AmigaMeeting 2004
report
The event started according to the plan at 10:00 AM in Lodz. The place was located in a secondary
school building. On the first photo you can see the projector which caused a lot of trouble.
Picture beamed by it was of rather bad quality (RGB balance was totally screwed up...).
There were some Pegasos I and II machines installed at the party place (also one PPC equipped Classic
Amiga). The second picture shows a Pegasos II in a classic, nice-styled ATX tower. The next one
is Krashan's Pegasos II, the casing can't be called neither classic nor nice styled but
at least it's small and compact. GLMatrix screen blanker can be seen on the monitor screen.
The last photo is a Pegasos on the eFunzine stand. A slim, very good looking MicroATX tower with cool
blue LCD display.
You can take a closer look at the mentioned LCD display on the left photo. Of course monitoring
CPU temperature is not so important with low-power G3 or G4 processors, but the feeling of
full control over the computer is nice for sure. The second picture shows another Pegasos (Peg I
this time) inside standard ATX tower. The next one is Kaczus's Pegasos displaying Ambient 1.4
information window on a LCD monitor. The rightmost picture is a Pegasos togehter with Classic
Amiga in the famous plastic Micronik Infinitiv tower.
Time for some screenshots. CLI window shown on the left is not much interesting. The second
shot shows a "Lord of The Rings" theme. Looking at people's Ambients and casings it was clearly
visible that Pegasos users are individuals in the old good Amiga way. There were no two identical
computer casings as well as no two identical Ambient themes at the show. On the fourth photo you
can see Directory Opus 5 running on MorphOS. On the third picture Krashan's Pegasos II again,
with an advanced LED/button "panel" ;-).
Time for presentations. The first one was introduction to Pegasos and MorphOS.
Of course there was nothing new for Pegasos users but a lot of people were
interested. We can expect that Pegasos community in Poland will grow :-).
Karol "Caro" Wlodarczyk showed MorphOS backward compatibility to AmigaOS 3.x with
TVPaint as an example legacy application. This was not easy because of the projector
having its own ideas about picture RGB balance (rightmost photo).
The next presentation was held by Michal "Kiero" Wozniak (leftmost photo) showing the latest version
of his ShowGirls picture viever. ShowGirls has become simple image processor, especially
useful for simple processing of images from digital cameras. There are basic operators
available like brightness, contrast, gamma correction, RGB and HSV balance. Image can
be cropped, scaled (7 algorithms), blurred, sharpened and saved in JPEG or PNG format.
All operations are very fast even while dealing with large pictures. ShowGirls also has a very handy and
powerful thumbnail generator. After this presentation we were able to see some games
on Pegasos. There were native ones, like Quake or Wipeout2097, as well as some classic
old-school games running on the DOSBox emulator, like Dune II. Then Jacek "JacaDcaps"
Piszczek took over the microphone (picture 4) and started the MOS 1.5 presentation.
MOS 1.5 is extensively enchanced compared to publicly available 1.4. New Ambient
is probably the most awaited thing. It is equipped with a DefIcons-like system
based on MIME types. There is the MIME prefs window of Ambient on the picture 2 and
the System Preferences window on the picture 1. Icon sorting is improved, text listers
are working again. Jacek "JacaDcaps" Piszczek also showed other improvements like
CPU load graph in TaskManager, new System Preferences, new MUI with nice RGB
colour selection gadgets. New MUI also has implemented a lot of gradients and
testing new settings is now realtime, which means there is no need to press 'Test' button
to see the effect. Also new software was presented, including native Hollywood 1.9
(photos 3 and 4) and BurnIt 3 (we could see CD burning in practice, live).
Presentation of 3D graphics on Pegasos. Michal "Kiero" Wozniak and Mariusz "MDW"
Wlodarczyk showed TinyGL library in action. TinyGL is an OpenGL standard
implementation for Pegasos. It cooperates with Pegasos version of the SDL library used
mostly for writing portable games. On picture 3 you can see one of them. Speed is
excellent, camera movements are smooth. On picture 2 an example demo of "flying sparks",
on picture 4 another one showing illuminated globe, which can be rotated and zoomed,
everything with realtime speed. Michal Wozniak said he will make screenblankers
based on these two demos. Then someone from the crowd asked if he was able to make two
other screenblankers named "Open Office" and "Mozilla". He answered: "In two weeks" ;-).
The projector gave too much green but, anyway, demos looked very smooth, fast
and nice. At the end of this presentation attendants could watch a MadWizards demo,
OpenGL based of course.
The next presentation was FryingPan - a competitor for BurnIt. On the leftmost picture
Tomasz "Error" Wiszkowski, the FryingPan author. Next a screenshot of the program in action.
On pictures 3 and 4 you can see show attendants (not all of them, but most of). I've counted
84 people on the pictures. The meeting organizers told me there were some more people on
the event, probably about 120. It shows Polish Amiga community is strong, numerous and
interested in Pegasos and MorphOS.
Commercial break at the end. The first picture shows software offerred by Matay (games mostly
but not only). Then t-shirts sold by eFunzine. The most popular one has an "ami-sheep" (a pun
based on the Polish word for "the Amigans") on the front and a tag "Gave $50.
Bought the t-shirt
myself" on the back. The third photo is the one and only sign of AmigaOne on the event
- the eFunzine offer. As it turned out, Polish AmigaOne group preferred show in Essen, Germany,
instead of presenting their hardware and operating system here in Poland. Well, it was
their choice. And something funny at the end - on the picture 4 the newest MorphOS soft with
blue butterflies, delivered by Kaczus. AmigaMeeting 2004 was an succesfull event in spite of
minor technical problems (the projector, some delays). We'll meet there again next year.
written by Grzegorz "Krashan" Kraszewski
English translation revised by Grzegorz "Fei" Juraszek
