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The RISC OS Southeast Show, 2001

The RISC OS 2001 Show which took place at the Blue Mountain Golf Club in Binfield, nr Bracknell. I attended the show on Saturday, along with some friends, including IconBar.com web maestro Richard Goodwin.

We arrived about half an hour after the 10am opening time and found the place already starting to fill up. Although a smaller venue than previous RISC OS shows probably made it feel more crowded, I do think there was a steady stream of people arriving.

The first stand to catch my eye - possibly because they were right next to the door - was Castle Technology. They had a number of special offers, including their flagship 300MHz Kinetic Risc PC for only 1195.00

Equipped with CD rewriter, 30GB hard drive and a number of other impressive features, this is the fastest production Risc PC in the world. Indeed, it's the fastest off-the-shelf RISC OS based computer in the world. This position may be challenged when Microdigital's Omega becomes available, but sadly there was no demo machine available at the show - not even a prototype machine - so I can't comment any further on this.

They were also previewing the long awaited Oregano 2, which should be available to existing users in a beta form within the next week or two.

Walking past the Acorn User stand, pausing to say Hi and have a chat with editor Steve Turnbull, we ended up at the ExpLAN stand, where the new Solo machine was being demonstrated - although the overcast day probably meant that the solar panel was trying to soak up what little sunlight was coming through the nearby window. The machine looked very interesting but a busy crowd of people prevented me speaking to Paul Richardson to find out more information.

Martin Wurthner was demonstrating his range of ArtWorks modules and addons, but again looked pretty busy so I moved on to the neighbouring Photodesk stand.

Photodesk Ltd had their impressive range of Olympus digital cameras and Canon photo printers, along with Photodesk Olympic edition and OHP2. However, the most interesting news was the new USB podule that Chris Hornby gave me a brief preview of. Made by Simtec and equipped with three USB ports, this looks like it will be an eagerly awaited product. The drivers are nearly ready apparently and it should be available for around the 90.00 mark - but don't quote me on that.

Moving round the corner from Photodesk Ltd reached R-Comp's stand, along with their Games Arcade, where a number of their latest games releases could be seen and played. They were also demonstrating a number of RiscStation machines, as RiscStation were unable to make it to the show themselves. Other goodies, such as DialUp and MessengerPro were being demonstrated on the stand, along with their newly released MessengerPro Server edition.

Next along was RISCOS Ltd's stand, where I signed up for the RISC OS Select Scheme. I hope other people will do this too - see http://www.riscos.com or more info - as it will help to ensure the future of RISC OS. According to Paul Middleton, they had already exceeded their expectations and initial forecasts for adopters, so it's already looking promising. Another surprise announcement was that due to the financial backing of a third-party customer, it looks like development of RON (RISC OS on a Psion NetBook) is back on. This is good news for everyone who has been waiting for RISC OS to run on this excellent little sub-notebook machine.

Next port of call was the AAUG (Association of Acorn User Groups stand) which has some interesting pieces of equipment on show, including the only working Phoebe machine - which was proudly showing five simultaneous Reply movies, whilst the machine remained perfectly responsive to use. There were also various development boards and items which never made it into production, such as the RiscFax device. The famous Risc PC 'pizza oven' case slice was on show too.

Moving on, we came to the Cerilica stand, where the new flagship 'killer' application Vantage was being shown off. This was the first show to feature this impressive vector-based drawing application since it was officially released and publicly available. This is a must have for serious graphics designers and users and I can hardly do it justice here - suffice to say I bought a copy as soon as it was available, so I already knew most of its features before I got to the show. However, there is already an even more impressive 'to do' list, so I look forward to future versions, which look set to firmly position Vantage at the top end of the vector drawing applications - of any computer platform, in my view. For more info, visit http://www.cerilica.co.uk

Of course regulars at all RISC OS shows are long-established Acorn dealers CJE Micro's, owned by Chris 'we have it in stock' Evans. As usual their stand was packed with all manner of goodies from their extensive catalogue, and looked pretty busy all day.

Many show regulars had busy looking stands, such as Archive Magazine, APDL, John Duddington (Pluto), Serious Statistical Software, Warm Silence Software, Fortran Friends, SurfTec and many others.

Surftec had their SmartMedia readers on sale for the first time, which allows RISC OS users to read photos and other data from the small SmartMedia cards used in digital cameras and PDAs.

Any enjoyable day was finished off in a local eating and drinking establishment (found after getting lost numerous times driving around Binfield!) with Andy and John from CJE and RISC OS Projects Initiative creator Peter Naulls. This gave me a chance to snap some embarrassing photos, including trying to get IconBar.com's Richard Goodwin back for embarrassing photos he normally takes of me. :-)

Richard's Show report is available here for all those who want to see anything I might have missed out.

Click on the thumbnail images below, to view the 800x600 sized images. All photos were taken on my Olympus C3030 and processed using Photodesk before being saved as the 50% JPEG images you see here.

The Solo, on the ExpLAN stand	R-Comp's games arcade	Looking towards Photodesk Ltd	RISCOS Ltd and Paul Middleton
Phoebe, revealing her innards	Another look at Phoebe	Chandler prototype	Prototype board
A close-up of the PCB	Risc PC 'pizza oven' slice	Looking towards Cerilica's stand	CJE Micro's
Dave Holden manning the APDL stand	Richard Goodwin taking a photo of Cathy stuffing an ice cream sundae	Cathy eating the affore-mentioned ice cream	Richard reacting to me pointing a camera at him in an attempt to get back for all those photos of me on The Icon Bar
CJE's Andrew and John caught in a 'not nearly embarrassing enough' pose!

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