[vox] AmiWest report

[Bill Kendrick]

So I went to AmiWest 2003 today at the Holiday Inn in Sacramento.

It was a pretty cool little show.  I saw a chap I knew from the Atari 8-bit community
(John Harris; he's the guy who wrote the Atari port of "Frogger"), met a woman who
did the board design for the "Commodore One" [1] - a new motherboard which uses
FPGAs to emulate the Commodore 64, but also has a cartridge port, slots for SID audio
chips, etc. [2]

I saw a number of systems running Linux, as well.  I believe all were running Debian
and had KDE up on display.  These were all running on the new "Amiga One" hardware,
which is PowerPC-based.  The motherboard I saw had a daughterboard with the CPU on it,
and apparently you can plug in PowerPC, MIPS or x86!

Amiga OS 4.0 seems to be the latest and greatest for the die-hard Amiga OS fans.


I gave one fellow a brief rundown of Debian's APT, and showed him the ins and outs of
The Gimp, which was fun.  (I seemed to draw a small crowd ;^) )


Genesi was there, with their Pegasos hardware running MorphOS operating system.
I spoke with some of the folks in that community, and based on what I saw (Quake II)
and heard, it sounds like I might soon have versions of my SDL-based games running
on this new OS. >:^)  Hehehe...


Anyway, since Linux use is growing in the Amiga community, and some of this new hardware
is able to run Linux (and I know some of you out there are very interested in non-Intel
architectures... Henry?), I'm going to see if we can get a presentation or two at LUGOD
some time in the future.


To sum it up, I'm glad I went!  Honestly, I should've gone both days... so much to soak in!

-bill!

-- 
bill@newbreedsoftware.com                           Got kids?  Get Tux Paint! 
http://newbreedsoftware.com/bill/       http://newbreedsoftware.com/tuxpaint/

[1] The board itself is a riot.  It has the words "PRESS PLAY ON TAPE" and
    "DESTROY HIM, MY ROBOTS" on it.  It apparently has a Pac Man on there.
    It even has a cute punky outline sketch of the woman who designed the board
    in between the SID sockets.  She was quite goofy, obviously.  :^)
    Also, apparently, she's working on programming the FPGA to emulate Atari 8-bit
    systems.  Eeeexcellent.

[2] People in the Commodore community love their C=64 SID chips.  Admittedly, they ARE
    excellent little sound synthesizers.  But come on, do you really need to stick one
    on a floppy drive controller card for your PC!?  I'm _serious!_  :^)