Here is the second page:
...and a look into the future.[/u]
The principal new item on display at the show was the motherboard of the Amiga ONE (see
the photo below), the new Amiga hardware development. The board, on display at the stand of reseller Virtual Works, was unfortunately without a BIOS, the work on which had been completed only two days before the show, and had not arrived in time.
It was however possible to examine a pre-release of the new operating system AmigaOS 4.0. Two conferences had been organized to show the features introduced in this new release. (The second conference was reserved to developers.) They announced the commercial availability of the new OS and the new machines before the end of the year.
On the other hand, Thendic France demonstrated the functioning motherboard of the new machine Pegasos. In fact one could admire (and try out) a machine based on this motherboard running the operating system MorphOS, an AmigaOS clone for PowerPC processors. The version was not quite 1.0; it was fast but still not very stable. This machine's commercial availability before the end of the year, including the OS, was also announced.
Epic Interactive had its new Highway boards on sale; these provide a USB interface to older Amiga machines.
On the software side of things, the presentation of Supreme was very well received. This new package generates effects for video production with Darkage. The magazine Bitplane -- the only Italian magazine that specifically covers Amiga in addition to other alternative platforms -- had its new edition on display.
As to non-Amiga platforms, the largest crowds were before the BeOS User Group Italia stand, who demonstrated the capabilities of these multimedia machines, and Morrigan Development, who demonstrated the well-known abilities of the Macintosh on video editing and post-production. We must also note the large crowds at the Ebay Italian stand, on account of the users' high interest for alternative platforms and retrocomputing.
The benches occupied by various users were very busy. These had a little of everything, from a merchant of used items to systems for processing musical signals. Not absent were the various Amiga clubs and associations, starting with A.G.I. (Amiga Group Italia), which brings the various local user groups together at the national level. We also want to highlight F.O.S:O.Ita from among the various participants in this section, a club of fans of the comic strip Sabrina-online, and the demonstration organized by Elena Novaretti, who demonstrated the (stupendous) printouts from a program of her own dealing with the calculation of the convergence of mathematical functions, a program that at present has no equal on other platforms.
In any case, we have set our appointment for the following year for the new edition of Pianeta Amiga, in which the new items previewed this year ought to be present, given the relaunching of the Amiga platform and the ever-greater participation of alternative platforms.
