The Wakefield '98 report

The 16th of May 1998 (Sat) started altogether far too early, I had to be at Salford Crescent station for 10 am. I waited for Paul Johnson to arrive as it was his car we were going in (cheers Paul). He arrived and we set off. Finding the show was not too hard (although we did end up going the wrong way down the A638 for a couple of hundred yards). Once there we went in to the show.

The first stand to catch my eye was the APDL stand (where I later bought a hard drive for my A3000) but first of all I decided to have a quick tour round to see where everyone was. I passed the RPC II demo area which was looking rather enigmatic behind its black screens, though, the cue looked too long and wasn't moving anywhere fast so I thought I would take a look later. I was walking down the other side of the hall and was deafened by a town crier type bloke ("Oh yeys!" and the lot) telling us something or other. Then I found the charity stall which was packed so it took some patience to actually get close enough too see anything.

Now I had gone round the hall and started to go round again actually visiting each stall and taking time to have a good look at all the new stuff and talk to the people on the stands.

Some of the 80 stands (in order of position in a circular motion (it helps to have the map))

• Space tech had some very impressive pictures taken with various digital cameras, particularly impressive was the Daimler taken with the Olympus 1400.
• Artex were demonstrating their very impressive "Exodus" game and "Ankh". I'm not too keen on "Ankh" style games but people who are should love it, the people playing it certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves. Artex nearly didn't make it to the show as they missed the ferry they were supposed to catch but they made it half an hour before the doors opened. Personally I can't wait to play "Tek" as the screen shots look so good and the game sounds very interesting, although, screen shots aren't always a faithful representation as was proved by BHP on the TBA stand (later).
• Simtec was interesting although I found out that I could have got a much bigger drive for a little more money but that's what I got for not shopping around enough. Though I hadn't really considered Simtec as an HD supplier, I had always thought of them as only doing things with PCB's and a lot of IC's on them. Well they say you learn something new every day!
• Acorn User, a pile of mags on a desk like Archimedes World, well it would have been if it hadn't of been for the RPC showing off some of Mike Cook's projects. He was enthusiastic about demonstrating and explaining how it all worked which was very interesting even though some of it went over my head (I really should start paying attention in lectures). After chatting to Mike for a bit I moved on.
• The games arcade (run by R-comp) was displaying Doom, Syndicate and Technodream. I didn't bother with Doom as those machines were mobbed by surprisingly young kids and I've played Doom a fair bit on the Play Station. I would, however, have liked to play Syndicate as all my PCite friends go on about how good it is and indeed it appeared to be every bit as good as they say. The graphics looked rather nice but with all the assorted noise of general show happenings I couldn't tell how good the sound was. (If they want someone else to give it a post release test, just to make sure.....) Techno dream, although old now, played well and the graphics were still looking reasonable even though everyone's gone mental about 3D texture mapped polygons etc.
• R-comp's own stand had yet more RPC's running Doom and seemed to be selling quite a few copies. They were also demonstrating their web authoring tools.
• Destiny Software were demonstrating Eternal Destiny (surprisingly enough ;-). [Are you sure about this? The news groups say it wasn't there - Ed] (There name appeared on the show map so I presumed they were there although I can't actually remember them. But I had to give such a class game a mention.) If I get a RISC PC I want a copy!
• IMS = Peanut. Yes, it was there and generating as much if not more interest than the RPC II (more of which later). This laptop could be more important to Acorn's survival than the new desktop as the old RPC is still a very capable computer whereas the A4 is definitely showing it's age. There could be a greater market for it as many people with old RPC's will hold onto theirs. There could also be a larger business market than Acorn believes as companies using the A4 at the moment will replace them (well the ones who haven't already gone to the other side due to the lack of a new portable will) and PC users who are so pissed off with that twat Billy boy (I know of a few) would consider taking the step into the Acorn world now there is an up-to-date portable.
• The charity stall was mounded high with all sorts of bargains, though, it was hard to see the afore mentioned bargains as the large number of people all trying to find this or that piece of hardware/ software or manual they've been looking for. It would seem that the local Wakefield charities will be getting a bit of a financial boost soon by the amount of stuff being bought. The number of people carrying BBC B's under their arms was surprising. Acorn, the BBC lives!
• It's true, the 4th D is still alive!!!! Contrary to popular belief they haven't dissolved, sunk under the waves etc and from what the bloke was saying they will be releasing some new titles in the future. There will be some old 8 bit games converted for the 32 bit machines and some genuinely new games too.
• TBA were showing BHP on two RPC's. The graphics on their web site are considerably better, in my opinion, than the actual in game graphics. I didn't play it for long but it didn't give a feeling of speed and the game play was acceptable but nothing special. As I said I didn't play it for long so maybe I shouldn't criticise so much as I didn't see the full extent of the game and I don't want to put them or anyone else off coding new games for the Acorn. With games like "V-Rally" and "Grand Turismo" for Play Station the Acorn needs some truly stunning games, though of coarse, I do appreciate PS games developers have budgets of several million just for one game where Acorn programming outfits don't. But at least TBA are definitely getting there (where ever "there" actually is).
• Computer Concepts were hiding in what can only realistically be described as a cupboard. Their stand was absolutely tiny. Weather this was just due to space availability or weather it reflects there commitment to the Acorn platform is yet to be seen. I know a lot of people complaining of lack of support and new versions of Impression and ArtWorks.
• Sibelius Software had a very understated stand. It was also a cupboard like Computer Concepts so it must just be a space allocation thing, however, they are porting Sib7 to the enemy but the friendly and helpful chappie on the stand assured me that they were not abandoning the Acorn platform and as far as they were concerned Acorn is still the major platform.
• CJE and NCS have merged and were selling stuff.
• Archive Magazine were giving away free copies.
• APDL were selling lots of stuff.
• Cummana and Cannon were selling the new parallel port PD drive which looks very cool. The RPC with CD tower in the converted heating cabinet looked the part too.
• Ant / Argo had a large stand area with RPC's attached to the world wide wait. I wanted to see for myself how the Acorn internet solution coped with certain web pages I use in the Uni library and are hideously slow on the PC's. There were a lot of people wanting to have a go so I couldn't do the comparisons and I couldn't even watch some one else as they were all reading pages and none of them were loading any.
• Acorn Computers had an interesting stand with orange flashing beacons (like the ones found on JCB's) on the tops of the bizarre standy thingys. Overall an attractive looking stand but what was on it? Well there were some NC's up and running and I took the opportunity to have a go. I was faced with a sort of desk top that looked like a cross between UNIX and Apple Crapintosh OS. No matter what I tried the damn thing wouldn't do anything. If only they had supplied an instruction sheet....
  There were some RPC's on the net and that is about all I can remember about the stand. I find it sad to say that the most memorable part of their stand was the orange flashing lights :-( I hope that was because I didn't hang around long enough to speak to anyone from Acorn as they were all busy talking to other people every time I went back to the stand.
• Desktop Projects' stand looked very swish and they were selling stuff.
• Irlam Instruments was displaying RISC-TV which is looking good. Still a little pixely but that's the best picture quality I've ever seen of channel 5 and that includes dedicated TV's! It takes a lot of clever stuff, as Mr. Irlam explained, to get a TV picture into a window on your desk top. They were also pushing the models of digital camera that are worth talking about currently on the market.
• Castle Technology were selling their excellent range of " Storm" interface cards along with all their other products.
• Sound Venture had a noisy stand as would be expected with steam trains, cars and just about everything else that makes a sound. A very complete and competent piece of software. I can't help feeling, though, that they should have invested in a cheap Hi-fi separates amp (Richer Sounds do a cheap Cambridge Audio one) and a semi decent pair of speakers to show off the full quality of their sounds. The PC speakers they were using were distorting on the louder and bassier parts of the sounds as they had to be turned up so that people could hear over the general hub-bub of the show (and Artex who did have an amp etc attached to the RPC running Exodus with its excellent " mood sensitive" music).

