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
Village Tronic were demonstrating the latest versions of the software for their RTG board - Picasso II. Thgey had animation software called Main Actor showing FLI animations from the hard drive or RAM in 256 colours at 640 x 480 (I might add, the animations were running faster on an Amiga 4000/030 than I had ever seen them run on a 486). As I previously mentioned the software plays FLIs and also ANIM5, ANIM7, ANIM8 and a Picasso own-brand animation format. It saves out as ANIM5, ANIM7, ANIM8 and Picasso, soon it will support GIF animations for loading and saving (as well as saving FLIs).

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
Amiga Magazin and Amiga Plus really like ProDAD. They both awarded clariSSA, ProDAD's animation software, Product of the Year. Note that that isn't Software Product of the Year (which was won by Real 3D v2), but PRODUCT of the year.

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
Fairly obviously, Activa were doing eye-popping demos with Real 3D v2 (or R3D2, as I prefer to call it). But they also had a new product, by a Dutch company, called MediaPoint. MediaPoint is billed as a Scala MM beater, and it certainly looks impressive on screen. With its abilities to control various external devices like; CDTV, Canon Ion, various VCRs and LaserDisc players and IV24 amongst others, CDXL playback and Serial and Parallel branching of scripts with active labelling and the ability to view just one section of a complex script at one time, maybe they are not being overoptimistic aiming for Scala's multimedia crown.

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
Dark horse of the show looks to be this Adobe Photoshop clone for the Amiga; called Repro Studio Universal. It is an Image processing and retouching program with built-in scanner and vector graphics support. The interface, unfortunately, is not an intuition one, although it uses windows, menus and icons. It is definitely aimed at the high end of the Amiga market with no support for printers other than Postscript and import support for only IFF24 and TIFF. But it's early days for RSU, with umpteen improvements promised and some already fulfilled since the programs release in June this year.

IFD
Jurassic Park 2 will be probably be produced on an Amiga if IFD's dinosaur objects are anything to go by. With over 20,000 vertices and over 20 24bit bitmaps in the Broadcast version of his Tyrannosaurus Rex model, it sure is a beauty! IFD are working on other dinosaur models including the ferocious Velociraptor, and they all come in a starter version with a limited number of vertices and no textures (which is free), a professional version with more vertices and textures, and the aforementioned Broadcast version which requires over 20MB free after you've loaded the object to render it in full.

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!