always blame the third party app. ;-)

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Hummm...  Seems to be an extra cursor key on that A1200 keyboard.  Any ideas?   :-o  :-?

[sdesros]

Actually, the event was organized by Technomages..
Here are my comments on ANN.

There was an OS4 machine present, but I don't know if there were official demos as I missed the first few hours of the show.  It was running on a G3-800 Amiga One and it was pretty much sitting there for people to poke and prod it I guess.  As mentionned in the link, I would have liked to have seen more software running on it.   :-(

On the MOS machine, I squeaked in a preview of Knights and Merchants, Alladin 4D (now I've got to unwrap the copy I got eons ago to install it), MAME (the slowdown in the game matched the slowdown on the actual arcade hardware I have at home).  And well, a bunch of stuff I already have on my system: MPlayer, etc.

[kwoodall]

I never even so much as suggested that Genesi setup or organized the event. I think the text of my report is fairly clear that we were attending/exhibiting.

As for the OS4 demo - would you consider me an unbiased reporter for that?

KW

[angrybrit]

IIRC wasn't an AmigaOne supposed to be given away? :-?

[sdesros]

Yes, there was a drawing for:
3rd Place: Quake II (Hyperion's port)
2nd Place: Alladin 4D
1st Place: AmigaOne motherboard.

Interestingly enough the 3rd place winner also won the 1st place.  Sadly, it wasn't me.

[NeRP]

>As for the OS4 demo - would you consider me an >unbiased reporter for that?
>
>KW

I would hope so, considering all the nice things I have heard said about you.  From what I have heard I would have expected you to reported much differently.

[angrybrit]

A motherboard?  I thought it was a complete system.

Oh well, (s)he must be happy still... :-D

[sdesros]

I would hope so, considering all the nice things I have heard said about you. From what I have heard I would have expected you to reported much differently.

What exactly does that mean?  

I don't believe I saw the MOS system crash while I was there.      The only time I saw it reboot, was when Kermit was showing the reboot times.   The only issue was that MiamiDx had issues with the Router so the system couldn't go online for longer then a minute or so.  But that's a MiamiDx issue.  

As for OS4, it seemed to have been as equally stable in the show.  It might have been restarted once or twice, but I don't think it was because of a crash or anything.  It seemed to work and respond great on a G3-800 Amiga One + VooDoo 3 PCI.  It looks good, OS4 seems to have a softer look (remided me of the newer KDE).

Both systems worked well while I was tinkering with them.   I didn't tinker as much with OS4, YAM was up and I felt like I was invading their system.  I ended up digging on the MOS system more when Kermit left the room....  Hope he doesn't mind.    I played a little bit of Knights and Merchants and tried out MAME.

The way I see it, at the end of the day we'll have two very similar systems that will both do the same thing.  The only difference will be how compatible they will be once they both have native software.  And will it be possible to have some sort of compatibility layer between them.

A motherboard? I thought it was a complete system.

From what I can tell, it was a motherboard.  I don't remember the CPU and/or if it had ram... It was funny because as the girl got her name drawn for the AOne she was asking: "So...  Err... Can I have it?"  And everyone sort of looked at one another and then a few people said: "Well, there aren't any rules stating that the winner can only have one prize".  So she was given the board.