Attendence was definitely down this year, with the numbers hovering around the minimum needed to recoup the costs. It's a shame considering the amount of time and money invested by the organisers, without whom shows like these around the world just wouldn't happen. Shows have formed a vital part of the Amiga community - for all the benefits of the Internet in keeping the spirit alive, there's still nothing else quite like a real, live face-to-face meeting of the die hard few.
After meeting and greeting organiser Michael Carillo (I just know I've probably spelt his name wrong now!), I made a quick tour of the exhibition hall. Now, credit where credit is due, the Thendic/MorphOS display had to be the star of the hall. No disrespect to the other exhibitors, but Thendic had a very polished exhibition consisting of several silver Pegasos PowerPC machines running the beta test release of MorphOS. There also appeared to be LinuxPPC available to try, and I'm sure I also saw some Mac emulation for good measure. Passers by could sit down at a machine and try out MorphOS - it has to be said that it does look pretty good. I hope the alleged port of MorphOS to the AmigaOne is both true and stable, because I'm certainly interested.
Amiga, flanked by the Blackpool Amiga Club and Eyetech, occupied the opposite half of the hall and were at a distinct disadvantage. With development of OS4 being undertaken as a series of modules and only the Exec SG kernel currently ported to the Eyetech AmigaOne, Amiga were never really going to be able to show anything visually pleasing - after all, the nitty gritty of OS4 is mainly under-the-hood. The new Amiga TCP/IP stack was being put through its paces via network Quake, but for me the real gem was probably the least impressive looking of the lot. Blink and you would quite likely have missed it...
Eyetech had some of the new AmigaOne motherboards available, with one machine booting up the Exec SG kernel. Exec SG is the new version of the Exec core of
