2nd Annual Developer's Conference (quick report)
Marco Papa
held in Monterey, CA (nov. 5-7). Well , it was great. As everybody else
I signed non-disclosure, so I'll comment only on stuff that is public record.
The talks were good. A lot of the original Amiga hardware and software
designers gave talks (Carl Sassenrath, Jimm Mackraz, Bart Whitebook,
Dale Luck, Neil Katin, Glen Keller, and of course =RJ Mical=). Dave Maynerd
of Electronic Arts, Tim King (AmigaDOS), Mike Boom (Midi), Tim Jenison
(Newtek), Bill Volk (Aegis) and Carolyn Scheppner (CA-Westchester) also
gave talks. Dave Wecker Ray tracing images were shown (and distributed
in IFF format). Some of the products shown at the fair: Starboard2 by
MicroBotics, large memory expansion and MAs-Drive 20; ASDG Mini-Rack-C and
Mini-Rack-D expansion chassis, Zorro memory boards and Intelligent Multi-
function board (with 4 DMA-driven serial ports, IEEE GPIB, 68881 math chip);
DigiPaint from NewTek, Aegis Draw plus, an IBM 3276 emulator from ProtoCom,
a 20 Meg SCSI Hard Drive from C Ltd.; Zing! (very nice replacement for
CLI) from Meridian Software; Memory cards, hard disks and real-time clock
from Side-Effects Inc.; The Xpander II 2Mb ram board, SCSI multi-function
card from Pacific Cypres; the 4Mhz turbo-Amiga from CSA; The Alegra
Memory Expansion Unit from Access Associates, the final release (really!)
of Sublogic flight simulator running on 3 different amigas with 3 different
views (left right center); A-Talk 1.1 with VT100 emulation (yes, from my
company), a real-time clock that uses the joystick port from Byte-By-Byte
(which laso had the PAL and a lot of other stuff.
Few of last year attendees were present
(which were mostly MAC developers). This was a totally new crop of developers.
Disks were copied until early morning with a "strange" Amiga with 4 external
drives that would copy the same disk concurrently. By the way, John Draper
was also there and his gadget editor got an unrecoverable read/write error
before duplicating it. Jim Goodnow stayed up until 1:30AM (I am not sure
since I left before) trying to help John to fix a version that he downloaded
from the well, but with no complete success. The gadget editor is very nice.
The last night was the one with the prizes. Most of them went to Electronic
Arts, the hardware award went to DigiView (Why all those software awards
and only one hardware award?), Deluxe Paint won as the best program overall.
The most applause went to Jim Goodnow of MANX and Fred Fish which received
something like the "oustanding award". A couple of Music videos were shown
(using the never-to-be-released Live!), a video from the Live Art Show at
SigGraph in Dallas, and two really outstanding short movies from a guy
I don't remember that left everyone speechless. These were two short
3-D Star-Wars-like movies done in super-8 off the Amiga Screen with NO
help from amy other device. Stuff that you see only at SigGraph.
A new developer support program was outlined by David Street, that will go
in effect next January, and will be presumably made public by C-A in the
near future.
The workshops were great. I went to =RJ='s Programmer Workshop, that
quickly became "the Story of AMIGA from the start" including the suit with
Atari, etc..
All, in all software developers were pretty enthusiastic, while that was
not the case for the hardware developers for reasons that will become
apparent in the future.
The highlight of the whole thing were two commercials by =RJ= and Dale Luck
that seemed very similar to Bartle's and James Wine Coooler commercials,
including a "thank you for your support" message at the end.
-- Marco Papa
Felsina Software