Now for the bit you've been waiting for, the RPC II. By now you will probably already know most of this but I'm going to tell you anyway. On entry to the screened off RPC II preview area I was handed a pamphlet about the machine and then I walked along a wall with boards telling me stuff about the new machine and a commentary was playing through a pair of speakers on the wall. 2.1 Million they say it cost to develop the new machine and when I saw it the first thing I said to Chris Cox when he said "Any questions?" was "It's YELLOW". Yep, that's right the font of the computer we have waited several years for and Acorn has spent £2.1M on is yellow. Mr. Cox explained that Acorn wanted the new machine to stand out from the Wintel™® boxes and get people interested in the product. When asked in the question section of the lecture if they were going to ship them in grey or black as well Chris replied yes if there is customer demand. He got some there and then (e-mail Acorn and tell them if you don't want a yellow computer) and someone suggested to him that they ship them with a can of spray paint. One person made the valid point that he wouldn't like a yellow computer in his living room any more than he would like a yellow Hi-Fi or TV. The case (apart from being yellow) also has two pull-away panels at the front for extra drives and as someone pointed out most devices are gray but Chris made the equally valid points that the covers can be put back over the top and that the most commonly fitted device is a CD-ROM drive which is already fitted (32x) and it has no tray like in car players). The next most commonly fitted device is a Zip or Jazz drive which are purple/dark blue anyway and according to him compliments the yellow nicely. The on/off button and the volume buttons (a feature I've long thought lacking) are purple already and looked quite good with the yellow. Apparently they tried it in Acorn green but it looked ugly.

