Quick AmiWest Report
Larry Anderson
Not really much to report from AmiWest this year (me being more a Commodore
8-bit fan than an Amigaphile), Diane (my wife) and I visited Saturday
afternoon, weather wasn't the 100+ degrees expected - probably in the more
comfortable low to mid 90s. Located a new location the Sacramento Clarion.
Heading toward the showbuilding I bumped into Robert Bernardo - travelling
commodore fan, and later on Jens Shonfield doing his Individual computers
thing. Unfortunately missed Jeri as she had rescheduled to only be there
Sunday (did leave her a couple Commodore goodies; hope she liked 'em).
Vendor turnout was a tad on the sparse side this year, though the good news
is Amiga OS 4 is FINALLY released, now it seems the wait (for many) is on a
G4 archetecture computer to better run it on. Jens didn't have any
Commodore 8-bit stuff this year (except for the Commodore Billboard/Funet
Archive CDs.) He was showing off the much smaller Catweasel Mk 4 card
(which allows for special drive access to use foriegn disks) and now
includes, a floppy pass-thru, PS/2 Keyboard and mouse support, Atari style
joystick ports and dual SID sockets. Gone is the Amiga clock interface.
As to AmigaOS 4.0 support, it's in the works... He also mentiond that
Retro Replays are currently all sold out and he needs to do another
production run of them.
Took a few minutes and visited with Robert and heard of his magical
Commodore Tour across North America and marvelled at his C1 baseball cap
(Baseball? hmm.. I think, it's a sport some people play... OUTSIDE!) and
all the Commodore wonders in his trunk. At the show I grabbed a couple
goodies from the sale tables, (a used hard drive and a very nice chip
puller). Robert snagged a 3-D camera (I suspect news of future show
reports from Robert in 3-D!).
As for the show there were a few Amiga groups and companies (The guys behind
Amiga OS, PageStream, LightWave, etc) in attendance, one users group came
all the way from Arizona. From the looks of Saturday it was a jovial
gathering, but sure wish there was more people (hmmm, maybe they should
include Commodore 8-bitters in the ranks we could surely boost the west
coast numbers! :-)
After the show closed up for the Saturday Robert and I left stuff for Jeri
with Jens and then we left (partly prompted by some crazed bicycle riding
stone-smahing guy who was wandering awfully close to our cars. - I kid you
not!) All in all it was a nice time.
Upcomming classic computing related West Coast events are:
the Classic Games Expo in San Jose - August 21st and 22nd
http://www.cgexpo.com/
and the Vintage Computer Festival (7th year!)
at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View
now rescheduled for Early October (2nd & 3rd)
http://www.vintage.org/2004/main/
Larry
--
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Larry Anderson - Sysop of Silicon Realms BBS (209) 754-1363 300-14.4k
Set your 8-bit rigs to sail for http://www.portcommodore.com/
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redrumloa
> He also mentiond that Retro Replays are currently all sold out
Sort of, I have a dozen or more in stock. We are the only US reseller I know of.