Due to me being busy in real life, the show report is less detailed than expected, mostly covered with pictures, and also I think that most of you will enjoy the interview with Ben Hermas, of Hyperion Software.
 

Amiwest 2000 was held in Holiday Inn, Sacramento Northeast, on Saturday and Sunday, 29 and 30 July 2000.

The show started as scheduled with vendors and user groups in their booths and offering what they could bring to the show, despite the decreasing number of the participiants, the spirit was as any Amiga show, in a friendly atmosphere and giving you the impression that these people know each other.

Some of the well known names were there, Nova design, Compuquik media center, FWD computing, Soft Logik, Hyperion software, Eye tech, Amiga Zone, Merlancia industries, and other vendors including booths dedicated to user groups and others.
 

The show started as planned, and I must say that I was impressed with the level of hospitality and warm welcome that we felt by the people who hosted the show, and their dedication to offer a satisfactory environment for the people who came to the show.

In the front wall of the show hall, a nice selection of classic Amiga software and books were on display under the Jay Minor library name.

When you enter the show hall, to your right, you'll notice the UGN booth from which the IRC and audio stream admins were busy keeping the rest of the Amiga community informed, and hosting several guests to answer questions from Amiga fans and users worldwide.

On the left, you'll see an attractive demo of Heretic II from Hyperion Entertainment and with some ads and posters about couple of upcoming products.
Looking at the game being played I was impressed to see the smoothness and the details of the graphics, since I was away from the Amiga gaming scene for a while now, the game rivals the PC version if compared to same resolution and according to Ben Hermans from Hyperion, they found in their tests, that the Amiga version was 20% faster from the PC version, check some interesting facts here.

Next to Hyperion's booth, was a small booth for Amigaonline.net, the only Amiga ISP so far, and had some flyers of the BoXer offered to the show attendees.

Next the legendary Harv Laser with his modest booth offering his Amigazone service, and selling promotional items.

Harv was, as usual, fun to talk to, very enthusiastic about the Amiga, and very friendly and patient with the inquiries, to the point that we couldn't make him mad no matter what we did. :-)

Harv was also selling external 33.6K modems at low prices.
Of course there was our meeting place, I was the second one to show up after Ed Dana, and then Luca Diana showed up, and then, the one and only, Robert Cosby(Coznfx) showed up at last.

Next to Harv's booth, was a large booth with all red checkered decoration, hosting Ryan Czerwinski 's Merlancia Industries's booth.
Ryan, as usual, very friendly, and offering all sorts of Amiga products, and he even wore a Micro$oft proof vest. :-)
 

We found an Amiga 3000+ in his booth that according to Ryan, was Dave Haynie's own machine, we took some pictures of it.
At the begining of the show, Ryan was a bit upset because he couldn't get his credit card authorizing equipment to work.

Regardless he still maintained his friendly attitude with his guests and customers.

Next to Merlancia, we saw AEMail software offered for a special show price of $29.99, the software looked promising, but I wonder with YAM's fanatic user base if this small market can stand another competition, especially commercial one.

I wish the authors all the best for their bravery, that's the beauty of the Amiga community, you always see brave people and dreamers among them.

We saw also FWD Computing offering all sorts of software and special bundles, including, .....errrr.... adult CD ROM based software.

Anti Gravity's booth had,....errrr.... the BoXer which was nothing but a prototype of the motherboard, without any chips on it, the version of the motherboard was 2.0, and they flyers that promoted their "upcoming" BoXer based configurations, and the booth was empty most of the time.

On the other side of the hall you can see Eyetech's booth advertising the Amiga Developer boxes, and demonstating a Scala based hybrid system with some interesting configurations.

Next to them, there were user group booths offering promotional items and T-Shirts, and right next to them was Floyd Deibel demonstrating impressive products from Audio labs, Floyd was nice to do a detailed presentation to us, showing the capabilities of the system, which could very well rival some of the configurations on other platforms at the same price levels, they also had upcoming products which were still in development and didn't make it to the show, we even sat there and tried editing some tracks, and Luca Diana(as usual) messed the edited clip. :-)
On the other side the great people from Compuquick Media Center, offering almost everything that you can think of in the Amiga market, they even had couple of A1200's for sale, video and PPC cards from DCE, and some attractive cases for the Amiga 4000 and A1200.
They also had the show's lowest price for the SDK for the new Amie for 10% off MSRP!
Their dedication and service is still a model in this market which is plagued by some non professional businesses, but these guys are simply down to Earth, and customer oriented.

As a matter of fact they were the only people with a developer box in stock at the show.

Also you cannot but come across Nova Design's booth, with the Amiga developers Kermit Woodwall, and Derrick Lisle demoing thei flagship product Image FX, and offering some deal on their other products and some other bundles.

I noticed a copy of Cinemate for Aura on display.
WHAT?
PC software in an Amiga show?
Seize them! Burn them! Off with their heads. :-)

G&G Publishing, Next to Nova's booth were giving out free copies of the latest issue of "The New Amigans", and signing up people for new subscriptions.

