Omega in Germany

We love distributing information and getting to the bottom of things. Call us nosey, we don't mind. By now it's been widely reported that there were indeed a number of Microdigital Omegas at the South West show last weekend plus the German user group Arche Acorn User Club e.V. (english) were delivered a number of Omegas, photographs can be found here. Here it is, another new, fresh and promising RISC OS machine and we're having to chase people up for information. Oh well, it gives us something to do, right?

Omega in Germany
Julian Zimmerle, chairman of the Arche Acorn user club, replied to our enquiries and had a number of interesting things to note about the Omega and Arche. Arche is incidentally linked with the fine German RISC OS news site arcsite.de.

According to Jules, Arche were intending to demo the Omega at a computer show in Germany however they were reportedly let down by deliverly company UPS and didn't get a machine in time. Julian also published photos of the postage label before cynics (not us, oh no) could think, "oh yeah, UPS, their fault, sure". As a result Microdigital have said they'll travel to Germany on the 15th and 16th of March with a number of machines for the user group to play with. Julian confirms he already has one machine and many more are on their way.

"It is certainly much faster than the Kinetic RiscPC I've got and seems faster at most things than the Iyonix I used last Sunday", Julian commented on the subject of his Omega. "I have not had time yet to do any measurements except for the HDD, wich transfered about 23 to 27 MB/s with large file copies in the desktop. That is the upper limit that the drive will do, not the limit of the interface."

'Course, Julian admits that Dave Atkins (of Microdigital) is a friend of his. We don't know about you but we'll wait for some clear benchmarks. What we can't understand is why Microdigital are so very keen to show off their new hardware to a handful of user groups but not websites like drobe.co.uk and iconbar.com. While we're very fond of user groups and appreciate their work in keeping users together and organising shows, the online arm of the RISC OS media serves hundreds of thousands of pages a month to users and yet we're usually the last to know.

Omega and Select
Julian also confirmed with us that along with Photodesk and OvationPro, RISC OS Select also works on the Omega, something Iyonix users can't benefit from. There are one or two minor glitchs such as the pointer under RISC OS 4.33 appears a couple of pixels below where it should. This is, of course, a version of RISC OS 4.33 that hasn't been built for the Omega so there will be little problems like this where the Omega and RiscPC architectures differ.

Julian also states the following software has been known to work on the Omega:
Organizer, S-Base, Squirrel, HTMLEdit Studio, SiteMaster, JvScript, HTML3, Variation, ProSound, CineWorks, RiScript, !PDF, GhostScript, GView, PS2PDF, InterGIF and all sorts of other image image translators, Cineroma, KinoAMP, AMPlay, AMPlayer, DigitalCD, SoundCon, Desktop Tracker, VICE64, SparkFS, Win95FS, PsiFS, Vantage, ArtWorks, Compo, Impression Publisher, MessengerPro, WebsterXL, Browse, Fresco, Oregano, Ovation1, Sibelius7, VRPlayer and Nettle.

R-Comp
RISC OS software publisher and solution dealer R-Comp were given an Omega at the South West show, handwritten paper sign and all. We got in touch with R-Comp to see what they had planned for Microdigital's hardware and in their reply they stressed to drobe.co.uk that they're aiming to support all RISC OS machines that their customers are using.

"I can confirm we have an Omega here for development purposes", Andrew of R-Comp told us. "However, at this stage I can't really comment on it (in much the same way as we didn't discuss Iyonix pre-release). But I can say that people played with the machine on our stand at the show."

Microdigital were unavailable for comment over the Omega appearances at time of writing.

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