SEAL Meeting Reports from March to May 2001

11th May 2001

This meeting had a distinctly high-end feel with three A4000s, an A3000 and an A1200PPC/BVision in attendance.

The main attraction at this meeting was a demo of the classic Scala multimedia authoring package given by Elliott Bird. Elliott showed us how easy it is to create a presentation using text, images and music. Thanks to Elliott for his efforts on this presentation.

Mick Sutton had received the full version of Shogo (Hyperion's first person shooter game that we demoed a couple of meetings ago). He'd only received it in the post earlier in the day so he unwrapped and installed it (a slow process) at the meeting. Several members had a go at the impressive first level during the meeting.

Sam Byford brought along two very interesting systems for us to have a look at. The first was his A4000 (shown in the photo below) in a Power Tower case with Mediator PCI/Zorro bus board. In this he had a Merlin graphics board and an IOBlix fast serial and parallel card. As you may know the Mediator PCI for the A4000 comes in two parts, the bus board and the PCI logic card which will activate the PCI slots on the bus board. Elbox haven't released the logic card yet so Sam is eagerly waiting for them to do so. Sam's other system was an A1200 in a Power Tower with an AteoBus, graphics and Ethernet cards.

27th April 2001

Is it an Amiga?.. Is it an iMac?.. YES!

Robert Williams had received his MacOS 9.1 CD and had got iFusion working on his A3000 (it still doesn't run on A1200 systems unfortunately). He demonstrated it running some popular Mac applications.

Paul Mountsey was having a problem setting a backdrop image which we traced to a datatypes issue. After trying a large number of different JPEG datatypes Tony Johnson and Robert Williams found a rouge datatypes directory in the Libs: drawer (rather than Sys:Classes/) which was causing the wrong datatype files to be loaded! Once this was fixed everything went back to normal.

We were pleased to see Richard Barton back at SEAL after a long absence.

Guru Meditation!

13th April 2001

At the start of the evening Mick Sutton was demonstrating the impressive demo of Shogo, a Manga themed 3D shooter being ported to the Amiga by Hyperion.

Robert had brought along prints of the new technical announcements referred to in Bill McEwen's latest update which has recently appeared on Amiga's website. These detail the plans for the development of the AmigaOS and caused a lot of discussion, I think most people had a pretty favourable reaction, the Amiga market is certainly a lively place at the moment which is a pleasant change!

Several members, Mick, Tony and Robert had just received iFusion (Apple Power Mac Emulator) which has been released by Blittersoft and Microcode Solutions. Sadly it doesn't yet work on A1200 Blizzard boards (but that didn't stop Mick and Tony trying :) ) Robert has an A3000 on which it should work but so far he's had no joy, the problem seems to be down to an incompatible MacOS 9 CD so Rob's now waiting for a copy from Blittersoft.

It was great to see one of SEAL's longest standing members, Michael Hunt at the meeting as he's been unable to attend for some time. We also met Chris Emmins' partner Sue who is a recent convert to the Amiga. Sue was particularly interested in Mick's demonstration of retouching digital camera images in Photogenics 5.

30th March 2001

Where is everyone?	...in the kitchen!

Alf Whitfield brought along his new Olympus Camedia 3000 digital camera. This impressive piece of kit has 3.3 megapixel resolution and loads of custom settings. One interesting point is that this camera is sold as a USB model but does in fact still have a serial port but is not supplied with a lead. Alf used the serial lead from his old Camedia 830 and the new camera works fine with existing Amiga software.

Several members had a go with Epic Interactive's recently released Earth 2140 strategy game. Mick Sutton showed several members Mac emulation with Fusion, in the next couple of months we will be holding a Mac emulation demonstration. Robert Williams had just installed the new version of aPDF (a viewer for the common Portable Document Format) which has much improved display quality and speed.

AGM - 16th March 2001

This meeting was SEAL's second Annual General Meeting where members get a chance to vote in their committee and exchange views about the direction of the club and plans for the coming year. The meeting started with an overview of SEAL's activities in the past year. This was followed by Financial reports for SEAL and Clubbed magazine.

The main task of the AGM is to elect the club committee, three committee posts were vacant as Gary Storm, Roy Burton and Jeff Martin had decided to step down (thanks to them for all their work). None of the committee posts had more than one candidate so the following members were elected unoposed:

Chairman - Mick Sutton
Secretary - Robert Williams
Committee Member - Chris Emmins
Committee Member - Elliott Bird

The member who had agreed to stand as treasurer did not attend the meeting and had not offered an appology or explanation. In his absense none of the other members present were willing to stand for the role so Mick Sutton agreed to continue as Chairman and Treasurer.

Congratulations to Chris and Elliott on their new posts.

Throughout the meeting many useful points and suggestions were raised including how to make meetings more welcoming to new members and ideas for local advertising. We will be putting these into practice over the coming months.

Thanks to the members who attended the AGM it proved to be very constructive and useful.

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