In front of them was the booth for the User Network with several Amigas and a Mac networked together, and others offering their Amigas and related products for sale, including one interesting hand assembled Amiga. :-)

Next to them were the good people from Softlogik, offering their package Page Stream, and in the second day of the show they were clearing Amiga OS 3.5 retail packages for a bargain price of $29.99.
 

The first day, Amiga attended the show, represented by CEO Bill McEwen, and Randy, but Gary Peake, Director of Developer Relations and Fleecy Moss VP for Technology couldn't make it, unfortunatly.

Mr. McEwen was, as usual very friendly, very patient with the crowd, and in his usual friendliness.
 

Saturday evening, the banquet was held in the same hotel in which the show was hosted in, in which Mr. McEwen made his appearance and we listened to his speech and presentation of two different systems, running the Amie SDK, in which a compiled demo was demonstrated to be running without any modifications on two different palforms, one on a PC notebook running Windows, and then other on a desktop running Red Hat Linux.

Some of the points that Mr. McEwen explained to the audience during the presentation:

1. There are lots of talks, negotiations with companies and firms, big and small, Amiga is generating lots of interest, but very little commitment is shown so far.

2. Due to the missing GUI/3D and sound parts of the SDK, some of inquiries couldn't be addressed at this point.

3. Mr. McEwen showed a nice little "Notebook" manufactured by ARM, some said that it was designed by Mick Tinker, with Amie running on it, the design was very nice, and we managed to grab some pictures of it.

4. Bolton Peck, Robert Cosby(Coznfx) are now at Amiga in the hardware QA.
5. Paul Nolan the legendary Amiga programming brains is also in the team, responsible for GFX and GUI.

6. Dean Brown of the DKB fame is also with the team, working hard to finsih the hardware headquaters.

7. A copy of the SDK for x86 PCs running windows was running on Mr. McEwen's notebook.

8. Amiga will offer IPO, but no date or initial price was quoted.

9. Amiga is working on a Java implemetation.

10. Amiga will give priority to existing Amiga devlopers over ANY other developer.

11. Mr. McEwen also compared what has been done in the past 7 months to what has been done in the 2 years under previous owners.

12. When answering a direct question whether Amiga is planing for a version of Amie or the SDK for the  Be OS platform, he said " There are no current plans, since there is not enough market on that platform", which answered some rumors floating in the community.

13. Amiga's proposed royality program.

    The program is voluntary.
    If the developer wanted Amiga to certify his product, and ship it with Amiga's official seal of approval, there will be a fee of $1.5 per unit sold and not per unit manufactured, or 5% of the total sales.
    The royality fee will also include an agreement with Amiga to help in market, advertising and deploying the products.
     Mr. McEwen also compared this program with some big names in the industry where royality fees were as high as $1 million dollars, or on the units manufactured, not sold.
 

14. Mr. McEwen will appear on several shows in the next few weeks/months.

15. The sales of  SDK are very good and Mr. McEwen mentioned one instance of ex-Amiga developer returning to the platform and buying 10 copies.

16. Coz, in his usual humorous tone, asked Mr. McEwen for re-implementing the infamous Guru Meditation errors. :-)

17. Amiga will assist anyone interested in market Amiga related products and promotional products.
    Amiga will offer these products at cost to anyone interested, and Amiga will also start selling them directly from their web site.

18. Why would anyone buy the d' Amiga(The official Amiga developer box)?

     1. Free ticket(s) to Devcon.
     2. Proacive communication with Amiga for enhancements, bug fixes, ..etc.
     3. Support from Amiga directly.

19. Mr. McEwen confirmed that the sound and 3D part of the SDK will be finalized in the next few weeks.

20. No processor is chosen yet for the "AmigaOne",  Amiga needs a commintement of 100,000 + units, and still evaluating several options, that means meeting this Christmas for a official launch cannot be confirmed at this point.

21. Amiga is working on implementing many of the features that the current OS has in the new OS.

22. Support for the classic software and hardware will be available in the new OS and it will be in a form which is "beyond" emulation, no specifics were given.

23. In the next few weeks Red Hat will start reselling the SDK through their channels.

24. Amie/The SDK Will run on 9 CPUs so far confirmed, target is around 13.

At the end of the speech Mr. McEwen personally handed all the people who attended the baquet T-Shirts, and thanked them for their continued support and loyality to the platform.
 

The next day the show continued as planned, with exibitors offering better prices to sell more units of their products.

There were couple of real time interviews with several Amiga developers, including Joe Torre, who is now in charge of the BoXer project at Anti Gravity, and Ben Hermans of Hyperion Entertainment.

Some unconfirmed news were floating around in the show, that Amiga will assist in helping current Amiga users in buying PPC cards, by assisting the developers(perhaps in cost reductions)?

Finally, I had the honor of meeting Dale Luck of the original Amiga team.:-)

In the next pages you will see some pictures in large gallery with thumbnails, and an exclusive interview with one of Amiga's greatest Assets, Ben Hermas from Hyprion Entertainment.