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	Events : AmiWest 2010 Personal Show Report
	posted by ssolie on 2-Nov-2010 18:35:58 (4274 reads)

With banquet attendance exceeding 60 people, there is no doubt this was a well attended AmiWest. Add in the fact original Amiga developers Carl Sassenrath and Dale Luck were present and you had one heck of a 25th anniversary Amiga show!

This year I'm going to concentrate on the AmigaOS side of AmiWest so there is no clone news from me this time. I was also not representing anybody but myself at the show this year. This means everything that I said at the show or that is written here is my opinion and my opinion only.

Friday started with hunting down my Sam460ex board which was supposed to be waiting for me at the show. Yes, it was a tad last minute. A huge thanks goes to AmigaKit's technician Chris for guiding me through the install into my infamous Antec Skeleton case. Engineers and technicians rarely get along so well. Thanks again Chris!

After fighting with the usual assortment of software bugs expected with any unreleased product, the Sam460ex was booting up into an AmigaOS 4.1 alpha software install. The ethernet driver was just not cooperating with the hotel's network for some reason so we had to do without. The rest of the Sam460ex was working well enough and show attendees were invited to play with the new Amiga system at the AMUC table. I noticed the graphics displayed some visible corruption here and there so I suspect the SM502 graphics driver may also need some work.

The Sam460ex hardware included 2 GB of DDR2 RAM and the CPU was running at a nice 1.2 GHz. Thanks to Paul, we also had 4 SATA ports available via a SII3114 card. Full details on the Sam460ex are available directly from ACube Systems and I'm not going to repeat them here.

Friday night I organized a private face to face meeting with several key Amiga people and I was happy to have most of them there. Communication is always a critical problem and I find meeting in person to be the most effective. We all agreed up front that this was a "safe" place to discuss things so I won't be sharing the details of what was discussed. The secrecy has nothing to do with NDAs and everything to do with mutual respect.

Late Friday, Carl Sassenrath delivered on his promise and we had a version of REBOL 3 available in time for AmiWest. For those not up to date on REBOL I invite you to explore the REBOL web site. Getting an Amiga version of REBOL 3 ahead of other platforms like Mac OS X was also quite a thrill. Carl is a tad biased and some of his code is still running inside AmigaOS 4 to this day. And yes, REBOL 3 was running fine on A-EON Technology's X1000 as well.

I am now working on providing the REBOL 3 GUI for the Amiga version of REBOL 3 so if you would like to help test it, please get in contact with me.

Saturday was very hectic as I attempted to toss together a system capable of connecting to the internet to display my presentation. My backup plan (i.e. Paul) seems to have the worst luck and of course his Sam440ep had a capacitor that popped off thanks to some rough security screening. Luckily, we were at AmiWest and thus some very good technicians and the repair was done in short order (thanks Adonis!). For some reason, IBrowse was the only thing that could get us by the hotel's internet screening software and we were up and running. We didn't have time to get into the root cause given I was up right after REBOL Technologies. I presented a bit I called Modern Amiga Programming where I tried to highlight some of the major differences between programming on AmigaOS 3.x and earlier compared to programming on AmigaOS 4.x and later. I do plan to extend this document and I would appreciate any constructive feedback.

Saturday evening was the banquet which included a yummy meal as per usual. Trevor Dickinson headlined the event and did an excellent job showcasing how he migrated from Amiga to Amiga over the years. I remember commenting to the table that this felt a lot like a wedding with speeches and a mic going around the audience. Many people had touching stories about how they fell in love with their Amiga computers and how it affected their lives. I did not have a touching story to tell but I did manage to win the John Zacharias Memorial Award for outstanding technical assistance to the Amiga community for 2010. This was a great honour and a complete surprise to me. Thank you again for this award.

Sunday we had a flight to catch so I wasn't able to be there for the show closing. The crowd is always thinner on Sunday but we still managed to attract people visiting my Sam460ex-based Amiga system complete with REBOL 3 of course. A quick goodbye to everybody and the show was over for another year.

P.S. A much more technical look into AmigaOS 4.x will follow in a subsequent report.

See you next year!
--Steven

STORYID: 5702

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pavlor

Re: AmiWest 2010 Personal Show Report
Posted on 2-Nov-2010 20:04:37

[ #1 ]

Elite Member

Joined: 10-Jul-2005
Posts: 9636
From: Unknown

Thanks.

Status: Offline

sundown

Re: AmiWest 2010 Personal Show Report
Posted on 2-Nov-2010 21:16:45

[ #2 ]

Elite Member

Joined: 30-Aug-2003
Posts: 5120
From: Right here...

@ssolie

"AmigaOS 4.x" ?

_________________
Hate tends to make you look stupid...

Status: Offline

davebraco

Re: AmiWest 2010 Personal Show Report
Posted on 2-Nov-2010 21:30:41

[ #3 ]

Regular Member

Joined: 3-Jan-2005
Posts: 134
From: Belgium

Thanks for the report! I'm looking forward to read the AmigaOS 4.x technical one.

