Take a standard UK show, say in Wembley, multiply it by four and you will have some sense of how big the WoC in Cologne
really was. With over 150 companies represented there, and with over 50,000 visitors on the Saturday, this, to
paraphrase a certain Middle Eastern dictator, is the mother of all shows!
The nicest thing, for me, at the German shows is the fact that people are there to SHOW their wares, not just to sell them. At most English shows you have a stand with the mag that's sponsoring the show (What about a JAM show, then Jeff?), a couple of serious software stands, and then 25 or so stands all selling the same game-of-the-month. In Cologne, companies like Macro Systems, Village Tronic, Supra, ProDAD and others had several machines running demonstrations of the companies latest product. One chap from Advanced Systems and Software (makers of the Fast Lane Zorro III SCSI 2 controller) lost his voice by the end of Saturday, and with nearly 350 people, on average, visiting each company on the Saturday alone, it's not surprising. Along with all the mayhem in the main hall, there were seminars running throughout the show in rooms to the side of the hall about C programming, System-legal programming, Viruses, Data Compression and encryption and the topic of the day - PhotoCD for Amiga.
Village Tronic
They also had a piece of fax software for any fax-capable modem called TrapFax. This takes full advantage of Picasso's high resolution Workbench to allow you to decode a full page afx in one go. The software takes a modular approach to save valuable memory. To finish off their list of new products, they had Ariadne and Liana, two networking products. Ariadne is an ethernet card and Liana is a very cheap peer-to-perr network solution. Both are SANA-II compliant (the big C's networking standard). Nicolas Geley was also on their stand. He was ably demonstrating TVPaint for Picasso (he should be able to demonstrate it, he wrote the bloody thing!), picking out people from his audience and framegrabbing them onto the TVPaint screen, whereupon he was messing with their heads, literally!
ProDAD clariSSA is a piece of software based around the animation engine in Adorage, software for producing DVEs. Basically it takes single frames or ANIM5 sequences and converts them to it's own format called SSA. SSA has two major advantages over ANIM5 and one major disadvantage. The advantages are playback that's up to 100% faster than ANIM5 and the ability to change palette on each frame. The disadvantage is, you guessed it, hte fact that not much software supports SSA as yet. However, clariSSA comes with a standalone SSA player, so it should be possible to integrate SSA into most software that accepts external commands. They were also showing a new version of clariSSA, the Pro version which includes such truly professional tools as: being able to key to any colour in the animation, a pseudo alpha channel, fades, wipes and effects within animations, and most astonishing of all, up to 80% faster playback speed than the standard clariSSA! To give you some idea of just how good everyone thinks clariSSA pro is, Amiga Magazin gave it 11.5 out of 12. (the highest mark I have ever seen previously in Amiga Magazin was 11.2!).
Activa International Whilst I was on their stand, Vesa Kinnunen was delighted to accept the award for best software title of the year from Amiga Magazin.
Palatinum
IFD IFD are also going to be responsible for Reflections 3 (reflections 2 is Germany's best-selling ray tracer and should be familiar to anyone who is aware of the work of Tobias Richter, who was also present on IFDs stand). The best news of all is that this program, which combines the technical excellence of R3D2 with the ease of use of Lightwave 3, WILL be available in English! This is but a tiny selection of the many excellent and unusual bits of soft- and hard-ware available at WoC-Köln, but a full review would take up an entire issue of JAM, so I shall leave you to read the piece by my co-correspondent Wolf Faust. Enjoy! PS If you only go to one Amiga show in your life, make it the WoC-Köln. It doesn't matter if you don't speak German (my German's lousy!), most Germans speak very good English. But it really is the BEST Amiga show in the world! |