Joe Connor and Denesh Bhabuta report from the Neuss '97 Atari Messe, organised by the German Atari Inside magazine.
Neuss is situated only 20 minutes from Düsseldorf airport and offers easy access from several motorways. Denesh and I took the Channel tunnel and drove through the night arriving early enough for a nap in the car before we set up the Atari Computing stand. The venue was the Neuss Stadthalle (Town hall) - the same venue used for the Neuss '96 show, expect this year the lobby area outside the main hall filled with stands. People were queuing outside for over an hour before the show opened at 10am and when the doors finally opened people were jostling several rows deep on most stands and there wasn't much room to move! The Atari Computing stand was located between Titan Designs and Calamus User with 16/32 off to our left. HOMA Systems and Best Electronics were to the right of Calamus User and collectively we made up the native English speaking contingent. Titan Designs sold all their Nemesis boards and you can't do much better than that!
Over the two days we sold more copies of Atari Computing than we did last year which we deemed a successful mission. Denesh and I were wearing our Atari T-shirts so people could look - but not touch. Naturally they sold like hot cakes! It was satisfying to see an increased number of individual programmers taking stands to promote their wares. Thomas Binder, the Thing programmer, gave me a guided tour around the latest beta. The most visible new features are some nifty window management routines and sexy 3D dialogs, programmed by Dirk Klemmt, who was sitting alongside Thomas showing off POV-Shell.
Atari Inside (FALKE Verlag) made a biggest splash with their Milan 68040 TOS clone but with no machines for sale on the day it was a bit of an anti-climax. However, they did hold a developers conference after the show (using the full size cinema screen) and it seems most of the German Atari hardware manufacturers bought something to the party which should help ensure its success. The projected price for a basic machine is expected to be around 1500 DM (around œ530). ASH was promoting its entire range of software, notably CAB2.5 which was being demonstrated by Alexander Clauss - I picked up a copy of the new Jinee desktop and the latest MagiC Mac v2.1.6 which is OS8 compatible and features MagiC v5.13.
ROM Software were there with Papyrus 5.5 and had the nerve to demonstrate their Window95 version with speech recognition, I could think of a few choice words! We could fill an entire issue with show news but we've at least given you a flavour, a great weekend!
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