South West show aftermath

News leaking from Saturday's event

• The Castle theatre presentation focused on imaging and printing using an Iyonix. It was presented by Castle's managing director, Jack Lillingston and was a more hands-on presentation for a change, with none of the usual overhead slides. The presentation also included the new X100 Iyonix case, which apparently came about in response to demand from Castle's commercial customers. Jack was upbeat regarding the rate at which users and clients are migrating from RiscPCs and A7000s to the Iyonix platform.
  
  
• One avid Castle supporter received free champagne and chocolates, for an Iyonix purchase, from CJE only to then open the champagne all over his inkjet printer - much to the considerable surprise of his fellow visitors. We're not sure how well the punter's new bubble jet printer will perform.
  
  
• The RISCOS Ltd. theatre presentation focused on the forthcoming ROM release and the future of RISC OS 4. RISCOS Ltd.'s managing director Paul Middleton insisted the awaited RISC OS 4.39 ROM release wasn't the end of Select - just a useful milestone on the 10th birthday of the RiscPC. 4.39 is essentially the same as the latest Select release with a few new features and bug fixes. The fact that the RISC OS 4.39 kernel has been chopped into separate, manageable modules was also discussed. RISCOS Ltd. was also, as far as we're aware, the only exhibitor with an Omega.
  
  
• Aemulor Pro was in full effect, being demonstrated on the day by its developers. The Aemulor team admitted that games support was a growing priority, including support for pre-StrongARM games. Aemulor Pro was said to be about a month away from release, although the JIT feature probably won't make it to the first release. A bugfix update is also scheduled for Aemulor users.
  
  
• Qercus editor John Cartmell's show presentation covered Finnybank's future plans for their magazine, how they came to name it Qercus and the difficulties in running a monthly magazine. John also apologised for the delays in publishing the first issue (which, we've learnt, looks a lot like Acorn Publisher) but revealed that Mike Cook will be back with an article on 'RISC OS loves and hates', along with around thirty other contributors and freelancers.
  
  
• There were fewer RiscPCs on exhibitors' stands than ever before, all seemingly replaced with Iyonixes. XAT's HID software for Iyonix users was also a popular sell.
  
  
• Photodesk had apparently paid for a show stand but a calendar mix up left Photodesk boss Chris Hornby double-booked and out of the country on the day of the show.

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Discussion

I met quite a few people who had travelled from considerably beyond the South-West to be there. It was a stunning location and very easy to reach. Definitely much more than just a regional show... markee174 on 1/3/04 8:06AM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

So what about the printer? Does an anonymous poster want to tell us if it works or not ? philipnet on 1/3/04 11:34AM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

Jack handed round prints which were as good as photographic on the special paper. Print costs are quite high - its not designed as a general purpose printer. It was good enough for Jack to demonstrate rescanning printed output and showing very fine details still present. markee174 on 1/3/04 11:59AM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

Yep, we were demonstrating GIMP-print with it even after the champagne incident. dgs dgs on 1/3/04 12:01PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

One thing that's not yet been mentioned is that RISCOS Ltd were demonstrating a Risc PC running Select with 512MB RAM. (Don't think this has been seen at a show before). dgs dgs on 1/3/04 12:04PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

John asked me to post the following: At the SW Show he (John Cartmell) commented that he was thinking of purchasing an A6 because his daughter may very well need to use a Windows machine as part of her employment. He said that with an A6 in the home network some of the magazine preparation may well be done with the A6 because of the speed increase over his current StrongARM RiscPC; this is what had been done as part of the review of the A6 and it proved particularly useful with certain graphics-intensive pages. He mentioned its use with the David Cowell article. John also confirmed that, if he were to *upgrade* from his RiscPC it would be to an Iyonix and said that such an upgrade hadn't been possible until recently because of the wide variety of applications that need to be used to deal with files from contributors. Since taking over Acorn Publisher every issue of that magazine has been produced by Finnybank on a StrongARM RiscPC. With the take over of Acorn User that magazine, and Qercus, will be prepared entirely on RISC OS computers and mostly, if not entirely, on RISC OS-on-ARM computers. In the case of Acorn User that is a radical step in the right direction. Note: for some time Tau Press produced Acorn User on Macs. We don't think that's a good advert and Finnybank will be disappointed if they don't produce a better product using RISC OS! Col1 on 1/3/04 12:06PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

Apologies for the bad formatting on the above. I meant to preview but missed with the mouse and submitted it instead. Col1 on 1/3/04 12:11PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

Col1: Isn't there still an Iyonix at Finnybank anyway? dgs dgs on 1/3/04 12:36PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

& there's not a lot that won't run under !aemulor - including !fresco It's low level stuff like the various FSs and bits of games that there are still (being worked on...) issues. No more excuses john - it's time to upgrade You know you want to... For the record our champagne luckily missed the important bits of my printer :rolleyes: turned my back & the cork just went... :-0 epistaxsis@work on 1/3/04 1:29PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

epistaxsis> "turned my back & the cork just went" Often a problem for the young and inexperienced. It's all a matter of getting the right technique and a bit of practice. Spriteman on 2/3/04 10:54AM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

or just being me I am normally a special brew man... epistaxsis@work on 2/3/04 6:14PM [ Reply | Permalink | Report ]

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