As mentioned above there are removable covers to cover expansion holes to which I immediately thought "Those are going to last 10 seconds in any school before their pinched." It's a sad fact but having been in school not so long ago myself I know that this is the case and even in university the covers over the expansion bays on the PC's are super glued up as are the ball covers of the mice which means you can't clean the rollers which, in turn, means you can't use the computer (yes some of them are that bad). Once I took one apart with a screw driver to clean it it was so bad and to annoy our computer people whose 2 standard answers to any problem are "Have you tried logging out and then in again?" and "You have?...? Er... Try a different terminal." The case is fully dismantleable which could be useful (especially for upgrading and repairs). It is held together by clips and which means no screws, this is something they seem to be proud of and make a feature of but again in schools the side will be off in the first day and the computer will be destroyed and pupils may be elecrtocuted. The first RPC had this in mind and they provided holes for padlocks, why couldn't they have provided some sort of locking system here?

The commentary said that a name is very important with which I agree. It went on to say that a commercial agency had quoted them £25000 to come up with a name so they decided to ask Clan members, good plan. Well it would have been if the closing date for entrys hadn't been a week before many Clan members received the entry form. Chris Cox said that there were several excellent names and some off the wall ones in the entries that were received so they decided not to use any of them and call it " Phoebe 2100". Well that was worth the wait then wasn't it?

The name and colour aside the machine is looking, technically, like a very serious bit of kit. It has a 64 MHz bus, a known previous bottle neck, which allows the Strong Arm to stretch it's legs considerably more and with 500 MHz Strong Arms on the horizon (Chris confirmed this) this extra bus speed is definitely needed. Now all we need is for the memory manufacturers to start making faster RAM! A 4 device faster IDE interface is provided as is PCI support. Standard PC cards can be connected if a driver for it is written so upgrading might get significantly cheaper in the future although this could have a detrimental effect on the current Acorn upgrade manufacturers and retailers. Sibelius Software are pleased the new machine will come as standard with a MIDI port which will hopefull= y make the Acorn system even more popular within the music industry because of this port just like the Atari all those years ago. As stated earlier it will have a 32x CD-ROM drive fitted and it will come with 32Mb of ram but still only has 2 RAM sockets but as Chris points out how many people need more than 32Mb for every day use? (Not many unless Bill starts writing RISC OS software ;-). No more expensive VRAM upgrades to buy either as there is 4Mb of EDO VRAM soldered to the board as standard. Also as standard is an extra serial port and at long last a joystick interface. The hardware allows for "several Strong Arms" (I asked if this meant in parallel or not and thankfully the answer was yes) so hopefully an OS upgrade will be available in the future to use several in parallel. Now that would really toast Pentiyuck 2 (well O.K. so it toasts it's self quite nicely on its own but we can always give it a helping hand).

RISC OS 4 looks pretty much the same which I think is a good thing as we are all-ready used to it and there is little room for major improvements in its normal operation. That's why Bill copied chunks of it for crash '95 ™. One thing Chris was keen on showing us is that files can be dragged onto the HD icon and it will save it to the root so you don't have to call up the directory viewer. I'm not too keen on the HD icon as it appears to be (I was a little way away from it and my glasses were a tad mucky!) a picture of a gray tower computer.

The SA sits on a tiny card (to reduce costs for replacing/adding more) with a few surface mount components on it unlike the almighty SA card for the current RPC. If you were a PCite then you wouldn't notice the SA at all as there is a smegging great gold coloured IC the size of a Panty-um which is an IOMD2 ASIC which does all sorts of whoosh-bang-wonder stuff. The hardware is optimised in many ways to support JAVA and all its affiliated gubbins better and make it faster. Maybe they will put "Designed for JAVA '98" stickers all over them ;->.

I thought the exhibition part was aright though a bit sparse but the commentary was well done (I could hear every word clearly unlike Railtrack's) and informative. It was all very positive but one thing irritated me that the demos of the machines lasted about 35 seconds and then we were asked to continue our conversations out side so the next group could see it. Out side the group continued to grill Chris about various things including when and how much to which the answer is hopefully Acorn World in September with developers getting their lucky mits on them in July/August. How much? The same as an RPC is now about £1200 to £1500. No mention that I can remember of how big the HD would be was made but I think that was probably for the best as HD's will be at something ridiculous like 100Gb or even 1Tb by then the way things are going at the moment.

The question is 'was it worth getting up early on a Saturday morning?' Yes, definately. I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Wakefield (even though my feet were rather sore that night! But that's a sign of a good show) and I would like to thank and congratulate the WAUG for an excellent show. I want to go next year already but hopefully owning an RPC instead of the family's A3000 by then.