_________________
A1200PPC / Sam440ep / Sam460ex / X1000 / X5000 OS4.1

Status: Offline

elwood

Re: AmiWest 2010 Personal Show Report
Posted on 2-Nov-2010 21:35:11

[ #4 ]

Elite Member

Joined: 17-Sep-2003
Posts: 3428
From: Lyon, France

@ssolie

thumbs up. Thanks for the report...

_________________
Philippe 'Elwood' Ferrucci
Sam460 1.10 Ghz
AmigaOS 4 betatester
Amiga Translator Organisation

Status: Offline

DAX

Re: AmiWest 2010 Personal Show Report
Posted on 2-Nov-2010 21:48:29

[ #5 ]

Elite Member

Joined: 30-Sep-2009
Posts: 2790
From: Italy

Great report!
I wonder if all 460EX will be overclockable to 1.2Ghz

_________________
SamFlex Complete 800Mhz System + AmigaOS 4.1 Update 4
Amiga 2000 DKB 2MB ChipRam GVP G-Force040 Picasso 2 OS3.9 BB2
AmigaCD 32

Status: Offline

Jamie_S

Re: AmiWest 2010 Personal Show Report
Posted on 2-Nov-2010 22:18:16

[ #6 ]

Cult Member

Joined: 26-Oct-2003
Posts: 796
From: Purbeck, UK

Thanks for the report, very interesting especially to hear that the 460 was demo'd with OS4 and a 4 port SATA card. The Modern Programming Guide is also a useful resource i hope you're able to find time to expand and maintain it. Looking forward to your OS4 technical update

Status: Offline

kyle

Re: AmiWest 2010 Personal Show Report
Posted on 2-Nov-2010 22:51:24

[ #7 ]

Cult Member

Joined: 15-Oct-2006
Posts: 866
From: Livorno, Italy

The Sam460ex at 1.2 ghz had passive or active cooling?

Status: Offline

marko

Re: AmiWest 2010 Personal Show Report
Posted on 2-Nov-2010 23:29:27

[ #8 ]

Super Member

Joined: 17-Dec-2007
Posts: 1816
From: Gothenburg, THE front side of Sweden ;), (via Finland), EU

Thanks for the report

_________________
AmigaOS 4.1 FEu2 on Sam440ep-flex 800MHz 1GB RAM
C128, A500+, A1200, A1200/40, AmigaForever 2008+09+16, 5 x86/x64 boxes
Still waiting (or dreaming) for the Amiga revolution...
m4rko.com/AMIGA

Status: Offline

redfox

Re: AmiWest 2010 Personal Show Report
Posted on 3-Nov-2010 0:25:19

[ #9 ]

Elite Member

Joined: 7-Mar-2003
Posts: 2078
From: Canada

Thanks for the great report Steven. Good to hear some more about the Sam460ex.

---
redfox

Status: Offline

freeaks

Re: AmiWest 2010 Personal Show Report
Posted on 3-Nov-2010 5:37:34

[ #10 ]

Regular Member

Joined: 2-Jan-2010
Posts: 225
From: Unknown

thanks for the report,
but most of this was already announced and known before the show even started.
e.g: sam460 was shown, x1000 was shown ...
but no detail about what was shown and tested on those machines ..
so i'll wait for the "much more technical look into amiga os4.x" subsequent report.

btw, maybe it's nitpicking but,
why call it that way ?
"technical look into amigaos" instead of "os4 progress report as of amiwest 2010" or something ?
the way you call it suggest to me a generic technical look into the OS way of working.
(which as users we already know, unless some things drastically changed lately?)

i'd be more interested in a report detailling the recent updates and changes happening on OS4.
like:
sam 460 and x1000 port progress details (what's done ? what's left to do? for each machine..)
os4 latest advances (like the new shell, new prefs, usb and etc etc ... )

i'm dying to know what's happening lately on the OS4 front. :)

Last edited by freeaks on 03-Nov-2010 at 05:49 AM.
Last edited by freeaks on 03-Nov-2010 at 05:41 AM.

Status: Offline

freeaks

Re: AmiWest 2010 Personal Show Report
Posted on 3-Nov-2010 5:46:08

[ #11 ]

Regular Member

Joined: 2-Jan-2010
Posts: 225
From: Unknown

@kyle
Quote:
The Sam460ex at 1.2 ghz had passive or active cooling?

i'd be very interested into this detail as well.
i hope it's passive cooling..

Status: Offline

corto

Re: AmiWest 2010 Personal Show Report
Posted on 3-Nov-2010 18:40:55

[ #12 ]

Regular Member

Joined: 24-Apr-2004
Posts: 342
From: Grenoble (France)

Very nice. It is a clear report.

I've just had a look at the modern programming article and I will read it deeply. Seems very good !

Status: Offline

ssolie

Re: AmiWest 2010 Personal Show Report
Posted on 3-Nov-2010 19:08:57

[ #13 ]

Elite Member

Joined: 10-Mar-2003
Posts: 2755
From: Alberta, Canada

@corto
Quote:
Seems very good !

It could be a lot better. I need to make some more time and add many, many more topics. There is a lot to know that is implicit for many Amiga developers. I suspect some of this material will make its way into the updated RKRMs at some point.

_________________
ExecSG Team Lead

Status: Offline

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