Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

C
eOur erstwhile editor
I reports from Europe's
, largest computer show
1order. It's a tribute to the estimated
750,000 people that visited
CeBit this year that they managed
it at all. Already, most hotels in the
city are fully booked for next year's show, and
possibly the year after, Already these same
hotels are taking reservations for Expo 2000
which will take place in Hannover with a predicted
40,000,000 visitors over the course of a
year.
So what hope did I have, only trying to make
my way here two weeks before the show? The
answer is none. Unless, that is, I wanted to
spend 3650DM a night for a hotel room. How
much is 650DM? Doh, only about E325 at the
current exchange rate. And that's per night It
does include breakfast but no baths in asses
milk or slaves fanning me and peeling grapes or
anything like that
Anyway, here's a tip for last minute visitors to
CeBit. When you arrive at Hannover airport, visit
the Hannover Hotel Service - you should be
able to find it easily enough - and queue there
for about two hours. They'll find you a room,
either in a private house, bed breakfast, or a
hotel conference room (which is where I
'stayed). The cost shouldn't be more than
100DM a night, unless you rent an apartment,
in which case you should look for about 150DM
a night. But you don't really want to know
about this, you want to know all abbut the
show.
ENORMOUS
IT'S MASSIVE!! It really is. It took me at least half
an hour of walking to even reach the
Escom/Arriga Technologies stand, going past
stands that were larger than a three-bedroomed
detached house showing off PCs, printers,
imagesetters, storage devices, ATM machines,
and any amount of different computer-related
equipment. At the front of one of the stands, I
don't know which, there was an HDTV in a case
filled with bubbling water, showing a fish tank.
The only difference I could see between it and a
real tank full of fish was that the HDTV display
looked more real (and certainly a lot easier to
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Village Tronic's large stand
was jumping with interested
Amiga users all eager
for a look at the new
Picasso 11 Plus or Picasso 4.
If they were disappointed
with their non-appearance,
they soon cheered up when
they saw the new version of
MainActor Broadcast (the
update is freely available on the Main Concept Website at
http://www.ac-copy.comimaincpthtml), the DKB Wildfire 060
card for the A2000, and the new line of software from ProDAD.
The DKB board is special in several ways. Firstly, it has an
ethernet port built-in, it also has a FAST SCSI 11 controller giving
up to 7Mbisec, a PCI expansion bus allowing for a new Picasso
card to be integrated with the accelerator, and perhaps most
importantly, the ability to run at a true 66MHz, something no
other 060 accelerator yet does. All you A4000 owners will be
happy that a board for your machines will be out by the end of
the summer, and A3000 owners will be catered for by the end
of the year.
AMIGA COMPUTIN
MA
look after). So eventually, like
Amundsen to the North Pole, I
reached the Escom stand. It was packed.
Unlike Compaq or NEC, who'd created an air
of business-like silence and space, the Escom
stand was, by contrast, more like a heaving
nest of termites, with about as much room to
move around as on the Tokyo subway. They
had the usual PCs (some Commodore
badged - it's nice to see that Escom are getting
something for their 510 million dollar
outlay) and some Al200s. The Al200s were
either showing off games, music or the new
Surfer pack replete with Mindwalker
Web browser, of which we have a working
preview copy.
As we've explained to death already, the
pack comes ready to run when you buy it,
and with just a phone call to IBM's toll free
number you are ready to roll. The modem
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supplied with the pack will be
.' to individual distributors in each
country to decide which one will be
bundled with the machine.
However, the best thing on the Amiga
Technologies stand was, without doubt, the
first new Amiga since the A4000T burst on
the scene back in '93. The machine (codenamed
Walker at the moment) is a bizarre
design as you will see from the photos on
these pages, but it really looks the part and
says that the Amiga is a different machine.
Even with all these trendy PCs with black
cases or integral speakers coming out of their
d sides, the Walker still stands out from the
e crowd.
l The Walker will come with a largish IDE
, hard drive (SCSI is apparently too expensive),
b 5 or 5Mb RAM (4Mb Fast, I or 2Mb Chip) -
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(h Top, the Pica sso I t Plus boa rd Wa ll on displa y,
not in use . Be low, Bob Prudde n proudly shows um his
060 a cce le ra tor for the A2 0 0 0